Essay by Eric Worrall
Greens are using the power outages following Hurricane Ian to push solar power.
The Climate Emergency Is Very Much Here. Now We Must Act.
Climate impacts are here today so we need to double down on climate adaptation now.
ANDREAS KARELAS October 5, 2022
In Florida, Hurricane Ian ripped homes from their foundations, mangled boat docks and left at least 2.6 million people without power. Floridians shared pictures of flamingos sheltering from the storm in public bathrooms and sharks swimming up the flooded streets.
Welcome to the age of climate change.
As we assess the devastating effects of Hurricane Ian, it’s time to take a closer look at climate adaptation. How ready are we for the climate impacts that are here now and are on track to become scarily worse?
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Given that solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history, according to the International Energy Agency, things are starting to look up. A recent study from Oxford found that a swift transition to renewable energy will allow us to decarbonize the economy by 2050 and save $12 trillion in the process.
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We must start building resilience right away. Clean energy powered micro-grids with battery storage will prove not only to be a cost-effective way to reduce carbon pollution, but they would also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters.
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Read more: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/10/05/climate-emergency-very-much-here-now-we-must-act
KCRA-3 published a story of a solar powered Florida community which apparently didn’t suffer any outages, located just 12 miles from Fort Myers, where Hurricane Ian made landfall.
From Chariot Energy;
Can Solar Panels Withstand a Hurricane?
By: Matt Kundo
August 9, 2022…
All solar panels, regardless of brand, style, shape or material, are built to withstand high winds to some degree. In general, most solar panels can withstand up to 140 mph winds, which is around 2,400 pascals (the unit in which solar panel wind resistance is measured).3 That’s sturdy enough to withstand a Category 4 hurricane, whose wind speeds range from 130 to 156 mph.4
However, this story above is a rare case, in that these solar panels were specifically designed to withstand the highest possible hurricane-force winds. Plus, they were heightened so less debris impacted the panels. Wind hurling at 170 mph is much different than a rock flying at similar speeds. Thus, any ground-mounted solar panels or rooftop panels lower to the ground didn’t fare as well.
The good news is that solar panels are being designed and built with materials to withstand more extreme conditions. So, even though the industry isn’t prepped for every weather situation, we’re working to becoming more resilient each year.
…
Read more: https://chariotenergy.com/blog/can-solar-panels-withstand-hurricanes/
For most people, a gasoline backup generator would probably make more sense. My personal backup plan, a small, portable gasoline generator and a stack of 5 gallon gasoline tins, locked in a secure, flood proof storage space, kept my freezer and TV going after Cyclone Marcia passed nearby in 2015 – including a prolonged period when the sky was black with storm clouds. And of course, a $1000 generator is a lot cheaper than a $7000+ household solar battery installation – regardless of green fantasies about the cost of renewables.
I think there is a case for solar backup, at least to keep the freezer going, if you live in a district which suffers prolonged power outages and flooding after big storms. I was caught in such a place in 2012, my home became an island after floods cut all the roads. There was a gas station within reach, but the pumps weren’t working, because they didn’t have a backup generator. My gasoline tins were close to empty by the time power was restored.
Having said that, I would hate to rely on solar as my *only* backup. If a storm or hurricane was accompanied by large hail, or flying debris, anything outdoors would take a beating, including solar panel installations. And of course, solar panels wouldn’t get a lot of sunlight during the period the sky was full of storm clouds.
If solar is so damned cheap, why do we have to keep subsiding it? Ban all subsidies now!
You’d have to pull a lot of numbers together to get the real cost of solar. Subsidies, tax credits, and rebates, but the money still has to come from somewhere.
Anyone who truly believes that ( Common Dreams: Rooftop Solar Would have Prevented Hurricane Ian Power Outages ) is uneducated in how rooftop solar works or deluded or both.
Rooftop solar MUST be installed such that it will automatically shut down and NOT generate any electricity IF the grid source goes offline.
This is to protect the grid wiring from being energized into potential faults of downed powerlines and killing utility workers.
Rooftop solar is sold and built on the basis of having the ability to “sell back” to the utility any excess generation (meter spinning backwards). That is why the system must shut down when the grid source fails, And why rooftop solar wouldn’t/couldn’t prevent Hurricane Ian power outages. To keep your house powered when the grid fails requires either a FF generator or a Tesla Powerwall battery back-up and inverter. A heck of a lot of Powerwall battery packs given the time grid power is down
Bryan, what you said is so important, I never thought about that. It’s good to know.
