This story initially appeared on Inside Local weather Information and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
When a baseball-sized hailstone slams right into a photo voltaic panel at greater than 90 mph, the outcome shouldn’t be fairly.
We noticed this in March, when a hailstorm decimated components of the 350-MW Combating Jays photo voltaic challenge in southeast Texas. Pictures circulated on social media and in information protection of 1000’s of panels pockmarked with white circles of damaged glass. Proper-wing shops have been wanting to amplify what they noticed as proof of the unreliability of solar energy.
The fact about hail and photo voltaic panels is extra difficult, and never so grim.
Photo voltaic builders and producers have taken steps to scale back the chance from hailstorms, which includes a mixture of refined climate forecasting and panels that may flip to keep away from direct hits. I just lately spoke with a few of the individuals 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 similar time, photo voltaic is the world’s fastest-growing electrical energy supply, in line with the Worldwide Vitality Company, and a part of a mixture of renewable sources which might be on monitor to supply the vast majority 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 yr in southeast Texas and one final yr in western Nebraska. However what about in 20 years, when hailstorms are doubtless going to be extra extreme and photo voltaic will cowl rather more floor?
There isn’t a good technique for shielding photo voltaic panels from hail, however there are methods to scale back the chance.
“There’s precise mitigation that may be finished,” mentioned Renny Vandewege, vice chairman of climate operations for DTN, the Minnesota-based firm whose subscription-based merchandise embody climate forecasting to be used by vitality firms.
“We’ve patented the flexibility to measure the incidence within the measurement of hail inside radar know-how,” he mentioned. “Scanning the storms, you get suggestions that claims {that a} storm is producing hail two inches in diameter, or regardless of the situation.”
This knowledge is most helpful if a photo voltaic array has tools that may reply to an approaching storm by adjusting the panel angle to scale back harm.
Almost all utility-scale tasks being constructed as we speak use trackers, that are techniques that flip the panels throughout the day to comply with the solar. A few of these trackers have the potential 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 techniques, sells a hail mitigation product that connects climate forecasts from DTN and others, and makes use of the information to regulate panel angles forward of hailstorms. The techniques are operated with software program that can be utilized each on-site and remotely, and so they have battery backups to perform throughout energy outages.
“Will photo voltaic proceed to get developed and in-built hail areas? The reply is sure,” mentioned Greg Beardsworth, senior director of product advertising at Nextracker. “The best way that can occur is thru a mixture of understanding the magnitude of the chance based mostly on location, deciding on the suitable mixture of module know-how and tracker stowing capabilities.”
