Looks expensive. The grey ones are the broken ones.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • Yer Ma@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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

        • Yer Ma@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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

          • ikidd@lemmy.worldOP
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Zomg@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nah, how else will Republicans cry that solar energy is bad, and that we need coal and oil?

    • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How strong that cloth and attachment would need to be to survive gusts from a storm that’s capable of generating such big hail?

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • kalkulat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Yer Ma@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Before the enactment of the metric system, many countries in Europe used their own official acres. In France, the traditional unit of area was the arpent carré, a measure based on the Roman system of land measurement. The acre was used only in Normandy (and neighbouring places outside its traditional borders), but its value varied greatly across Normandy, ranging from 3,632 to 9,725 square metres, with 8,172 square metres being the most frequent value.[clarification needed] But inside the same pays of Normandy, for instance in pays de Caux, the farmers (still in the 20th century) made the difference between the grande acre (68 ares, 66 centiares) and the petite acre (56 to 65 ca).[50] The Normandy acre was usually divided in 4 vergées (roods) and 160 square perches, like the English acre.

          *Europeans invented the acre 1000 yeats ago

        • nexguy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If by “Americans inventing” you mean “Europeans inventing” then yes

            • nexguy@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              If “European countries” excludes most European countries then yes European countries didn’t use acres.

            • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Bitch it was the romans who “invented” most of the units.

              And unless I see y’all adopting metric time in the near future I frankly don’t want to hear about how oh so stupid anyone who isn’t doing metric is.

              Plus there’s just the idiocy of it being base 10 when base 36 is so much better, uses the whole keyspace of numerals and latin alphabet letters, “10” is a perfect square that’s the product of two other perfect squares, plus “10” has 9 factors, it has a number of factors equal to one of the perfect squares that it factors into!

              • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It’s good when the people of eternal Rome use the old measurements, for they were the citizens of the coolest empire of our time.

                It’s not good when the americant’s use it to measure screaming eagles per burger or something. 🧐

        • Derby@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’ll convert it to a metric unit for you so it’s easier to visualize: the solar farm is 2*10^27 square Angstroms.

          Hope that helps!

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think even when damaged they still produce.

    More modern vertical arrays might fair better in hurricane-prone areas.