Anyone who would nail a LiON battery pack to the wall of their house is just as deluded as those who park their liON EV in their garage.
I was going to bring up that point exactly (thought not as well likely d;) ) as I’ve had solar since 2014 and through one hurricane with a loss of power. And I can attest that, yes you lose the output of the solar power once the grid goes down. The only way to avoid that is to disconnect from the grid and have some form of battery backup.
One of the biggest unstated costs of renewables is all the extra on-demand gas turbines that have to be kept at the ready ready to start up after the clouds come, the sun goes down, or the wind stops blowing. In fact, the inefficiencies of keeping these sources on standby actually gets counted against the costs and efficiencies of gas generation which is akin to surreptitiously moving the weights from one side of a scale to the other.
EIA, IEA, California, etc. are masters at abusing proper accounting processes in order to burden fossil fuels with renewable costs.
All in their nefarious quest to make renewable energy LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) less than fossil fuels and much less than renewable energy’s true costs.
The claim that solar energy is cheap is a lie so convenient, that it must be told over and over again.
The same could be said for Climate Change itself.
There are also serious doubts Ian was actually a Category 4. The wind damage on the ground is not consistent with that wind speed, which I understand was measured remotely.
At altitude, say 800 to 900 feet. Near the deck, there were wind gusts in the high double digits, and sustained winds at three quarters. The planes were buffeted.
It reached cat. 4 in the Gulf of Mexico, but weakened (as all hurricanes do) as 50% of it moved over land from (very warm) ocean waters.
The following “official” data is from the NDBC (/ NOAA) website.
URL : https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/
Zoom in on the map to find the closest “buoys” north(-west) and south of Fort Meyers (26.64°N, 81.87°W).
Note also that 1 m/s ~= 2.237 mph.
The “eye” going over Fort Myers at landfall (below the cat. 1 threshold of 73 mph …) can clearly be seen, but even in the stronger “peripheral” quadrants of hurricane Ian the sustained wind speeds never managed to get past the category 2 threshold.
Thank you, Mark BLR!
That chart helps explain why the wind damage I was seeing wasn’t consistent with Cat3/Cat4 in early videos and videos made during the storm.
But then when later videos came out, some areas did have damage to roofs and trees consistent with Cat3/4. But it appears the damage was from gusts, which would cause the spotty severe wind damage I saw. And some of those gusts may have been higher than recorded if they hit where the instruments weren’t located.
Most of the damage I was seeing was from water from the surge. I’d see houses destroyed and roads washed out, but few trees down and the standing trees and palms had lost little of their foliage.
I was stumped because I was seeing what Tom Halla commented on just above; visible wind damage not consistent with the reported wind speeds and mostly surge damage. But I did finally see some spotty damage from very high wind speeds.
Thanks again.
I had Cat 1 gusts 120 miles north of Ft Myers…24 hrs or so worth of them. They had them well in the Orlando area they day after the eye moved onshore.
Not the first hurricane that area has experienced, and FL building codes have had plenty of upgrades in recent decades (such as after Charley, which was shortly before I moved down here). Plenty of incentives with insurance to make everything hurricane-proof as possible.
I had three large trees uprooted. My property was covered with downed limbs. Maybe every 20 minutes one was slammed into the boards on my windows or my roof. It certainly was a bit “spotty” when I got out and drove around.
The winds did a number on rural areas southeast of me. Nothing to slow down those winds I guess.
Thanks for the report, Michael. Video reports are still coming in and I’ve slowed my search a bit after finally finding some areas where the foliage was stripped, and more trees were down.
Early on, most of what I was seeing was water damage and the reports on wind speed weren’t matching the visuals.
I figure where people were getting hammered by wind, they weren’t sticking their neck out to get videos.
One thing that struck me on UK TV News footage was the absence of downed and damaged trees. It didn’t match the predictions of a super strong hurricane I’d heard in the days before it struck.
What strike me is people judging an event from what they have NOT seen.
Judging max winds in a hurricane by finding spots that did NOT report those winds.
I do not know what “super strong” means.
That is not how hurricanes are described.
But by any definition, this was a very bad, awful, totally not good hurricane.
Look more if you have not seen what you expected.
I personally think anyone who has not seen the images of the worst of it, have not looked for it.
