The photo is pretty interesting in that some whole panels are completely unscathed right next to ones that are literally covered in impact craters. Maybe they should selectively breed the surviving panels together to get a new generation of more resilient panels.
Only slightly tongue-in-cheek. It's very unlikely that the unscathed panels had no impacts at all right next to panels that had dozens of them. So the surviving panels must have just been meaningfully more robust than the others.
the more likely explanation seems to me that not all panels were hit by a sufficiently large hailstone to cause an initial break. once the structural integrity of a panel is broken, smaller stones can damage it further that wouldn't have otherwise..
Probably not just the size of the hail that hit it, but where the big pieces hit it. At a first guess they're using tempered glass, and that's a lot more likely to fracture if you hit it near the corners than the centre.
> So the surviving panels must have just been meaningfully more robust than the others.
Or the variability was in the hail -- panels are designed for this kind of weather to some degree, but sometimes you get a storm on the edge of the design limits.
It is likely that once one very large hailstone caused cracks, follow-up strikes that would have bounced off an intact panel created further cracks in the already damaged and now weaker panel.
So the still intact panels are probably not significantly stronger, they were just statistically fortunate in that they didn't receive an impact that started a progression of further damage.
I was looking through NOAA's database of geoengineering permits reciently and a surprising number of them were for hail reduction. I would not be surprised to see an uptick.
The Western Kansas Weather Modification Program claims a 27-35% reduction in hail and benefit/cost ratio of up to 37:1, and they are primarily targeting crop protection. I wonder how precise they can be.
"Baseball-sized" hail will do that. It will also break or badly damage a lot of other things, including buildings, homes, automobiles, animals, and people. For example, here are some pictures of car damage: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=giant%20hail%20car%... .
We are, after all, talking about big balls of ice hurling down from the sky, their speed increasing by 32.2 feet/second every second.
Had a friend that lives in that area. This happened a few years ago. He had just bought a new mustang. 2 weeks later its in the shop for hail damage. Hundreds of dents. That stuff is no joke.
It was brand new and the cost to fix was less than the car and was covered. Totaled usually enters the picture if it is more to fix than the car is worth.
Storm cells can experience tremendous downdrafts, such that falling objects (rain, hail, small children, etc.) can see higher-than-gravitational acceleration.
This is especially the case in a downburst event, where cold air suddenly collapses down through the cloud column. Which might itself be associated with / a trigger for hail formation.
These downdrafts (as well as the resulting horizontal outflows of air near ground-level) have caused a number of aircraft accidents, a combination of both trying to fly through a descending air column and the sudden changes in registered airspeed as the craft first fights a strong headwind (increasing lift), then experiences a strong tailwind (decreasing it), and even causing the aircraft to stall from insufficient airspeed.
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency ranks this area in its the highest category for hail risk on the national index.
> [Grant Otten, media relations specialist] said the panels are designed to withstand hail, but the size of the hail Friday was exceptional.
I started to worry for the installation on my parents' house, but according to the article, this happened on a high risk location within the American Continent, and was still considered unusual there.
Yeah, baseball sized hail is not a normal thing in my area. Marble sized hail is the normal large size with pea sized hail more frequent. So when the weather alerts start telling you a storm has a history of tennis ball to baseball sized hail, it's one you look to avoid. The marble sized hail is enough to ding metal. Golf ball sized hail will damage trees and smash glass. I've never personally experienced baseball sized hail, but on the day that I ever do, I'll have to question what I did to piss off god to that point.
The conditions to create a hail stone that large are just not easy to create. If you consider the weight of a piece of ice the size of a baseball, then consider the strength of air currents required to keep pushing that bit of mass around in the air so it doesn't fall to the ground sooner you might see why it is rare for that size of stone to be so normal. Even with global warming, those are some serious currents required.
I wonder what the minimum size is to be worried about. Presumably we are going to find higher insurance premiums for installs that need to be regularly repaired due to hail damage. I think my own home gets what I would consider "car damaging" hail once every 3 years.
