This story initially appeared on Inside Climate News and is a part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When a baseball-sized hailstone slams right into a photo voltaic panel at greater than 90 mph, the end result will not be fairly.
We noticed this in March, when a hailstorm decimated components of the 350-MW Preventing Jays photo voltaic mission in southeast Texas. Photographs circulated on social media and in information protection of hundreds of panels pockmarked with white circles of damaged glass. Right-wing outlets 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 danger from hailstorms, which includes a mix of subtle climate forecasting and panels that may flip to keep away from direct hits. I not too long ago spoke with a number of 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 identical time, photo voltaic is the world’s fastest-growing electrical energy supply, according to the International Energy Agency, and a part of a mixture of renewable sources which are on observe to provide 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 12 months in southeast Texas and one last year in western Nebraska. However what about in 20 years, when hailstorms are possible going to be extra extreme and photo voltaic will cowl way more floor?
There isn’t a good methodology for shielding photo voltaic panels from hail, however there are methods to scale back the danger.
“There’s precise mitigation that may be accomplished,” stated Renny Vandewege, vp of climate operations for DTN, the Minnesota-based firm whose subscription-based merchandise embrace climate forecasting to be used by power firms.
“We’ve patented the power 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 situation.”
This information 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.
Almost all utility-scale initiatives being constructed in the present day use trackers, that are methods 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 rapidly flip to keep away from a direct hit.
For instance, Nextracker, the California-based producer of photo voltaic monitoring methods, 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 methods are operated with software program that can be utilized each on-site and remotely, they usually have battery backups to perform throughout energy outages.
“Will photo voltaic proceed to get developed and in-built hail areas? The reply is sure,” stated Greg Beardsworth, senior director of product advertising at Nextracker. “The way in which that can occur is thru a mix of understanding the magnitude of the danger primarily based on location, choosing the suitable mixture of module know-how and tracker stowing capabilities.”