4 ms·
Sounds like a job for collapsible hail nets, like used at fruit farms.
by bsenftner 3y ago
Sounds like a job for collapsible hail nets, like used at fruit farms.
- FeistySkink 3y agoWould having permanent nets severely affect the efficiency? Specifically for baseball-sized hail, i.e. large gaps between threads.
- foxhop 3y agoshade causes the panel to shut off or under perform.
- sumtechguy 3y agoThere is one vid of a guy on YT talking about his daily drop off in power. Turns out it was 1 small cable shading out one small part of a panel Which was enough to shut the whole panel down. His conclusion was the way they were wired up caused it to stop working due to the shade on one set of cells.
- ars 3y agoThat's because it was wired with a single inverter for the whole string. So it can only generate power based on the weakest panel. Instead you can use micro-inverters by each panel. Or optimizer's which are dc-dc converters and basically do the same thing. This is very common when you have a chimney, and the shadow from it moves around. I think installations where it's all on a single inverter are not very common - a cloud moving in the sky will mess with the entire array, it's just not a very good way to design it.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoA solar tracker with a vertical config would mitigate most of the damage while generating more output for the farm.
- btbuildem 3y agoDoesn't that raise the cost of the installation by an order of magnitude?
- sokoloff 3y agoAdding tracker capability typically costs no more than the panels, so definitely not an order of magnitude increase.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoAnd utility scale generators already use 1 axis tracking to maximize production. Hail storm predicted? Panels rotate to vertical to minimize vulnerable surface area. > Many large-scale PV systems integrate intelligently controlled single-axis trackers that can execute peril-specific defensive stow strategies. Leveraging these capabilities, plant operators can manually or automatically rotate a tracker-mounted PV array to an optimal tilt angle for hail risk mitigation. This defensive posture will reduce hail-impact energies and the exposed hail-field impact area, effectively decreasing the number of direct hail strikes and decreasing hail-impact energies. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/12/24/weekend-read-navigating-hailstorms/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/12/24/weekend-read-navigati...
- gpm 3y agoI wonder if it might actually be cheaper to use the panels to protect the tracking (and other) equipment, and just replace them. If they're flat on top like this only the panels should be exposed, it's easy to see if they're broken, and apparently they're less than half the cost of the system.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y agoI imagine bullet proof glass is too expensive?
- rjmunro 3y ago"bullet proof glass" is not really a single thing. It's a matter of what kind of bullet do you want to stop. Something from a BB Gun, or a tank round? There's a lot of degrees in between.
- giarc 3y agoDo these panels usually have the ability to tilt (to follow the sun throughout the year)? If so, I wonder if just turning them as vertical as possible would have helped.
- dylan604 3y agoWould make sense because they are not going to be generating any power while the cloud covered storm is passing through. Add some routine that says if (hours == daytime && sunlight == false) { moveToVert(); }
- x3874 3y ago[flagged]
- usrusr 3y agoIf you don't consider reactors a tech solution you must be focusing on the contrarian angle.
- dylan604 3y agoI think we need CIWS-style systems like that found on aircraft carriers only with friggin' lasers to blast the hail stones into smaller pieces.