Looks expensive. The grey ones are the broken ones.
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Has anyone investigated the consequences of all the sunlight that’s leaked into the environment because of this disaster? What sort of clean up are we looking at and how long will it take?
The effect on the local goth population will be devastating.
Richmond! 🖤
It’s okay, this happened outside the environment.
Well, it’s just not supposed to happen.
The problem when photon containment breaks like this is that we can never be 100% sure which photons were SUPPOSED to be there, and which ones leaked out. We’ll need a dedicated team of particle physicists with very small tweazers to have any hope of sorting out this mess.
Unfortunately the VST (Very Small Tweezers) project is running a decade behind schedule and needs an additional $10 billion in funding, but the older RSP (Rather Small Pliers) project could be retrofitted to support photon retrieval with a bit of light-absorbent paint.
We’ve began the process of capturing all the seabirds exposed to the sunlight and scrubbing it off them with a combination of lye and baking soda.
They seem unhappy about this process.
😂
I feel like this is one of those things that definitely has to have happened before now; after all, grid-scale solar isn’t something we’ve just started doing in the last two or three years, we’ve been at it for at least 15 that I know of. And hail isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in TX. So I wonder why we’re hearing about it like it’s news. Is this fossil fuel funded bad press? Did they skimp on protection they shouldn’t have?
It’s Texas. So without doing any research, it’s *probably all of the above and also there’s corruption in there somewhere…
Idk, here in the PNW I had only seen hail once in the past 10 years, this spring it has hailed over a dozen times… climate change is wild
Ah, the solar power epicenter that is the PNW.
I meant that yes hail happens in Texas, but these freak storms are getting worse and it is a new phenomenon. Also most houses around here have solar
Actually, I guess I was trying to be funny. And me having 25kW of solar panels is even crazier, because I’m an afternoon’s drive away from the Arctic Circle. In winter, we get about 6 hours of sunlight a day, at a ridiculously terrible angle.
Really? I grew up near Seattle (>20+ years ago) and I remember getting hail fairly frequently, probably more frequently than snow, at least in my neighborhood. Then again, the hail was quite small and only lasted a few seconds to a minute most of the time.
I lived in Seattle for a while and it never hailed, late 20-teens, but in the Willamette valley it is pretty rare, yet it has been hailing every few days this spring/early spring, we also have been having lightning storms. It is an unusual beginning to the yeat
Huh, I’ll have to ask my parents, who still live near Seattle. I left around the late 2000s, so I’m mostly talking about the 90s and early 2000s. It never hailed a lot (like 2-3 times/year), and thunderstorms happened a few times in the spring.
That said, more than 5 times in the spring would definitely be unusual. That, plus the bonkers 100F+ weather two years ago (I think? I wasn’t there) is kinda nuts.
Lol it’s been well over 110f every summer for the last 8 years in the valley…
https://www.plantmaps.com/en/us/climate/extremes/f/oregon-record-high-low-temperatures
Solar farms on rust scale are relatively new, though. So this might have happened countless times before, but not that concentrated on a single entity.
theres more solar than ever, the news is doing less interesting things now than it ever has been. Big oil is losing more money at the mere smell of none oil based power.
Makes sense really.
Maybe it’s just good footage. Photovoltaics are synergetic with fossil fuel power, both in terms of green washing and actually prolonging dependence.
Can you please elaborate?
No, because they’re shitposting at best and trolling at worst. See their other comments.
I can tell you right now whatever alternative solution they have, no one will accept.
Because photovoltaic and wind power are inherently unreliable, they create a need for fossil fuel power sources to always be ready to go in order to fill in the gaps. Fossil fuel companies like to talk about how they’re all for a green transition, but what they don’t say is that they want the transition to last forever.
This is brain dead, we have plenty of green energy storage methods available. We just need a big enough green energy surplus to store.
The benevolent fossil fuel industry will be there to help with every step of this revolutionary transition to renewable energy.
You know what, you’re right, we’re all fucked, there is nothing we can do, let’s gather round and jerk ourselves off about how miserable we all are until the warm embrace of the ocean washes over our heads. Thanks for helping me finally see that.
What’s with the histrionics? Nuclear power is a mature technology that’s practically a drop in replacement for fossil fuel power. No need to redesign the grid to make it smart and add problematic battery storage.
PV prolongs dependence on fossil fuels
That’s an unusual take.
There are good applications for PV, but it is not reliable thermal power, so it will never sufficiently dispace fossil fuels. We need nuclear, concentrated solar, and/or deep-well geothermal power plants in order to accomplish that.
babies first electric resistive heater prototype would like to disagree with you.
I think they might be taking issue primarily with the “reliability”, the argument that solar is all well and good, but because generation isn’t uniform, it can’t fully replace fossil fuels. And I can see the argument for using nuclear for base-load and supplement with solar as it’s available to use.
i know what they’re saying, but they’re objectively wrong. Sure it’s hard, it’s not the most trivial thing to do. Harder than engineering, designing, and building a CCG turbine plant from the ground up? Highly doubt it, probably more expensive though.
