Pierre Gosselin points out this absurdity on his website:
Weed-Covered, Neglected Solar Park: 20 Acres, $11 Million, Only One And Half Years Old!
German solar skeptic website SOLARKRITIK.DE here provides the background on the rundown, weed-covered solar facility in former communist (and now “green”) East Germany, which I presented in my last post here.
It’s much worse than we thought. The story behind the above photo and the project itself appears here at the online Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper. The facility is sprawled over an area of 20 acres. The Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper wrote just before the facility went into operation:
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Looks like they run a mower between the rows, but have’nt figured out how to keep the weeds down under the panels.
I suppose “RoundUp” would be sacrilege to them.
Earth’s plants have evolved over 3 billion years to fight “tooth and nail” for every square millimeter of sunlit surface. When we deny them any of the earth’s surface, they always fight back.
With fronds like that – who needs enemies?
Put some soft tires (one side with huge tires) on a ride around mower with a skinny driver and drive it right down the middle of that glass road. Weeds be gone. Make it electric too. With a long cord. Or maybe one of those obsolete hover-mowers (fly-mow?) would do it…
Or one 20 acre sheet of black plastic. That should cover it.
Granted, the weeds present in this site will be having a serious effect on the panels outputs, as shading causes loss of power. But solar panels do work, even here in the north of Scotland. I live off-grid with panels providing some of my power, together with wind and occasonally diesel.
They do work this far north, and in summer we have long hrs of daylight, albeit much less in winter, but then its windier in winter.
@Eyal Porat
Panels do not need direct sunlight, they work perfectly well with diffuse light as well
No wonder solar panels don’t work. They generate water to keep weeds alive. Water is a greenhouse gas.
As for the desire for installing solar in deserts, hasn’t anybody involved even heard of sandstorms?
How many desert solar installations would survive the sandblasting inflicted by even ‘one’ severe sandstorm? All that ‘shiny’ isn’t going to stay shiny for very long, that’s for sure.
Also, windborne sand would make weed control look a non-issue, as dealing with new ranges of sand dunes built by solar panels and reinforced by solar panels, would be an extremely expensive ongoing headache.
Same goes for HVDC powerlines proposed to transmit all this power for 1,000’s of miles, which are extremely vulnerable to both high winds and sandblasting (neither uncommon in desert environments). Never mind, as long as vast amounts of Public Money can be siphoned off into the feeding trough, eh?
There’s a similar problem with solar furnaces in such environments too. The frequent replacement of mirror coatings will be far from cheap (the excellent coatings on my telescope mirror will do well to last 12 years, and believe me, that mirror is absolutely pampered).
You have to wonder if some people ever make it out of mom’s basement, to interact with the real world?
Step 1. Fill in forms. Apply for grant
Step 2. Ignore local objections and pay off Bureaucrats.
Step 3. Clear land. Lay concrete bases. Install panel units
Step 4. Bureaucrats inspect facility and hand over grant.
Step 5. Buy house in a warmer country and lay on the beach laughing at the sucker tax payers back home.
Not sure anyone ever said solar was maintenance free, but several above seem to think that is true, but then I’m not sure what a few weeds in one poorly maintained site is supposed prove about solar itself working, other than the petty nature of skepticism.
I’m sure, If I could be bothered I could find 100 photos of weed free sites from around the world.
It was a little funny that the pop add that appeared on this site when I opened this comment was this http://www.solarquotes.com.au/?gclid=CIGgyvaq7KkCFQYlpAodPUMAXw
roomba-like robotic mowers are available on the market.
GEESE
Plans have been announced to turn the WHOLE of a town near me into a solar PV Farm by fixing PVs to every house roof in the district. See the article in the local paper here:
http://www.leamingtoncourier.co.uk/news/will_southam_be_the_uk_s_first_solar_town_1_2821995
Pierre Gosselin. Thank you so much for this!
“Meanwhile Europe is planning a $600 billion monster solar facility in the SAHARA called Desertec”.
Beyond insanity! Ask anyone living in Cairo what it is like to live in a house there during and after a sandstorm. It is a total waste of time to clean or dust for at least 3 days after! Now imagine these panels in the storm getting sandblasted. Forget the dust laying on the panels, they will be useless within hours and these windstorms happen all through the year and are so predictable that the Arabs have historic charts that tell you within three days when one will kick up!
The Coptic Gale Chart is named after one of the ancient religions and was devised many years ago in Egypt (Alexandria?) and I have used the chart since the 1960’s and it is surprising how accurate it is! Maybe not scientific but those Arabs have been using it for many centuries.
http://cyprus-storms.webs.com/copticchart.jpg
Now imagine a panel after it has been blasted by just one years worth of these wind driven sandstorms. $600 Billion! Blood boiling time again!
We are all familiar with the Gore Effect.
Now there is the Obama Effect.
Read the sad story about the green company Obama praised.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_070511/content/01125109.guest.html
http://www.wksu.org/news/story/28755
Kind of sad to see people being misled about the promises of green energy.
Reminds me of the eduscams advertisements we see on late night TV. The ones that promise high paying jobs in some industry after you’ve laid down the money for training.
Gary Hladik says:
July 5, 2011 at 10:23 pm
No goats in Germany?
I was going to suggest sheep.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 5, 2011 at 10:01 pm
“Strange, I don’t see any provision for tilting the panels and they look set rather low to the ground for the location. ”
These would be so-called “Tracker” systems. They are not cost-efficient anymore as the price of panels has dropped too far. You produce more electricity/Feed In Tariff profits by spending your investment on more panels instead of panels+tracker.
A weed eater would likely break their upkeep budget and make the project uneconomic. During installation they could have placed a poly barrier on the ground and covered it with a few shovel fills of gravel. Better to add to the installation budget when you are being subsidized than to have to pay from your production afterword.
Combine it with a rabbit farm, problem soved. Or else crank up the bio-diesel generators (Spanish style) to offset any losses.
The waste of money and of perfectly good land borders on criminal. From an environmental, and even a carbon-centric POV a tree farm would make more sense. Go Green. No really, just go.
Two words: landscape fabric
So THAT’S where all those “shovel-ready” jobs went.
Maybe they need to import some workers to to the jobs the Germans won’t do…
From looking at Google Sat Maps the solar farm is on the same property, where there is a smelting operation, Curiously the street view is blocked with in 4 miles of the site. Through out the local area there are what looks like surface mining operations for maybe sand for making glass?
The label on the building complex says “zf services deutschland gmbh” a Google search shows they make auto parts, and overhaul wind generator gear boxes just to the South East of the solar farm.
Seek and you shall find ( gawd I love the internet!)
Yes the panels are low enough that goats would be running up and down the racks of panels, would last less than a week with 60 goats working over the weeds.
So we can’t build solar here in the US because it might disrupt the growth of native species. But this proves exactly the opposite, The greenies are wrong AGAIN, who’d a thunk it.
What delicate little assemblages they are.
The solar panels’ lifespan would have been even shorter, had they been erected in Oklahoma.
When the ratepayers are paying 10-20 times the fair rate for the energy these panels produce, the best thing that could happen is they get completely covered with ” real solar panels” plants.