3 ms·

This is cool. I've seen a bunch of farms with solar panels on their barn roofs (which makes sense, they can be a pretty large area) but never over crops. Solar

• glogla 3y ago
  It is tricky - on one hand, it seems pretty nice to cover places like car parks or some crops with roofs of solar panels. You get to use the space twice and you get some shade. On the other hand, the panels are pretty heavy and need to be cleaned every so often. You need a lot of steel to make sturdy framework to put the panels on, unless you want them to fall on someone or break in strong wind. And cleaning the panels that are high up is more difficult than cleaning panels that are ground level. So depending on cost of labor and cost of steel and whatever (and I don't have numbers, I'm just musing) you might be better of putting solar panels on separate empty field.
  • dividedbyzero 3y ago
    As for cleaning, if this becomes widespread someone will surely make solar panel roombas.
    • jaclaz 3y ago
      They already exist, example: https://hycleaner.eu/en/produkte/hycleaner-solarrobot/ https://hycleaner.eu/en/produkte/hycleaner-solarrobot/ though they cannot "jump" from one line of panel to the other, so they are suitable only on continuous surfaces.
  • Faaak 3y ago
    I've never cleaned my solar pannels in the 3 years I've had them and I still haven't noticed any loss of production. Raining once in the while seems to clean them good enough