This is the internet. You can see hundreds of hours of video and thousands of pictures, showing astounding damage and apocalyptic winds and surges.
What you have to look slightly harder to find is before and after images, or else it is hard to judge what has been erased and levelled.
This was broadcast during the storm, but there is footage of far more widespread damage taken from drones, etc.
(1) Hurricane Ian images and videos: Cat 4 storm causes widespread damage across western Florida – YouTube
Which is the only way possible to get into the hard hit areas.
In the worst places, they are not even letting reporters in.
Events cannot be judged by what a person has NOT seen.
If you go outside into the upwind side of a building when the wind is over 100 mph, you are inviting death.
When wind is over 120, even in gusts (which go on for longer than you might imagine…minutes…), you are gonna be badly injured or dead when even a small branch or palm frond or any other debris hits you.
Force is proportional to the square of wind velocity.
It is not linear.
No one will come to help you once winds are over 39mph.
911 will put you on a list and come by a day or two later, if they can get to the location.
If you can call for help…if you are not dead.
They are still finding bodies even now, over a week later.
Most fatalities in any hurricane since 1935, and counting.
1935 was the Labor Day storm…strongest hurricane to ever hit the US.
Video is looking down a random street on Sanibel Island.
This place was a jungle paradise before Ian.
https://twitter.com/ReedTimmerAccu/status/1577682335809634304?s=20&t=7YzIsNTj8xx5Jv05_7xSqQ
Early on no one could get into the bad areas, because bridges are washed away, or the police have block off access, or else trees were blocking roads.
In places where they are still pulling bodies from the piles of wreckage, they do not let even residents in, in some cases, let alone gawkers and looky loos.
But by now, anyone who looks will find that the reports of this being one of the worst hurricanes to hit Florida in recent times, is most certainly accurate.
It has always been the case that the worst f hurricanes is a relatively narrow area and mostly and most commonly pretty near the coast. Surrounding areas get less wind and inland areas along the track of the center but further from landfall, often do have less consistent damage.
Keep in mind that every building and tree standing survived the extremely long lasting (days) and powerful (in most places) winds from Irma just 5 years ago.
All the weak trees were knocked over or broken to bits by that one.
Plenty fell over. Plenty were stripped bare.
Plenty lost a ton of leaves but still have some foliage and it may not be at all apparent that a tree with leaves just lost 90% of them.
This is the end of the rainy season, and every plant and tree were at maximum foliage.
My live oaks have leaves on them, but you can see right through the foliage and look at blue sky behind them.
Prior to Ian, you could not see 10 inches past the outer shell of leaves.
Severe hurricane wind damage is not localized.
If you are seeing localized wind damage it is more likely caused by individual severe thunderstorm microbursts. Wind bursts that appear as if a giant fist punched through trees and buildings.
When hurricane Isabel passed through Virginia, hundreds of miles away from landfall, the local forests and even Richmond sustained multiple damages of this sort.
One neighbor had many trees knocked down in a direct line. So much that her driveway was blocked by a wall of fallen mature oaks and yellow pine. My property just across a residential neighborhood street had minimal wind damage.
Another neighbor, in line with her bashed trees lost a new copper coated porch roof. Copper sheeting was mostly stripped off and the whole porch roof blown into our other neighbor’s treefall.
Tornadoes cause similar data, but fallen trees lie in random directions with treetops frequently snapped off.
When you see intact homes and roofs adjacent to wrecked ones, it is because some buildings are newer and some are older, no other reason.
Everyone around here had power cat 3 and 4 winds for a long time. Over hurricane force for many hours.
I cannot turn on the news or look at my computer without seeing thousands of images of stunning damage.
Spotty damage my ass.
Everything was not wrecked because some properties are well built, and surge only goes so high and so far inland.
Most of Florida is not as low as coastal locations.
Almost everyplace that is built on is built up several feet at least, which is one reason there are so many canals and retention ponds and even huge manmade lakes…for the fill they provide, and also for the drainage they provide.
We get six feet of rain every Summer, with much of it falling in huge downpours of several inches in a short time, and hour or three.
Additionally, there are huge mitigation and preserve area in and around SW Florida.
Miles of Mangroves and cypress forest all over the place down here.
Where I live, only one lot in ten is built, the rest is forest.
Forest breaks a lot of wind.
And while some trees always go down, it is amazing how many do not even break.
