Exactly! Like how hydro-power is a dead end and we shouldn’t invest in it.
It’s like, “guys, you know there’s who cities that aren’t by a river, right?”
Comment on California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoOk, but none of that mentions how they plan to account for panels buried under a foot of snow for half the year. That’s the source of the concern, not simply smoothing out daily peaks and valleys.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
The snow problem isn’t really that much of a problem if you build for that in mind.
All the panels need is a small heat strip running through some part of it, maybe even behind the panel, added as aftermarket options, to melt it as it falls, and some sort of sensor to only kick heat on when it’s needed. They have things like that for led traffic lights already, so it would really just be repurposing something that already exists.
Sure that uses some electricity, reducing the overall efficiency, but 90+% of the year it’s not actively snowing hard enough to need to kick the heat on, so that’s a minimal loss.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Could even make it a manual thing or periodic and dependent on the panel having reduced power generation during the day. Heat up the snow while the panel is angled and it will eventually fall off without needing to melt all of it. Then, the rest of the time you can just let it get cold.
I wish my car’s wheel wells had that to periodically drop the slush/snow that builds up behind the wheels. Just needs to run for a little bit until the chunk falls off.
SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
I considered mentioning the angled slide-down option, cuz that does work for a lot of applications, but I feel that having it slide off the panel face in a heavy sheet would be bad for it over time, cause scratches and stuff that scatter light and reduce efficiency. Maybe reduce it more than it would be reduced by heating it while it’s snowing heavily, or at least cause it to need replacement or servicing more often.
SteveKLord@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
The article is focusing on California as an example so that doesn’t seem entirely necessary but you could look to Norway to discover how they deal with this:
Vertical Panels are one solution as are Snow Repellent Panels and heated solar panels