And utility scale generators already use 1 axis tracking to maximize production. Hail storm predicted? Panels rotate to vertical to minimize vulnerable surface area.
> Many large-scale PV systems integrate intelligently controlled single-axis trackers that can execute peril-specific defensive stow strategies. Leveraging these capabilities, plant operators can manually or automatically rotate a tracker-mounted PV array to an optimal tilt angle for hail risk mitigation. This defensive posture will reduce hail-impact energies and the exposed hail-field impact area, effectively decreasing the number of direct hail strikes and decreasing hail-impact energies.
I wonder if it might actually be cheaper to use the panels to protect the tracking (and other) equipment, and just replace them.
If they're flat on top like this only the panels should be exposed, it's easy to see if they're broken, and apparently they're less than half the cost of the system.
"Bloomberg suspects that high winds drove large hailstones into the Scottsbluff panels" > I wonder if that might also damage the panels in a vertical config?
Do these panels usually have the ability to tilt (to follow the sun throughout the year)? If so, I wonder if just turning them as vertical as possible would have helped.
There is one vid of a guy on YT talking about his daily drop off in power. Turns out it was 1 small cable shading out one small part of a panel Which was enough to shut the whole panel down. His conclusion was the way they were wired up caused it to stop working due to the shade on one set of cells.
That's because it was wired with a single inverter for the whole string. So it can only generate power based on the weakest panel.
Instead you can use micro-inverters by each panel. Or optimizer's which are dc-dc converters and basically do the same thing.
This is very common when you have a chimney, and the shadow from it moves around.
I think installations where it's all on a single inverter are not very common - a cloud moving in the sky will mess with the entire array, it's just not a very good way to design it.
"bullet proof glass" is not really a single thing. It's a matter of what kind of bullet do you want to stop. Something from a BB Gun, or a tank round? There's a lot of degrees in between.
Panels are generally warranteed for up to a certain windspeed and up to a certain size hail. Mine are up to roughly golf ball sized and 80mph wind. Beyond that, you need insurance just like anything else that's valuable and subject to nature.
I'm all for taking climate change seriously, but here it seems rather easy to "adapt" to the new conditions:
So future solar farms need even stronger mechanical protection of the light-receiving surfaces: If there is some magical high-tech material that would withstand those forces while still being sufficiently transparent in normal operation, that could be used.
Otherwise, the solution seems relatively low tech for me: install some way to protect the panels during storms - e.g. by some kind of durable "blind" that can be closed in bad weather or by making the panels able to turn 180° and flip the light sensitive surface towards the ground.
I wonder how much efficiency would be lost by using a thicker glass -- or even bulletproof material -- on the panels. I imagine this has been considered but there are technical and financial reasons not to.
There is no such thing as material that is "bulletproof", only varying levels of bullet resistance can be certified to specific and highly complex applications of materials or combinations of materials.
You know how car safety is complex and isn't solely attributable to any one system or component, like a seatbelt, or airbags, but rather the combined effects of the whole system of components, in that specific application? Bullet resistance is similar.
My idea for this is basically an enormous, rail-guided heavy, metal garage door that can be raised remotely to cover the entire installation from above. You could even power it with a small power reserve battery that got recharged from the panels, have it automatically get raised when the barometric pressure went too low or after a weather alert for hail came in, etc.
Trying to engineer resistance into the panels for the top 0.1% most extreme hail load is going to increase the cost for everyone, including those who never even get pea-sized hail. Seems wasteful to me.
I imagine having automation to turn the panels vertical during a hail would have saved a good portion of them. I assume these already have motors for turning, so it should be relatively cheap.
Would it not be sufficient to angle the panels to 90 degrees so that they're sitting vertical instead of angled
to the sun. That would at least minimize the surface are exposed to the falling hail (unless it's really falling at an angle).