Palm trees and native vegetation such as live oaks are well adapted to hurricanes, or else the state would be bare instead of heavily wooded everywhere that is not built up or everglades.
Here is Florida high resolution elevation map. We are not all at 2 feet above sea level:
Much of the state, even in South and Southwest Florida, is 20-30′ above sea level or more.
And mangroves and barrier islands do a lot of good. There are a lot of places on exposed locations, near water and low elevation, but not everyone, and not by the time you get ten miles inland in most places.
http://www.joeandfrede.com/usa/florida_topo_med_res.png
The lightest shade of pink is 10 feet or less, but the other shades are in 10 foot increments, so the second shade of pink is 10-20 feet.
The Yellow areas are over 140 feet high.
Brown is 70 to 120 feet above sea level.
Knock it off. It was a Category 5
Now, isn’t Desantis the BEST ever governor with his well managed state recovering from such a massive extreme hurricane faster then ever possible???
Build UP his creds, don’t down play them.
Sarcasm I assume
Yeah, why didn’t he just stay up late and hire a few guys to hundreds of square miles of natural disaster!
Here it is all of ten days later, and they have barely even done temporary repairs on every single one of the damaged bridges that cut off entire islands from the storm.
Those 40,000 power linemen who were in state when the storm hit, prepositioned by the governor’s orders, and over 5000 national guardsmen already in my neighborhood days ahead of time, are really lazy.
They have not even fixed every single think that was totally destroyed yet.
I mean, how long can it take to rebuild an entire electricity distribution system for millions of people?
So what if they had over 2 million of the 3.1 million back up and connected to the grid within two days?
Why are those guys working day and night to get power on, so damn lazy, even as dead bodies lie undiscovered in the rubble from the deadliest hurricane to hit Florida in 85 years?
In any case, jackass, in case you forgot, back in 2005 every one of you Democrat wastes of space taught us all very well, that hurricanes and everything that happens after one of them, are the direct responsibility of The President of the United States.
Every death on his watch is another MURDER he personally is committing, on all of us!
So thanks for electing that senile old doddering fool, d!ckhead.
This graph is pure bullshit.
Tens of thousands of wrecked homes and a 15+ foot storm surge proves it.
As do wind measurements over a span of 100 miles, From Marco Island and Naples to Tampa Bay, and clear over to the other coast more than 120 miles and a day away, in Melbourne and other locations.
I posted a list of winds over 100 mph in a large number of locations, including 140 mph in Cape Coral, and, well, let me find it and repost it here.
RSW is the letter code for the Fort Myers International Airport.
Here is a list, tentative and incomplete, of locations that recorded winds of over 100 mph:
Lee County
1)3mi SE Cape Coral,140 MPH
2)Southwest Florida International Airport, 110 MPH
3)Tarpon Pt., 109 MPH
4)Fort Myers, 100 MPH
Charlotte County:
1)Punta Gorda Airport, 135 MPH
2)Punta Gorda, 124 MPH
3)Grove City, 110 MPH
Collier County:
1)S Pelican Bay, 112 MPH
2)2mi ENE Collier, 105 MPH
Hendry County:
1)La Belle, 110 MPH
(La Belle is way far inland…over 10 miles inland even of me. 50 miles inland of the point of landfall, in fact!)
Maritime Locations:
1)Sarasota Bay Marker 17, 106 MPH
2)1mi S Venice, 104 MPH
Honorable Mention:
1)Ding Darling Nwr, 98 MPH
2)3.8mi SE Estero, 95 MPH
3)2.2mi NE Port Charlotte, 90 MPH
4)2mi SE Bonita Shores, 99 MPH
5)Melbourne Beach Barrier Island, 81 MPH
(well over 100 miles from landfall, on the other coast entirely)
6)New Smyrna Beach, 86 MPH
(likewise, over 100 miles from first landfall)
7)Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, 86 MPH
8)Tampa Bay Cut, 87 MPH
9)New Pass Shoal Light, 85 MPH
All of these seem to be something like an hour or more prior to landfall, except the ones inland and on the other coast of course.
Landfall was 3:45 PM, and the place that the center passed at that time, 3:45, was a tiny barrier island not very close to any of these places.
Most reports I have seen of “strongest winds in Ian” are before 2:00PM.
So what does that tell us?
I am about 40 miles inland, and about 50 miles from the point of landfall of the center.
But the eyewall went over my house.
