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.
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#61
“…Compiled from Jack Herer.com Fuel:
Farming 6% of the continental U.S. acreage with biomass crops would provide all of America’s energy needs.
Hemp is Earth’s number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months.
Biomass can be converted to methane, methanol, or gasoline at a cost comparable to petroleum, and hemp is much better for the environment.
Pyrolysis (charcoalizing), or biochemical composting are two methods of turning hemp into fuel.
Hemp can produce 10 times more methanol than corn.
Hemp fuel burns clean. Petroleum causes acid rain due to sulfur pollution.
The use of hemp fuel does not contribute to global warming…”
I’d like to add one more “perk” to the idea of burning Hemp as fuel:
People living downwind are much happier.
From DirkH on July 6, 2011 at 4:09 am:
“Trackers,” as I understand them, are for the east-west sun-following movements, and would be a maintenance nightmare on such a large-scale panel project. I was thinking about simple tilting during the year to keep the panel roughly perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. There are various ways of mounting the panels in a rigid-enough manner that allow for a quick manual adjustment, once a month or so should suffice. It can be done as part of the regular maintenance, when they check the panels for damage, clean them… trim the weeds… etc.
Nah, obviously they are growing feedstock for a cellulosic biofuel refinery. Too bad none of ’em work: http://www.wisconsinagconnection.com/story-national.php?Id=1366&yr=2011
The weeds can capture and store energy, unlike those useless shiny black things.
A hedge trimmer would make short work of the weeds, but perhaps there was no subsidy for that!
Obviously, another project, designed for show and dough. Once the ribbon was cut and the political hay was harvested… the site had no further imperative. GK
Ah in this whacky “post normal” science world, the government will fund a “scientific” study that will show that in order to keep the weeds down you have to remove the residual heat under the panels and then create some green employment by sending out a team of painters to paint all the panels white, to reflect the sunshine, and of course write it all up in a media lauded “peer reviewed” article for Nature or some other prestigious “science journal”
A win-win for rabid environmentalists. Money will need to be allocated to remediate the site.
They could outsource weed removal.
Fred H. Haynie- “Has any one calculated the rate of energy production of 20 acres of weeds and compared it with 20 acres of solar panels? ”
Biomass can produce a wide range of tonnage per acre-year, from 1 to >20 T/acre-year. Pick 10 T/acre-year as typical. Biomass can provide about 16 MBTU/T of heat, or 2000 kWh/T (assuming 40% efficient generation). For 20 acres at 10 T/acre-year, that comes to about 0.4M kWh/yr. Then you need to subtract energy needed to harvest and burn the weeds.
The article claims the solar farm will provide 2.7M kWh/yr. So, the solar panels provide more electricity than burning the weeds from the same plot of land.
Note that the farm is claimed to have a peak output of 2722 kW. This means they are expecting only (2,700,000/(365*2722) = 2.7 hours/day of full sunshine. Perhaps the weed shading is built into this calculation.
The real question is this. Which offsets more carbon; leaving the weeds to grow and allow them to absorb the CO2 or cutting them down to allow more sun light to hit the solar panels?
I think it can easily be economically viable. If you turn it into a solar farm-grow-op.
Anthony,
It would be an illuminating study if some of your surface station volunteers, who live close to wind farms, could shoot a short movie panorama each month that you could then host, so we could do a count of the operating Vs. non-operating windmills over the course of a year. Wonder if we would discover something similar to the obvious loss of capacity as shown in the solar farm article above. Even a one-time effort could prove interesting.
Sort of OT, but has anyone experience with silicon solar cells in areas that have hail somewhat frequently?
Mindless plant: 1, Al Gore: 0. We are witnessing Darwin’s theory in real time.
AndyG55 says:
July 5, 2011 at 10:30 pm
I am puzzled about the effect of putting a large solar farm in the middle of a desert might have on the region. The farm will absorb a LOT of energy, and may have quite a significant effect on the local climate. Will the shade encourage plants to grow? How will it affect evaporation etc,
Do they even know what affect it will have ??
Dont worry, Mother Nature is way ahead of us on this issue.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
How can they have been so deranged as to not lay down even “weed weave” for protection against weed? Or were they just hoping the onlooking hippies would smoke it all in some delirious, but colorful, state, not knowing one weed from the next?
It’s another green job opportunity!
The panels are undoubtedly functioning as moisture condensers, which then drips through the gaps between panels, so that the weeds under them are well watered.
I’m surprised that the original article doesn’t have information about the actual output of that facility. They’ve got the rated capacity – would be really interesting to see what it’s actual performance has been.
As to goats that several people have mentioned – they’d have an absolute field day (no pun intended!) jumping up on those solar panels, racing up and down them, chasing each other, leaping off the far side, etc. Goats love to climb and leap on things. Using goats for weed control would be a great way to very rapidly ruin the entire facility – but the goats would sure have a lot of fun in the process! I have no idea if sheep would be a similar problem or not…. or if sheep are even willing to eat weeds like goats are, or if sheep are more particular.
If those are actually thistles/nettles…. well, I don’t know about present day “Round Up” weed controller, but back 10 years or so ago, you could just about drench nettles/thistle here in the US with Round Up and it’d have relatively little effect. The durned things are pretty resistant to weed killers and awfully resilient.
re post by: henrythethird says: July 6, 2011 at 8:57 am
Henry, not sure if you’re serious or joking – soooo…. the thing about hemp is that it doesn’t contain the psychoactive compounds that marijuana does. Or at least, commerical hemp that is used to make cloth, rope, and a ton of other products doesn’t. It LOOKS like marijuana I gather, but you’d get zip if you smoked or ate it – and it apparently does have tremendous commercial value. It’s a real shame that you can’t legally grow it as a crop here in the USA (or at least, last I checked you couldn’t).
Eddie says:July 6, 2011 at 11:11 am
“The real question is this. Which offsets more carbon; leaving the weeds to grow and allow them to absorb the CO2 or cutting them down to allow more sun light to hit the solar panels?”
Another question would be – how many months, years, will it take to break even CO2 wise with this facility?
It is going to be a lot longer if they don’t do some maintenance soon as they are missing out on the theoretical max output time of the year. I hope the design of the system is such that the panels DC output is converted to AC quickly (with only a few panel per inverter) otherwise those weeds are going to effect entire strings of panels output.
The weeds look a lot like the ones in my front pasture- which are finally drying out now that we have hit the upper 90”s(F) here in CA. My little 6.12 kw (sts rating) generated 35 kwh yesterday. With our still and hot temperatures yesterday my output was down about 10% from it’s theoretical max output for an early July day. Heat, dirt/dust/bird droppings and shade/clouds are not good things for PV output.
You Don’t understand they are running an experiment to see how much sunlight the “plants” absorb and how this affects the running of the solar panels.
Take the Money and Run.
Epic Fail.