I'm guessing the top edges of the panels are (or could be made) strong enough to handle a direct hit.
That would mean mounting the panels a lot higher, and not all panels are mounted on motors due to cost already. The real question is how many panels will be damaged by hail in a 10 year period and back-calculate what it's worth to protect them.
That would exactly negate the efficiency of the panel. You want the normal of the panel to be pointing at the sun which is generally towards the clouds emitting hail. Or are you suggesting an automated panel movement when hail is approaching?
>Or are you suggesting an automated panel movement when hail is approaching?
Yes, big Red Button to re-orient all panels when hail is approaching. Some of these farms are massive so I think it would save enough of them to make it a cost-effective feature. Not sure how much human monitoring goes on though, or if an automated system would be better in case it happens e.g. late at night.
(sorry about the formatting +embarrassed smiley+ )
I think the question is all about cost. How much would it cost to add such a system? And how much is hail damage insurance on those panels? How much does your insurance decrease if you had such a system?
So long as the system costs more than the insurance savings, it won't be common. However, if your insurer starts demanding it, then it will be installed everywhere quickly.
Why not just put a wire mesh cage above them? You only care about hailstones larger than a certain size, so the mesh is going to be pretty open and won't have much impact on collection. Galvanized steel is cheap and will do fine, no recycling issues either.
Nets which could be deployed (manually or automatically) during periods of high-risk for hail might be an alternative.
Minimises the risks you highlight, maximises protection of the solar panels themselves.
In this case, the netting need not even be particularly transparent. You're looking for loss-minimisation, rather than maximising electrical production at all times. So a fairly thick or heavy webbing might work.
Keep in mind that as the damage inflicted increases with the kinetic energy, that is, with the square of velocity, even a net or webbing which permitted contact of hail with panels but at significantly reduced speed should serve to avoid most damage.
Ooh I never even considered this. A fair number of my neighbors installed solar panels on their roofs in recent years but we generally get large hail every couple years. I’ll be keeping an eye on their roofs.
Most panels will handle up to ping-pong size no problem. Solar front-sheet glass has been pretty highly optimized over the years.
In the case you do get damage, the actual panels are only about 1/4 of the total system cost. So the panels are pretty cheap to replace, assuming you picked a common size.
(speaking as someone who has just recently installed a solar installation): The panels are around 15% of the system cost (small-scale residential system, so things will likely be different for municipal/grid-scale systems -- I can't speak to those...)
Station transformers are usually out in the open, because airflow for cooling is critical. Nuclear power plants have lots of very big transformers that aren't under concrete roofs.
With precisely zero deaths due to radiation, given the automated plant safety systems detected that the input line for the cooling water had frozen, and automatically shut down the reactor. This was nothing short of complete success from a nuclear energy safety perspective.
Also, side rant: Everyone likes to shit on Texas for not winterizing for temperatures they never used to receive (including on the country-leading wind and solar installations - Texas produces more renewable energy than any other state), but Seattle seems to gets a free pass for letting people die of heat exhaustion in that 2021 heat wave because fewer than half of residential buildings there have ANY kind of A/C system, while NYC routinely gets a pass for not having been prepared for major storm surges and deadly flooding that they never used to receive.
Climate change kills no matter where you're from, nobody's got a perfect setup for this new world we're living in.
Also, FWIW, even including that grid outage in Texas, Texas' grid is still far more reliable from an total system uptime percentage perspective than either interconnect is. The state with the least reliable electric grid in the country is in California.
The key is the planners of this project were cash burning idiots for ignoring the FEMA risk map. If they had any business sense, they would've completed a profit forecast maximizing insolation while minimizing natural hazards and remoteness for construction and maintenance costs.
Baseball-sized hail!? Did it have no effect outside of the solar farm? Does everyone in Nebraska park indoors? Was nobody caught put in the street? Are the houses made of stone?
