Baseball-sized hail destroys Scottsbluff solar farm
cowboystatedaily.com
cowboystatedaily.com
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.
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.
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.
https://library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Wea...
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.
https://www.gmd1.org/WMP_brochure_revised_use_pg_2_&_3_final...
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.
Until terminal velocity is reached of course, although wind speeds in the impact zone could also add to that.
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.
> [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.
yet
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.
> 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.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/12/24/weekend-read-navigati...
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.
And anyway, even if it's up-to-date, that doesn't mean it will still be true when you go and actually buy the equipment.
if (hours == daytime && sunlight == false) { moveToVert(); }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.
My initial reaction is more along the lines of: "What?! Baseball-sized hail?! Can we still let our children play outside?!"
Even clear glass heats up so it takes some of the energy the panel wants.
That'd be quite a bit cheaper.
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.
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'm guessing the top edges of the panels are (or could be made) strong enough to handle a direct hit.
* * * * * | | | | | \ \ \ \ ---------- instead of. -----------
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+ )
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.
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We get hail here, but haven't seen baseball sized hail yet.
Anyone have any insights on this?
Risk profiling.
Hail-rating.
Preemptive / mitigating measures (see discussion of nets or webbing elsewhere in this thread).
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.
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.
And Nebraska is mostly empty so much falls on nothing.
Roof insurance pays out and crews come from as far away as Arizona to feast and the cycle continues.
These big hailstorms seem to be once in ten years or so.
When they're green, you know there is hail and perhaps even a tornado inside somewhere. Beautiful but terrifying all at the same time.
Hail. Rocks. Planks. Cows...
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.
Yes the hail too is big in Texas.
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.
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.
I assume this would be standard practice (diversify across regions and types of insurance) for any insurance provider, right?
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.
Lloyds of London is a marketplace where a lot of insurance companies reinsure with each other, or with "syndicates" which are groups of investors.
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.
Injury. Low likelihood of death, though possible.
Do not play in hail or thunderstorms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/act-god.asp>
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:
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...>
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.
You build in more than one spot, with enough capacity and energy storage to account for fluctuations.
The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim.
Well. That statement means every location needs to generate all power needed through both methods.
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.
Fans of wind and solar paper over this like it is no big deal.
When exactly can we expect to see this cheap, ubiquitous energy storage that will solve all of our intermittent generation problems?
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.
Sounds like Boomer thinking: we’ll just screw over those spoiled kids.
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”.
- 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.