RSW is about ten miles from my house, closer to the coast.
That graph is not what was reported at RSW.
It may be some place in downtown Fort Myers that was shielded by a hi rise or something.
We all had hours of wind over 100 mph, and many hours of wind above hurricane force.
Storm surge is pure physics. It is impossible for a cat 1 wind to raise a storm surge 15 feet up onto land.
It is impossible for a cat 1 storm to have 140 mph winds in it.
Impossible for bare minimum hurricane to have 100+ mph winds not only hours before landfall, but also 50 miles south of the eye and 50 miles north of itt, and everyplace in between.
Explain a barely hurricane strength fake storm pushing up a 15″ storm surge that wrecked entire islands and towns, and had over 4 feet of surge inland, all the way down in Naples, that is on video flooding a fire station?
Every tide gauge in this region recorded the highest water levels ever recorded in over 100 years of measurements. Many of them were still rising when they broke, like Naples at over 6 feet about mean.
Here is video of over 15 feet of surge at Fort Myers Beach. Note the large home first flooding, then being lifted off foundation, and then wrecked utterly note also that sidewalk and street are several feet above high tide level.
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1575910518514016257?s=20&t=7YzIsNTj8xx5Jv05_7xSqQ
Below, Naples tide gauge showing record value and it breaking, or power went out.
Power went out everywhere.
This was a major hurricane, much larger than most, and it went on for hours and hours.
BTW, hurricanes are not rated by where the strongest wind are NOT found, or what structures were NOT wrecked, and which trees somehow survived being knocked over, uprooted, or stripped bare.
Why does anyone think buoys offshore can be used as “proof” of a hurricanes’ winds? In that kind of wind, there are towering waves in a hurricane eye wall and inner bands. When they are not getting over washed they are being pushed over.
You should reserve judgement until preliminary reports are verified by an investigation.
Or else just take it from the people who were right under it when it went over.
Like me.
In mathematical terms it is actually applied bullshit, as I neglected to include some “obvious” axioms.
1) Most “conspiracy theorists” note that the “buoy data”, which I plotted, were “inconsistent / incoherent” with the land-based (/ airports) “weather station data” … which I did not plot, as it was (and still is) incomplete.
2) A hurricane’s “category” is determined by its “sustained wind speeds”, not by the “peak gusts” numbers.
– – – – –
The NWS (National Weather Service) doesn’t provide “Historical Data” older than 3 days.
The “Weather Underground” website (wunderground.com) data seems to have all of SW Florida’s weather anemometers “breaking” around 4 PM.
That data, the “… (WG) …” lines in the updated graph below, happens to have a near-constant “Sustained wind speeds to Gust speeds” ratio of around 1.5.
The difference between the “Fort Myers” buoy data (from the NDBC, take it up with NOAA, not me !) and the “Fort Myers (WG)” airport data is noticeable, and (so far ?) unexplained.
From a USA Today article (direct link) a couple of days after Hurricane Ian hit Florida :
155 / 1.5 is just over 103 mph.
The “official” category of Hurricane Ian at (and after) landfall was “a Cat. 2”.
i am not surprised as they have been hyping hurricane wind speeds for some time. you can go to the National Data Buoy Center and get historical data on sustained winds and wind gusts from the nearest offshore weather buoys. They will not show anything close to what is being claimed since they are now using airborne wind speed instead..
The category of a storm is determined by the speed of the wind in the eye wall. Wind speeds drop off rapidly as you get further from the eye wall.
You can’t expect a location that is 100 miles away from the center of the storm to receive as much damage as areas closer to the center.
The tide gauges in SW Florida all recorded the highest water level ever recorded.
I myself have never seen video of anything like what that video of Fort Myers Beach shows.
I have heard of 15-18′ storm surges, but never saw it like that.
And I do not recall ever hearing about over 6 feet of surge a full 50 miles from the eyewall.
Piles of boats up on land, I have seen before, but maybe not so many and not such large ones in the mix.
I have never seen wind damage like this before, on solid steel beams and girders that are what appears to be 18 inches to 2 feet wide, and 3/4 of an inch thick:
At time stamp 0.57
https://youtu.be/fqsBw15-rR8
Here is a video I just came across from a CNBC reporter at the beach in Naples.
Naples is 50 miles or more south of the place the eye came ashore…IOW far from the eyewall.
