Hacker News Reader

Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, in Oconto county Wisconsin, residents are all up in arms about a solar farm going up. It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money. The arguments against it are "this destroys farmland", "who will clean the snow off of it in winter", "I don't like how it looks", "static electricity will kill the crops around it", "it will raise the temperature of the surrounding area", "you can't recycle fiberglass so it's bad", etc.

View on HN

> It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money.

What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.

The contractors that build it and the jobs to maintain them.

We should be honest and admit that the maintainance jobs are very, very few.

Power bills will go down. Solar electricity is by far the cheapest form.

I guess you're assuming that power will be used locally and not sold to a different city/state?

Source: the butt tons of wind farms that sell their power to the state next door and the fact that our power bill has doubled in that time frame.

But it's unreliable, and needs a lot of battery tech + overbuilding to make it reliable. Can people be confident that building the array will in and of itself make their electricity bills go down?

Even with those additional costs, it is still arguably the cheapest generation technology.

if people can't be confident about this it's only because a bunch of grifters and oil company propaganda. The math here is pretty easy.

> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"

This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.

The process really is as simple as "libs want it so it must be bad". Everything else is a rationalization after the fact.

PV panels are typically angled to catch the sun better, and they're smooth and dark... snow slides off by itself if the sun is shining (and if the sun isn't shining, you aren't losing much by having the panels covered).

Snow only rolls off after a lite dusting.

If there's a foot of snow on the panels they don't catch any sun, don't get warm, and it doesn't melt off.

More than about 3 inches needs to be manually cleared.

I wonder if you could just run them backwards for a while to clear them. Use the V*I loss.

The energy it takes to do that is significant.

Often exceeding the energy gained in the winter.

I'm thinking if the sun can warm the panels enough for a thin layer of ice to slide off, then it can't take that much more energy to make a thick layer slide off.

It does. Even at 0F, you'll see snow melting on the roofs in winter.

It's a fair concern. There's a solar install up in northern WI that is part of a microgrid and basically doesn't generate energy in winter due to the amount of snow they get. The lack of solar output is offset by nat gas generators.

Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.

Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.

I agree that removing snow can be a concern in some regions, it’s just like—yeah, that’s a job we’ll have to pay somebody to do.

It just seems like a less unpleasant and less unhealthy job than pretty much anything related to petrochemicals, haha.

i was under the impression that the panels track the sun as the day goes by to maximize sunlight. If it starts snowing then just put them in a vertical position, there's no sun shining anyway.

I don’t think all panels are necessarily tracking, there’s some trade off; tracking mounts aren’t free.

You could ask them why they grow so much dang corn then?

> 1/3 of corn is used for fuel - https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...

> Corn raises temp & humidity - https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/corn-fields-add...

> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources

Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.

Normal people understand this. The people of northern WI are a bit challenged.

>> "who will clean the snow off of it in winter"

Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com