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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

The one gotcha is that roof mounting for vertical is a bit of a headache & the structural support is often precisely the wrong way round.

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Instead of mounting on a roof, maybe this should be used in place of fences.

One thing Jenny Chase (longtime solar analyst with Bloomberg) likes to point out is that in many places, solar panels are actually cheaper than fencing materials [1]

1. https://www.ted.com/talks/jenny_chase_solar_energy_is_even_c...

How they hold up to kid’s soccer balls tho?

When I bought my solar panels, they showed me their test video of launching balls at them to simulate hail. They said you're toast if it gets to baseball size but below that you should be fine.

Unfortunately, she doesn't say what kind of fence she's talking about. The kind of fancy privacy fence people put up between yards, maybe; but I'd be impressed if they're cheaper than livestock fence, which is the context some people are talking about in this thread. A typical cattle fence (woven wire, steel posts, barbed wire on top) will cost about $2500 per quarter-mile right now for the materials.

I'm not sure what a quarter-mile of solar panels four feet high would cost, or whether they'd survive the occasional cow rubbing on them. Neat idea, though.

This is an interesting application; it sounds like they've worked through a bunch of those issues: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/27/bifacial-rooftop-vertic...

Interesting that they list wind as one of the places where vertical panels have the advantage - my intuition would have been the other way around, with angled panels doing better in windy conditions. Wind uplift isn't something I'd have even thought about.

I meant more on a classic home with an A-frame like roof.

Don't think it's a coincidence that the demo vid they're showing off is a flat factory roof

Yeah, I mean the peak of such a roof is the only practical place for it. I'd say this style of mounting is simply not appropriate for all types of roofs, and that's not exactly a bad thing, just geometry

Yeah, and the mounting would need to be robust enough to withstand the panels acting like a sail in storm winds.

I think it'd be interesting to look at how these might be colocated with crops.

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