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Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

> India needs to move to homegrown manufacturing of cheap solar

I doubt India could manufacture solar cheaper than China which already has all of the necessary ecosystems for massive scale solar panel manufacturing.

> solar energy could help with the extra demand in energy because of high heat

It may seem counter-intuitive, but solar panel efficiency is affected negatively by temperature increases. Most solar panels have a temperature coefficient of around -0.3% / °C to -0.5% / °C. So at 50C , you're expecting more than 10% loss.

Most people don't realize a lot of electronics just isn't designed to operate in such extremes. Plastics start to lose rigidity, glues start to detach, liquid crystals start to behave slightly differently.

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Additionally Pakistan installed a giant solar farm it lost 30%+ of projected efficiency due to getting covered in dust, requiring a large budget to constantly clean them. So hot/dusty places are bad places for these. Despite a lot of sci-fi books which talk about covering deserts in solar farms.

> requiring a large budget to constantly clean them

It's not unfathomable that a cheap, automated method of doing this could be developed.

> It's not unfathomable that a cheap, automated method of doing this could be developed.

And that cheap, automated method will require energy as well. Perhaps a bigger concern maybe that such a method may require a cheap fluid to prevent damage to the panel coatings and that might be water, already a scarce resource in those places.

What they did is explained here, the process is quite involved:

> Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water (enough to sustain 9000 people) while rain in the Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning methods allowed setting of dust before it was re-cleaned.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park

Every day they're using 20.7 litres of water to keep a single panel clean. It's an interesting problem, but I'm certain there's a better way if one were willing to develop better automation.

Why is it not a good idea to use pressured air jets attached to each panel? Is the energy required for quick pressured air burst significant?

Imagine silica dust landed on your lenses. Pressured air on that dust. Scratches.

They already exist.

I wonder if there's an opportunity to install some kind of wipers on panels.

Ecoppia makes robotic systems to clean dust off of solar panels without using water: https://www.ecoppia.com/technology

Some of their systems are already deployed in India. One example:

Site: Bikaner Solar Park

Location: Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

Capacity: 438 MW

Bikaner solar Park it is located in the north part of Rajasthan surrounded by the Thar Desert. While providing optimal irradiation, this geographic location poses great challenges in terms of soiling losses, which fluctuate between 17-25%. As such, it requires between 12-36 conventional wet manual cleaning cycles.

With the installation of Ecoppia’s E4 fully automated and water free cleaning solution, there was no longer a need to perform manual wet cleaning, saving billions of liters of water every year. Moreover, Ecoppia’s daily cleaning, significantly reduced soiling loses, maximizing the site’s productivity.

https://www.ecoppia.com/projects

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