The fire house with 4 feet of water was miles from the beach it seems. Right there at the beach, the surge is up to the second story balconies.
I think at least at those places that far from the center, nothing like 9 feet of surge was forecast that I saw.
We have all heard of it, but now we have video.
I bet there are thousands of videos taken by people with phones, but many of these places have no power yet (it commonly takes up to three weeks to get power to the hardest hit locations, but this situation is more widespread than most, so who knows. No power means they may not have internet, and almost certainly anyone in those places when the storm hit is currently worried about bigger problems than uploading their videos.
Like, where are they gonna live until their homes can be rebuilt?
https://youtu.be/6i4s439hjR4
They claim a solar panel can withstand 140 mph winds? Even if true, that wouldn’t much when the roof it’s mounted on is gone.
(And would it withstand a 140 mph wind driven debris?
Exactly: Rooftop solar panels are USELESS when the roof blows off. They are also rendered useless when a storm surge wipes away the rest of a house.
Furthermore, after hurricanes, electric utilities typically DISCONNECT from the grid homes in hurricane-damaged areas. Why? Utilities NEED to protect crews repairing power lines from power generated in homes. And, the wiring in flooded homes can be a fire hazard. One blazing home can ignite an entire crowded beach community.
“The streets in this meticulously planned neighborhood were designed to flood so houses don’t. Native landscaping along roads helps control storm water. Power and internet lines are buried to avoid wind damage. This is all in addition to being built to Florida’s robust building codes.”
And there we have it. Houses built to a robust building code. Compare to photos of residential areas of Fort Myers, which look more like a shanty town in Puerto Rico after a storm. Also, the power lines were buried, so not knocked down by flying tin roofs or branches off trees. I remember in Japan, warnings over the USAFRTN saying “Secure your trash cans!” Build right, and make sure there is nothing that can be blown away, and at 140mph can destroy otherwise well built houses.
The snowbirds & retirees, who make up a significant portion of the Florida population, are not interested in building-to-last let alone building to survive hurricanes. They are looking for cheap & disposable for their short horizon.
Bullshit.
People do not build their own homes.
There are low income neighborhoods like anywhere else, but most of the housing in Fort Myers is expensive gated community with newer housing. There are neighborhoods here that are not gated, like most of Cape Coral, most of Lehigh Acres, Bonita beach, Naples, etc.
Codes are strict here.
Older homes are grandfathered in though.
It would be too much to force people who have older homes to raze them when codes are modified.
I have no idea what you looked at, but this is not the lower ninth ward in SW Florida.
The vast majority of the population has moved here in the past 20 years.
And the proportion of homes built in that time is even higher, because many have rebuilt after buying older property.
Seriously, do you honestly think people in Florida build homes that are designed to be wrecked in a hurricane?
Everyone knows they happen here all the time.
No one insures crappy old substandard houses.
Even snowbirds do not want to have their homes wrecked, Einstein.
Code enforcement is no joke here.
Anything found to not be permitted and inspected is ordered to be dismantled. Immediately.
You need building permits to do just about anything here.
It is one way Florida has no state income tax and no local wage taxes, and low property taxes…they get a large proportion of the funds they need to operate by charging people who are building or making improvements.
Which also protects everyone by making sure all work is inspected.
Is this jackass hour on WUWT?
Not sure what you are talking about with Fort Myers. There are lots of vulnerable mobile home parks, and of course there are older homes, but normal and recent houses are built to very strict building codes which have been upgraded with most every new major hurricane hit to the state. Homeowners often also pay extra for additional hurricane protection for discounts on insurance. The serious damage to Fort Myers was flooding and storm surge, not wind. Babcock Ranch is nowhere near the coast (brags about being 30 miles inland and 30 feet above sea level). There was inland damage and inland power outages, but comparing Babcock Ranch to Fort Myers is silly.
Babcock Ranch is all basically brand new, so comparing homes which have all been built under the most recent building codes to those built 30-40+ years ago is disingenuous.
Burying power lines has a trade-off in expense, maintenance operability. Whenever someone says “just bury the power lines,” it’s obvious where their science education lies, and they haven’t seen the bill that will comes from it. Babcock Ranch has its own power source so isn’t relying on transmission from far away, either. I know people with underground power lines who did lose power when trees were uprooted and brought the power lines up with them. And they were out of power longer, too, because it is a longer repair.
Syd Kitson is out to sell homes. You bought into his ad.
