This story initially appeared on Inside Local weather Information and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
When a baseball-sized hailstone slams right into a photo voltaic panel at greater than 90 mph, the end result isn’t fairly.
We noticed this in March, when a hailstorm decimated components of the 350-MW Preventing Jays photo voltaic challenge in southeast Texas. Photographs circulated on social media and in information protection of hundreds of panels pockmarked with white circles of damaged glass. Proper-wing shops had been desperate to amplify what they noticed as proof of the unreliability of solar energy.
The truth about hail and photo voltaic panels is extra sophisticated, and never so grim.
Photo voltaic builders and producers have taken steps to scale back the chance from hailstorms, which includes a mixture of refined climate forecasting and panels that may flip to keep away from direct hits. I not too long ago spoke with among the folks doing this work.
First, let’s lay out the issue: Local weather change is contributing to a rise within the severity of storms, together with hailstorms.
On the similar time, photo voltaic is the world’s fastest-growing electrical energy supply, in response to the Worldwide Vitality Company, and a part of a mixture of renewable sources which might be on monitor to supply nearly all of the world’s electrical energy by mid-century.
Proper now, examples of hailstorms wrecking photo voltaic farms are uncommon sufficient that they’re nonetheless notable, just like the one this yr in southeast Texas and one final yr in western Nebraska. However what about in 20 years, when hailstorms are seemingly going to be extra extreme and photo voltaic will cowl far more floor?
There is no such thing as a excellent technique for safeguarding photo voltaic panels from hail, however there are methods to scale back the chance.
“There’s precise mitigation that may be achieved,” stated Renny Vandewege, vice chairman of climate operations for DTN, the Minnesota-based firm whose subscription-based merchandise embrace climate forecasting to be used by power corporations.
“We’ve patented the flexibility to measure the incidence within the measurement of hail inside radar know-how,” he stated. “Scanning the storms, you get suggestions that claims {that a} storm is producing hail two inches in diameter, or regardless of the state of affairs.”
This knowledge is most helpful if a photo voltaic array has gear that may reply to an approaching storm by adjusting the panel angle to scale back injury.
Practically all utility-scale initiatives being constructed right this moment use trackers, that are programs that flip the panels in the course of the day to observe the solar. A few of these trackers have the aptitude to enter “stow” mode, which implies they shortly flip to keep away from a direct hit.
For instance, Nextracker, the California-based producer of photo voltaic monitoring programs, sells a hail mitigation product that connects climate forecasts from DTN and others, and makes use of the info to regulate panel angles forward of hailstorms. The programs are operated with software program that can be utilized each on-site and remotely, they usually have battery backups to operate throughout energy outages.
“Will photo voltaic proceed to get developed and inbuilt hail areas? The reply is sure,” stated Greg Beardsworth, senior director of product advertising at Nextracker. “The best way that may occur is thru a mixture of understanding the magnitude of the chance primarily based on location, deciding on the suitable mixture of module know-how and tracker stowing capabilities.”
