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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

> Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles.

I do wonder how electricity pricing plays into this: having panels that are optimized for production in mornings and afternoons will produce less overall, but could provide more valuable power overall.

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you could just add a triangular shim under each panel that make them flat towards a common level. Each ring would need their own shim height but since you need some mounting hardware anyway this would add only a bit of weight.

Good point! That would work yeah. The placement will have to be modified a bit to avoid shadows but that would work just as well.

With a dish that can be oriented to always face the sun, there should never be any shadows

Mounting hardware like that can easily cost nearly as much as the panels with how cheap panels can be right now, and the cost of the extra labor to install standoffs.

That mounting hardware shouldn't cost any more than standard mounting hardware - it'd be a simple matter of making one pair of standoffs taller than the other. You are going to need standoffs, and the labor to install them anyway.

Yes, but suddenly you need different kinds of standoffs instead of one uniform size. This makes manufacturing a bit more expensive, logistics a bit more challenging, and installation a bit more complicated.

All of this means it's going to be more expensive than standard mounting hardware. Not by a lot, but solar panels have become cheap enough that even small differences matter.

Yes, but on my napkin, all of this will create significantly more power which more than offsets those costs.

The entire thing is on a coaxial mount. If you need less power, just turn it away from the sun, intentionally designing suboptimal features to chase uneven demand loads (between winter and summer) would not be a worthwhile strategy.

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