Extreme Hail Storms Are Wrecking Solar Farms—but Defending Them May Be Easier Than It Seems

This communicative originally appeared connected Inside Climate News and is portion of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When a baseball-sized hailstone slams into a star sheet astatine much than 90 mph, the effect is not pretty.

We saw this successful March, erstwhile a hailstorm decimated parts of the 350-MW Fighting Jays star task successful southeast Texas. Images circulated connected societal media and successful quality sum of thousands of panels pockmarked with achromatic circles of breached glass. Right-wing outlets were anxious to amplify what they saw arsenic grounds of the unreliability of star power.

The world astir hail and star panels is much complicated, and not truthful grim.

Solar developers and manufacturers person taken steps to trim the hazard from hailstorms, which involves a operation of blase upwind forecasting and panels that tin crook to debar nonstop hits. I precocious spoke with immoderate of the radical doing this work.

First, let’s laic retired the problem: Climate alteration is contributing to an summation successful the severity of storms, including hailstorms.

At the aforesaid time, star is the world’s fastest-growing energy source, according to the International Energy Agency, and portion of a premix of renewable sources that are connected way to nutrient the bulk of the world’s energy by mid-century.

Right now, examples of hailstorms wrecking star farms are uncommon capable that they’re inactive notable, similar the 1 this twelvemonth successful southeast Texas and one past twelvemonth successful occidental Nebraska. But what astir successful 20 years, erstwhile hailstorms are apt going to beryllium much terrible and star volition screen overmuch much ground?

There is nary cleanable method for protecting star panels from hail, but determination are ways to trim the risk.

“There’s existent mitigation that tin beryllium done,” said Renny Vandewege, vice president of upwind operations for DTN, the Minnesota-based institution whose subscription-based products see upwind forecasting for usage by vigor companies.

“We’ve patented the quality to measurement the occurrence successful the size of hail wrong radar technology,” helium said. “Scanning the storms, you get feedback that says that a tempest is producing hail 2 inches successful diameter, oregon immoderate the scenario.”

This information is astir utile if a star array has instrumentality that tin respond to an approaching tempest by adjusting the sheet space to trim damage.

Nearly each utility-scale projects being built contiguous usage trackers, which are systems that crook the panels during the time to travel the sun. Some of those trackers person the capableness to spell into “stow” mode, which means they rapidly crook to debar a nonstop hit.

For example, Nextracker, the California-based shaper of star tracking systems, sells a hail mitigation merchandise that connects upwind forecasts from DTN and others, and uses the information to set sheet angles up of hailstorms. The systems are operated with bundle that tin beryllium utilized some on-site and remotely, and they person artillery backups to relation during powerfulness outages.

“Will star proceed to get developed and built successful hail regions? The reply is yes,” said Greg Beardsworth, elder manager of merchandise selling astatine Nextracker. “The mode that volition hap is done a operation of knowing the magnitude of the hazard based connected location, selecting the due operation of module exertion and tracker stowing capabilities.”