Nuclear base load is an incredibly good strategy though, although nuclear isn’t fossil fuels, so.
My 200W panel just got slammed camping over xmas and not a spot of damage on it—its made to have some sort of protection from hail strikes. Meanwhile the 4×4 got smashed windows and dents all over.
Wow that’s a huge hail ball! I get excited when they’re marble-sized.
It might have cracks in the silicon crystal that might burn in over time.
But yeah, impressive that it could take this big of hail balls without braking the glass.
There’s a truck in my neighbourhood that was hit by hail. The owner repainted it, but left the dents. He has a little bumper sticker explaining what happened. It looks pretty amazing, IMO, and must be an awesome conversation starter.
It’s not uncommon where I live, but certainly starts conversations of people comparing their worst storms. My own favourite was the damage done to a massive carlot near the docks and airport that stored new cars coming into the country to freight out around the state. Thousands of cars, no cover. They all went on sale massively discounted as hail damaged but the downside being people couldn’t get additional non-compulsary insurance until repaired. So new car, but probably barely making a saving after fixing it all. Or, just leave it and o ly have compulsory insurance, which only covers damage you do to public property with your car and not your car or other people’s.
Placing hardware cloth or similar over the panels with a couple inches of stand-off should prevent most any damage from even lege hail. It will probably reduce sunlight by a few percent across the entire field, but considering the storms Texas gets it would likely be worth it in the long run instead of having most of an entire farm wrecked.
But then Texas isn’t big on protecting their power sources from environmental impacts, are they.
Nah, how else will Republicans cry that solar energy is bad, and that we need coal and oil?
How strong that cloth and attachment would need to be to survive gusts from a storm that’s capable of generating such big hail?
Hardware cloth is metal mesh, so any wind strong enough to remove it would have long since destroyed the panel it was attached to thanks to the surface area of the panel. The standoffs would probably need to be “L” tabs or similar arranged in a grid across the face of the panel. Heck, just erecting a screen over the entire field would probably be better and cheaper than doing individual panels, but a field-size cover would probably end up with needing higher strength posts to mount it because of the greater drag over surface area. That said, I’m not an engineer, so the most efficient and effective method of protection is going to have to come from someone with more knowledge than my guesswork.
Yeah, might want a metal grating/mesh or something instead. Should do better in the wind.
Hardware cloth is a metal mesh.
Ah okay, I wasn’t familiar with the terminology.
the likelihood that you get hail that is capable of damaging pretty robust fabric is incredibly unlikely, and will start damaging other things. So you really only need to protect against the most common types of hail.
Why are we so dumb? Just put a large rolling cover over solar fields. Truck beds have this “technology”.
Keeping political power matters. Actual function, like electrical power, does not. They would rather rule an empire of dirt than be an ensign in starfleet.
Wow. It was only after reading comments on this post until that I remembered WHY I was more than happy to leave Reddit behind. Too bad so many of these diseased children moved over here.
It took just one comment: ’ What is “4000ac”? ’ to start the drool-fest.
Better find a new place then.
Should have put them underground.
Why didn’t they just cover them with metal sheets to protect them from the hail? Are they stupid?
Yeah why don’t they just build a roof over them?
All the people arguing for nuclear, are you sure Texas is best place to handle that? I’m fine with nuclear as long as they have a reasonable plan to store the waste, but Texas is horrible at managing anything energy related.
Yeah. I’m not normally an anprim, but for Texas…
Tbh, I think America in general might be a little too obsessed with personal freedom for us to transfer the entire country over to nuclear energy.
Successful nuclear programs require actual collective work for long term viability. We would need to actually give administrative powers to an agency like the nuclear regulation commission that supercedes the authority of individual states.
Otherwise its just going to be like 30 years of ironing out NIMBY state legislation before anything gets built, just like the deep storage facility we’ve been “building” since the 80s.
You know what the plan to store a lot of nuclear waste in America is? Bury it in west nowhere, Texas.
Sad thing is they have so much land for it! Could get around how so many people are concerned about living near a nuclear power plant, by just putting it in bum fuck nowhere.
We already have that, it’s called Yucca Mountain - and people STILL are fighting it.
Don’t tread on my private infrastructure!!
I think even when damaged they still produce.
More modern vertical arrays might fair better in hurricane-prone areas.
Heliostats seem to be getting popular on large solar farms. You could use them to stow the panels upright to avoid damage in these circumstances.
sucks to be the insurance in this case
I wondered if this was the one from years ago, or new.
Technology is fragile.
Looked expensive. Looks like garbage now.
Saladbar sneeze guard stonks to the moon!
(Because a hail size sneeze guard would have stopped hail size hail is the joke, you humorless fucks.)
Take your medicine.
Thanks Empricorn’s mom and or dad for such a clever, witty, original, child.
May this child one day bring you some value.
“Am I out-of-touch?”
No, it’s all the people I insulted with my edited comment who are wrong!
Please. Stop double and tripling-down on bad comments and just take the L…
How the fuck does a sneeze guard insult anyone.
If you are, it definitely isn’t me who is wrong.
