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Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on s

Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered. As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself. Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.

azernik 6y ago
Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost. But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.
- windexh8er 6y ago
  I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean. I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper. Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.
    - 8note 6y ago
      If they're still producing any power, they'll have some self heating just through waste. I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off. After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water

azernik 6y ago

Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost. But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.

windexh8er 6y ago
I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean. I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper. Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.
  - 8note 6y ago
    If they're still producing any power, they'll have some self heating just through waste. I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off. After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water