At even modest cycling speeds, dust, sand, insects, rocks, small children, etc., may irritate or injure eyes. Eyewear is strongly recommended.
At highway speeds (~100 kph) your eyes will tend to tear up.
With goggles, motorcyclists, race-car drivers, and pilots sustain wind speeds of ~200--300 kph, though that is probably an upper reasonable limit, and again, any sort of debris will greatly increase trauma.
(Some) pilots have survived supersonic bailouts or loss of structural integrity: <http://www.classichistory.net/archives/sr-71-breakup>. Though typically, that ride starts with a full flight suit and helmet, though it needn't end in the same state.
Had a 90mph hailnado ~8 years ago. It came straight across the yard & drove water through the front door, spalled a 1/4" of limestone off the front of the house & stripped the blades off of the grass: we had a field of tiny, poky stalks.
It doesn't hail as widely as it rains (at least in the Dallas area). It tends to dump hail across a couple neighborhoods per storm, while the rain my fall across all of Dallas and Fort Worth (hundreds of square miles).
Even withing the areas where hail falls, most of it won't be the giant hailstones. Once it gets below the size of a quarter cars and roofs are generally safe.
But yes, it regularly totals cars and destroys roofs. They'll send out an army of adjusters and roofers will swarm the area looking for work.
Don't be an insurance company specializing in just one city in Texas or you can be wiped out in one storm.
Can confirm. I happen to live in one of the affected neighborhoods. From my experience in TX, roofs do really well with up to ping pong sized hail. Anything bigger and you have a problem.
It’s absolutely mind blowing to me how many people have their garage packed with “stuff and junk” and park outside. And then they end up strapping mattresses on their cars with duct tape.
I really want solar panels but it just doesn’t seem to make sense here. This is the 2nd time we’re having roof replaced in 10 years. A few houses have panels on their roofs and about 30% panels seem to have damage visible from the street.
This is going to sound hacky, but would a screen of 1" chicken wire mounted several inches above the panel (the stuff stretches) make for some cheap insurance? The wire is thin enough that it shouldn't interfere significantly with the amount of light the panel gets.
Ideally. But if you start up a company in Texas, and you make marketing and sale inroads in a single big city at a much faster rate, you have a problem.
It's a bit easier in Texas with multiple large cities. But if your marketing and sales take off in one region, you can find yourself vulnerable to a single hurricane hitting the coast, for instance.
Since insurance is so heavily state regulated, if you are limited to your one state that has one big city, you may have that risk no matter what. Bigger companies can span multiple states, of course. Smaller companies will have to have their portfolio underwritten by another insurance company.
Generally you reinsure yourself with other insurance companies, so that if you get more than a certain amount of loss in a single year, other insurance companies cover the extra. This risk can be spread between several reinsurance providers, taking a percentage each.
Lloyds of London is a marketplace where a lot of insurance companies reinsure with each other, or with "syndicates" which are groups of investors.
This kind of dynamic brings home how screwed small landlocked countries are (unless they're part of something like the Eurozone). And conversely, how amazingly lucky I am to have been born in the US.
Having previously lived in the area. It depends. But yeah we usually just parked in the garage. But not everyone has that and they get their car obliterated by it. Insurance usually covers it. That size is rare enough that it is not that big of a deal. But when it does. Usually it is pea sized. Golf ball sized is decently rare. Baseball (this case) is very very rare. That size is along the lines it would damage your roof on your house too.
All the houses in my area needed new roofs from "just" golf-ball sized hail. Farmers lost entire crops. The ground was solid white: it was like snow in July.
As others have noted, Nebraska is largely rural space, and severe hail damage tends to be localised.
Other damage would likely have been limited to a few vehicles and structures (not many as those would not be densely clustered), and probably a fair bit of crop damage. Both within a reasonably small radius relative to the solar farm.
The solar array was most likely the most valuable property in the region. It's what happened to be in the bullseye of the storm, so to speak.