(And the only edit was the comment, you humorless fuck)
Removed by mod
Solar allows independence from grid companies for people with the land or rooftop to spare. For the rest of the population, solar farms are a massive source of clean energy that shouldn’t be ignored, even with incidents like this. Frankly, the panels aren’t the major part of the cost of a solar farm after the land, storage and distribution network.
Nuclear is a good second or third choice if storage isn’t sufficient. But I’ll say if fusion ever leaves the lab, it’ll be a different world.
Its not entirely a scam, but it was a prophylactic (that we didn’t use) not a cure. Shit being fucked fucks it worse too.
Like trying to put a condom on a dick half rotted from syphilis.
Utility scale photovoltaics just seems like a bad idea.
Why do you say so?
Because he’s paid to.
PV isn’t super efficient. It’s great on a rooftop because the space isn’t being used for anything else, but for grind-scale there are other solar options, such as concentrated solar thermal arrays that drive heat engines.
Solar thermal systems can also store and retrieve excess energy using molten salt, allowing load balancing without needing batteries.
This. mirrors focused on a boiler work best, but then you get random fried birds…
That’s a solid negative. Sorry you’re being downvoted to hell. You might have some points we could all talk about.
Thanks. I do not take it personally at all.
Utility scale coal and NG plants seem like a worse idea.
Certainly, but PV isn’t the thing to replace those.
If you agree that Coal is worse then PV, then you agree that PV should replace Coal.
Sure, but I don’t think that’s effectively possible. For example, Germany has had to restart coal fired plants even though they were deploying PV like crazy. However, nuclear power actually can replace coal. Incidentally, the good Germans have been falling for fossil fuel interests and getting rid of their nuclear plants.
Depends on how much there is, what level of the grid it’s connected to, and what the overall supply mix is. Without adequate energy storage yet, a lot of times it’s fossil fuels filling the gap between renewable output and peak demand.
That’s a huge caveat and the fossil fuel industry is happy to exploit it and prolong our dependence on them. The grids are already set up for thermal power generation, so nuclear is the way to go to really knock out fossil fuels.
Nuclear vs fossil gets in to why you don’t/can’t run all nuclear, else things would be very easy. Nuclear’s capabilities are best suited to supplying the base load/minimum demand but they can’t be ramped or dispatched, reactors basically run most efficiently at their designed output levels, so you can’t use them to balance supply and demand. The use of fossils for base load is more a thing in countries with lower regulations, usually because of things like a growing manufacturing economy (ie “global south”), but also in some extraordinary regulatory circumstances (Germany) or just because of when fossil was brought online/refurbished. Fossil’s capabilities are like the opposite and they are most efficient and economical used for load-following, which is even more important with renewables you can’t dispatch.
So fossil is still the main control lever for reliability, and that’s the crux of why a suitable replacement technology isn’t available yet. If it was simply a matter of output level then we’d have no problem. Mitigations to reduce use of fossils when demand is high can even be things like a demand response/dr program for transmission-connected facilities, where they are incentivized to reduce their use during times of high demand. Basically instead of having a higher energy price and all this generation online, you take a bit of what that price would be and use it to incentivize consumers to reduce their demand. Smart stuff but fossils are still a thing with that and if storage could replace them we could easily just have nuclear+storage, even smaller nuclear like those SMRs/small modular reactors.
Another massive consideration with all of this is the logical location of each type of generation at the transmission level. In the event you might have to bring the grid back from 0, or even just handle expected equipment failure, the specific location in the logical grid where types of generation is attached has to consider the capabilities of each type of generation. For example in a blackout situation you can’t just start a nuclear generator when the demand is effectively 0, you have to bring generation and loads online from scratch in very increments initially. During the 2003 northeast blackout there were opinion articles complaining about how the casinos were online before neighborhoods, ignorant to the fact those casinos were instrumental in providing an initial load on the transmission grid.
What are you saying, that fossil fuel power plants, presumably quick responding natural gas fired ones, will always have to be incorporated into a power supply mix? If it is just for emergencies, that seems like a reasonable compromise. Would it even be considered part of the mix in that case? Still, I’m not convinced that that would really be necessary. Couldn’t a properly sized variable load be sited at each nuclear power plant to the same effect? Couldn’t it be as simple as sending a little bit of steam to small turbines that are just for grid start up and then venting the rest?
Not that fossils/natural gas are required per se but their capabilities. Some places like Norway and Quebec are geographically blessed with distributed hydro that can fill a lot of that need. The variable load for a nuclear in that case could be many times larger than the generator itself but I’m not aware of any studies on that. Kinetic storage with massive flywheels is maybe the closest thing to that, or even batteries. You can ramp nukes by venting steam but that heat can cause environmental issues. Similar to hydro how their capabilites are reduced based on environmental factors like handling spring runoff.
There are some very recent reports out of the Ontario regulator who are dealing with this exact issue right now. Long term demand increasing for the first time vs carbon legislation, and the mandate to have a reliable grid.
That’s a really interesting engineering challenge. If you have any links handy to articles explaining the situation in Ontario please share them.
