100-MW solar farm just broke ground in Wisconsin

That is the same latitude as Milan, Italy and Southern France!

Bifacial above ground capture more of solar, esp if the ground reflects solar back.

Many YouTube experiments where people have captured an extra 100-150W from back panels yielding 500W+ per panel.

And bifacial is only slightly more expensive than mono panels. With higher efficiency the price is worth it.

For residential solar with batteries, the price of panels is barely 10% of the cost. Labor, permitting, connectors, inverters, framing take a huge chunk of the cost.

I imagine utility scale has lower overhead but the tradeoff for bifacial would have given positive ROI.

They report on other countries as well, here's a story about a much larger project in China from yesterday: https://electrek.co/2024/11/14/china-worlds-largest-open-sea....

One reason this one could be notable though is that the panels are US-made, I think that is somewhat unusual.

Early solar farms were very concentrated in sunny states because the equipment was expensive enough that they couldn't make money elsewhere. As solar equipment has fallen in price, there are more places where a solar farm can turn a profit. That's why solar farms are now being built in places like Wisconsin. States like Arizona are still adding solar farms each year but now less sunny states are also building solar farms because falling equipment prices have made it practical.

Also, there are usually only a few really heavy snowfalls a year. The rest would presumably melt off pretty quickly, though I’m no expert.

And solar cells work way better if it is cold due to silicon having a lower resistance at lower temperatures.

So it's not all bad if it is not overly dark.