Can be. Smaller hail (~3mm) will leave marks on your skin (depending on density/velocity). A baseball (72mm) of ice (~195g) at 11m/s to the head could kill. Very unlikely.
If it gets hit by hail the size of a Volkswagen, its going to be done in. If it gets hit by pebble sized hail it's probably fine (and so are these solar panels).
Baseball sized hail is pretty nasty stuff. Angle and location of impact is going to affect the outcome.
Well I guess this will not be covered by insurance (act of god and all).
Also as someone said, collapsible hail nets, which I never heard of, would have helped.
I wonder why that was not thought of by the solar farm people, especially since they are in "thunder alley". Would hail nets reduce efficiency of the far a bit ? If I had to guess, the real reason is this was built on the cheap.
(Legally) Acts of God may invalidate any contract, including insurance contracts.
However they have to be natural ("God did it") not man-made, and they have to be unforeseeable, so "This only happens every ten years" won't count, but "Suddenly central Paris disappeared into a previously unknown volcano" would be an Act of God.
If you're in Tornado Alley, and your house gets destroyed by a tornado, your insurer can't be like "Act of God, our tornado insurance doesn't cover that" because that's no act of god, that's just weather where you live.
What would the point of it be if it wasn't. I think this person is confusing the difficulty in getting insurance if you live in a flood zone. That is how this would potentially work, no insurance because you are in a hail zone. Never heard of that before though, so this is probably covered and something the insurance will reassess to not cover in future work.
Ah but “hail zone” isn’t quite the same order of magnitude problem as “flood zone” for the places that can’t get flood insurance. Those are starting to look uninhabitable due to encroaching sea waters. Hail’s just freak weather.
"Most" insurance is not for Acts of God, but for small, discrete, predictable, and uncorrelated risks: Life, health, automobile, homeowners / renters, property & casualty (usually structural fires), theft, burglary, and business-related risks.
It is major and widespread disasters which private insurers typically avoid, specifically because many policies receive claims at the same time: flood, earthquake, hurricane, and increasingly of late, wildfire. An alternate term is force majeur, which might offer a clearer image of why such widespread events are uncovered.
Other common exclusions are for civil unrest and acts of war.
I'll note that the Investopedia article above includes tornadoes amongst its events. This somewhat suprises me as tornadoes, whilst locally devastating, often do limit damage to a highly localised area or path. Yes, large storms or clusters may devastate a city or region, but most events are reasonably small-scale, as major natural disasters go. A widespread hailstorm could well be far more costly in terms of claims, as discussed in TFA.
Insurance works by predicting the future value (or cost) of a particular event, and by spreading that cost out over a large number of policyholders. On the back-end, insurance companies operate through reinsurers, who bundle those already-bundled risks into even larger tranches, and hence, more predictable outcomes. The ultimate private-sector backstops are entities such as the Lloyds Names, in which high-net-worth individuals pledge their entire personal assets against particular risks. (The nature of this and the potential downside cost has been much commented on over the years, and there have been periods in which there have been spectacular personal wipe-outs as a consequence.)
Where private companies can not or will not tread, governments frequently step in. Flood insurance in the US is frequently offered or backstopped by the US Federal Government. This is one of numerous ways in which governmment enters into and manipulates risk markets, with other examples being Federal Deposit Insurance (on bank and savings and loan deposits, see recently Silicon Valley Bank), exemptions from liability as with the nuclear industry, and backstopping other financial instruments as with Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac in the home mortgage sector.
And there are instances in which insurance companies have stepped away from their obligations. My understanding that this was the case in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, argued in part by insurers on the fact that records of both individual policyholders and of the insurance companies themselves were destroyed in the event. I don't know what the antecedents of US state-based regulation of insurance are, though I suspect that this event played a role.
