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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Got to be the most expensive possible way to put up a few square meters of solar panels.

In Texas, where land is cheap and sun plentiful, they have a project where they're just laying them out on the ground. No support structure, no expensive clockwork to tip them this way and that. They want to get more watts, they buy more dirt-cheap panels and lay them on the ground too.

See, all that support structure costs more than the panels these days. Way more. You want to spend your money wisely, ditch the supports, buy more panels instead.

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This is Switzerland, where land is not as plentiful as in Texas, not by a long shot.

Plus, the support structure is free in this case, it's definitely cheaper to lay solar panels on those dishes than tearing them down just to lay panels on the floor. Also, having solar panels laying flat on ground level sounds like skimming on infrastructure to save money short term but having to pay higher maintenance long term: you have to keep the panels relatively clean for them to work, having them slanted and elevated a bit means that less dirt get on top of them and rain washes most of it regularly.

My guess is: the problem is not the price of the land or the price of the structure, but the permits. In Switzerland, you can put solar panels on existing buildings without requiring a permit.

As the article says, there are many "large" solar panel projects planned in Switzerland, specially in the mountains, where the snow will reflect the light and increase electricity production in winter (where electricity is the most expensive). But it takes a very long time (sometimes many, many years) until those projects are approved, if they are approved at all. This is known to be a problem, and government did try to speed this up, but it still is far too slow. (I'm Swiss.)

Texas uses robot vacuum cleaners. Not a lot of rain. Definitely a sweet spot for them.

Anyway. I'd guess they'd do better to lay them on the ground next to those dishes, than the expense of climbing up there and fastening them to that massively expensive superstructure. Not to mention the danger to life and limb, climbing around up there.

Generally speaking it's just a mistake to mount solar panels in some difficult-to-reach expensive place.

Optimal: A large flat space near the existing grid, with generous road access and clearance. On cheap land and cheap supports. Where it can be serviced, not too far from the service center.

Those dishes fail on half of those metrics.

What you're describing doesn't exist in Switzerland, which you could tell by doing a quick Google Maps view.

Nothing in Switzerland is cheap, least of all land. Practically nothing in Switzerland is flat either. What little flat land we have is used for agriculture and cities.

Turns out south-facing mountain slopes are nearly ideal for solar panels. From a quick Google Maps view, the country is about half that kind of terrain.

And nobody is going to convince me you can't find the same square footage as, my god, some radio dishes! somewhere in Switzerland.

No, this whole OP article is eco-theatre.

The whole thing is a red herring. How many of these old antennas exist, maybe a dozen? At "25 homes" each, it doesn't meaningfully impact the cited 50 TWh need.

Sure the structure is free so why not, but even that needs maintenance, just ask Arecibo. It's unclear from the article if they plan to use these as sun-tracking panels, but the burden of that would make it rapidly economically unfeasible.

They're not mounted at all? Texas also has wind, and storms, and tornados. I'd think panels literally lying loose on the ground would be at too much risk of blowing away, or getting covered in mud.

I can maybe see just mounting them to concrete sleepers or something....

Putting solar panels on existing structures, as is the case in this article, is much better than on undisturbed land. The upper crust in a lot of southwest desert stores a significant amount of carbon which gets released when you tear it up for a construction project. Such projects also use a lot of water, which is a scarce resource in many desert areas. Plus destroying the land harms a lot of native plants and wildlife.

Putting solar panels on existing structures avoids all of those problems and produces just as much energy. There is a lot of space on existing buildings that doesn't yet have solar panels and we should be making much more of an effort to improve on that.

They've already got the dish. They can use it for solar panels for now and if business comes back they could take them off and use again for its intended purposes.

It's a little wacky, but at RF the dish performance isn't actually degraded as much as you might think by the panels. It's possible that at night the system could be used for its original purpose and then in the daytime generate solar.

Again, one step better than that is to just put them nearby, at ground level. Safer, cheaper. And probably, don't go up there into the mountains at all, but put them near the grid in some convenient place. All improvements over climbing up on dishes in the mountains.

But the company who owns the dishes might not own the flat ground around it.

But what do you do if you own the a set size of land and satellite antennas already?

Tearing the antennas down down also cost money.

I don't know the rules for new solar structures, but keep in mind in some places in Switzerland you can't even paint the house the color you want.

Take pretty pictures of them, then build solar panel farms where it makes sense instead.

That makes no sense.

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