And even if you're losing a small amount due to an inefficient angle, just get more panels!
However, at grid scale a few percent difference in cost or output can have dramatic impact on profitability so there's a lot of seemingly trivial optimizations going on. Some instills go so far as to aim some non tracking panels slightly to the east or west because slightly more valuable kwh beats slightly more kwh.
People think renewables are efficient in some way. They aren't. It's literally the most wasteful way to produce power because it doesn't get here when we need it and grid scale storage is orders of magnitude more expensive than production.
Which is why so many grid scale solar installs come with enough batteries to store ~50% of daily output. It's not about nighttime power it's about reducing demand for peaker power plants. Basically combined cycle natural gas operates at ~64% efficiency assuming long term operation, but open cycle has much lower efficiency and thus much higher costs.
[[Citation needed]]
> grid scale storage is orders of magnitude more expensive than production.
[[Citation needed]]
PS: I have little interest in looking for citations when you can do your own research using 2024 data.
It can provide 400MW of power for 4 hours before it goes offline and cost $560m.
You need 6 of them to provide 24 hours back up. That's $560M * 6 = $3.4B. That's not counting the three times as large solar plant that you will need to build to charge the battery or that the battery will lose 50% of it's output within a decade unless you build an even larger battery installation to prevent full discharge. On top of that to prevent yearly black outs you'd need somewhere between 3 to 20 times the capacity above depending on region and climate.
Meanwhile the latest nuclear power plant produces the same power without degradation for less than half the rosiest estimate above and was build in a country with no history of nuclear power and no indigenous expertise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Pairing batteries with solar provides actual useful power from solar for most of the day. You don't need both 24h of batteries AND redundant solar farms to get 24h of energy. Extremely redundant solar costs less per kWh. Therefore a combined system will cost less, provide more useful power, and charge the batteries at zero additional cost. I'll stick with batteries alone, but include that zero charge cost as part of a cheaper overall system.
Construction costs vary by country so you need a country with both battery systems and nuclear to get an apples to apples comparison. For the US "In 2023 costs had increased to $34 billion, with work still to be completed on Vogtle 4.", with work still to be completed on Vogtle 4, and that's just construction on two 1.1GW reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
400MW * 6 = 2.4 GW, 4h * 6 = 24h. 36 * 560m = 20 billion so well under that 34+B even before considering the cost savings from solar. We are comparing with Nuclear at 2.2GW which again goes offline for long periods, but we care about orders of magnitude so redundancy is a non issue.
Now you need to consider operating costs for both systems. In constant dollars without subsidies construction works out to roughly 1/3 of nuclear total lifetime costs ~1000 workers + fuel + insurance + new equipment + decommissioning adds up. I'll be conservative and double that 34 billion instead so 68B.
Actual studies look into foretasted costs. However for orders of magnitude 5%/year of install costs per year in maintenance would be equivalent to creating redundant facilities to cover 50% degradation in 10 years, so that's conservative as swapping out batteries would lower costs here. Lifetime costs should therefore be below 20B + 20B * 5% * 50 years = 70B ie roughly the same as Nuclear per kWh and far more flexible.
Now, you can easily quibble about these numbers but your not getting an orders of magnitude difference here.
Feel free to provide better numbers. Those are the two largest most recent projects. That those numbers disagree with what studies say they should be aren't a problem with the numbers, but problems with the studies.
Also you should read up on the difference between power and energy since you're confusing the two in pretty much every line of your post. Watts aren't joules and joules aren't watts.
I did provide a US example for an apples to apples comparison. Providing lower numbers is irrelevant when higher numbers already prove the point.
> Also you should read up on the difference between power and energy since you're confusing the two in pretty much every line of your post. Watts aren't joules and joules aren't watts.
Don't hand wave, pick a single example.
If you don't understand my notation you can simply compare 2 * 1.1 GW nuclear reactors * 24h = 52.8 GWh per day. The battery example you gave was 400MW * 4h = 1.6GWh per day. 52.8 GWh / 1.6 GWh= 33x. I used 36x for a total of 20.16 Billion dollars.
https://undecidedmf.com/have-we-been-doing-solar-wrong-all-a...
This guy did some interesting real-world testing in a bunch of different circumstances - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M
The other major advantage here is that you can use them with farming and actually do something with the space.
In addition areas where it snows sees a dramatic uptick in solar power because of the reflection of the snow and not needing to brush the panels off.
vertical panel layouts really open up a LOT of options that were not available before. (using them as fences, putting them on sun facing walls of homes spaced off and letting the pass through sunlight hit the other side). There's a lot of possibilities here).
So vertical makes a lot of sense on large scale solar farms I think, even more so when you consider the land can be better utilised.
On domestic scale, where you can easier shift your load to match your production AND you might already have a roof with the right front and pitch, normal pitched north/south facing installations might make more sense.
They end up covered in moss and mud.
I'd recommend doing it at night, because I got a nasty zap off mine when presumably some of the mopping water got into the electrics and came up the metal mop pole .. (the electrics are all supposedly fully waterproof, but I guess on my 10+ year old panels stuff has degraded)
If you're selling it back to the power company then this might not be a problem unless you also have resell limits.