One view of government is that it operates where the private sector can not or will not, generally, notably in national defence, in various risk and safety-net systems (notably the modern social welfare state, in many ways born under Bismark in Germany in the late 19th century), as an establisher of standards (from money to measurement to industrial specifications), and as a provider or coordinator in the case of public goods: those whose marginal cost approaches nil, which are nonrivalrous in consumption, and/or which are non-excludable in consumption.
This gives rise to the observation that the US Government is an insurance company with an army:
I experienced a once in 100 year hailstorm once in the west. It would probably be more cost than it’s worth. They seem to spring up with little warning, are highly localized, and last mere minutes.
Edit-and I live close to this area. We could generate electricity for the entire human race here north of 360 days per year and the land is largely empty.
They spring up with little warning if you're visiting the area and are not accustomed to paying attention to the weather forecast. It also sounds like you might be from a part of the world where weather is presented by a TV personality rather than a meteorologist. In the parts of the world where severe weather happens, actual meteorologists present the weather and are less concerned about looking good on TV. While I like to make fun of forecasts as much as the next person, they are impressively accurate. Once the storm systems do start popping up, the information from the tools they have available to them today is incredible. Please, do not confuse your inexperience with storms as the norm for those that do.
I have never quite understood how and why reliable energy should be produced from unreliable weather, and from what we gather climate change means the weather is going to become even more erratic.
It means a resilient electrical grid will be large and made up of a variety of generation and storage methods in a variety of locations.
We already do this with other forms of energy production; coal, oil, and gas burning plants need to go down for maintenance, which means we build more capacity for that too.
I'm not saying we don't. I'm just commenting on that statement. It's easier to build a strong and realistic picture once statements that have unlikely implications are removed.
No, not every location. This means that the sum of the other areas not impacted by weather need to have enough capacity to power the whole, at least for a limited time.
When we needed massive technological improvements and production capacity for batteries to support cell phones, it happened. The same is now true for electric vehicles. There's little reason to think grid-scale storage is going to play out differently; humans are historically pretty good at this.
Detractors of wind and solar like to pretend disingenously they're proposed in isolation by idiots, but that's hardly the case. You'll see hydro, nuclear, gas/biomass peaker plants, etc. in the mix, and you'll see overprovisioned capacity of the cheaper generation forms like wind and solar to account for seasonal or weather-related dips in production.
What is the problem of “unimaginable scale” you’re referring to?
You can already get a home battery and enough solar to fill it. We’re already doing energy storage. As has happened with cellphones, EVs, solar, and wind, the more we do it, the cheaper it’ll be.
No one’s proposing nuking fossil fuel plants and going “oops better fix that”.
The key thing is to build resilience into the system:
- diversify power generation among multiple classes of electricity generation: geothermal, running water (=dams), solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biogas/waste incineration, pumped-water storage.
- build large grids with ample transmission capacity on long lines. China for example has built multiple HVDC links spanning thousands of kilometers - enough to span the entire US.
- build out mesh grids. The more interconnections, the better the resilience against any kind of external shock.
- incentivize large consumers (=heavy industry) to build out the ability to weather outages - basically, pay them to go offline when needed. Yes, some processes (e.g. glass smelters) cannot be stopped without incurring severe damages, but a lot can.
- incentivize private consumers to invest in battery-backed fallbacks and solar panels on their roofs. A typical home runs at anything from 3-6 kWh - that's around 5.000€ for a battery that provides a day worth of regular electricity usage.
All sources of energy are unreliable to some extent – what matters is modelling that to understand the risk and put appropriate mitigations in place. For sources which have more inherent variability (such as solar or wind) the mitigation is often storage or over-provisioning.
The addition of appropriate mitigations allows us to derive an energy source with the desired level of reliability. The cost of those mitigations (i.e. more storage required with erratic renewables) needs to then be traded off against other energy sources and the associated costs.
Only slightly tongue-in-cheek. It's very unlikely that the unscathed panels had no impacts at all right next to panels that had dozens of them. So the surviving panels must have just been meaningfully more robust than the others.