Looks like old Mother Nature just applying selective evolution to the old building codes. It has happened in other parts of the world. Witness some of the centuries old buildings still quite livable. Most built out of stone.
It is illegal to connect a generator to your homes’ circuit breaker panel without a transfer switch installed.
No one goes around disconnecting homes from the grid.
When power is restored after an outage caused by a hurricane, or anything else that causes such damage, it is turned back on block by block.
House by house. They do not open breakers at the pole unless it is for a specific reason. Wrecked and flooded homes do not have generators hooked up to the mains, and I have rarely heard of anyone getting charged with manslaughter because of an illegal connection.
Florida has strict laws about getting permitted and inspected prior to hooking up a whole home generator.
Everyone that has one here has it go on several times every Summer, but usually only for a short time.
Things like circuit breakers keep shorted out wiring from burning down entire crowded beach communities.
Your post is almost pure malarkey.
And annoying.
“Blazing home”?
“Crowded Beach Communities”?
I have never heard of a house catching on fire when power is restored.
Utilities protect workers by warning people they will be criminally charged with manslaughter not to mention code violations if they have an illegal hookup with no transfer switch.
Power companies have equipment that will detect power back feeding from such connections.
It does not happen much. Never that I have ever heard about personally.
For one thing, if you connect e generator while you are still connected to the grid, your power will be everywhere, not just your home, and your generator will be overloaded instantly.
The only way what you are describing could plausibly happen is if you turned it on suddenly while someone nearby was working on the lines and got zapped before your generator got fried from back feeding the whole neighborhood, especially when the current you are feeding into the mains hits the transformer outside your house and is boosted to distribution level voltage. That would all happen about instantaneously.
The distribution grid has switches everywhere that allow any portion of lines to be isolated. They isolate every section as they work on it.
Here in Florida, it is illegal and you cannot hook up a solar array AND have a transfer switch, so you will not have power when the grid is down.
We went through that whole conversation just five years ago with Ian.
You can have a whole home generator. Many do.
I do.
You can have panels hooked up to roll your meter backwards when you are generating more then you are using from your panel array.
But you cannot have both.
They will not let you.
I am not sure why.
People complain bitterly about not being able to use solar panels after a hurricane.
But it is a fact here in Florida at least…in an outage, your panels are disconnected.
You can only get power from panels in an outage if you have a battery backup system, and are not using net metering.
Considering that whole house generators come with a transfer switch included most times, and they have switching that disconnects your panels when the grid is down, I have no idea why they do not instead disconnect your panel and your house from the grid, but leave your power from your solar array connected to your house.
It may be because load has to be matched to what is being generated.
What happens to extra wattage from panels if it cannot be fed back into the grid?
What happens if you turn on too many things at once and your demand exceeds what the panels are putting out?
In that case, you will get a voltage drop, and it can easily wreck any electronics you have connected. Ditto any electric motors.
Not sure if any excess would therefore cause an unregulated rise in voltage to your house in that circumstance.
Bu it is a fact, panels are disconnected automatically when your house loses power from the grid.
So stop making stuff up.
Here, in case you do not believe me:
Solar power can’t replace the main electric grid after a storm – Make Solar Safe
It’s not the wind, it’s the airborne debris.
Nice pic of a petrol generator and in Britain clever Octopus wants to subsidise their use by the sounds of things-
British energy supplier Octopus to pay customers to save power this winter (msn.com)
I read the article. They didn’t explain why a petrol generator is needed.
I mean, if renewables are so great, why do they even need a fossil fuel backup?
KcTaz,
fossil fuel is not a back up. Renewables supplement fossil fuels but fossil fuels are essential to keep the grid in load and supply balance. (hydro also if the country has a lot of such resource.)
You can run a grid happily on fossil fuel generation but you can’t run a grid just on renewables.
This is because fossil fuel generators are controllable as to output, renewables are not. Imagine if your car throttle were controlled by the weather and not your foot, that’s renewables on a grid. Solar by far being the worst of them.
Why would Octopus need to ask customers to save power, when
“All our electricity comes from 100% renewable sources like sun, wind and water”
Surely ruinables aren’t affected by gas shortages?
Somewhere in the small print is the caveat that they supply electricity from the national grid, so when there isn’t enough wind and solar (which is most of the time) they will waste even more of your money on “carbon offsets”. The whole thing is a scam. You would think trading standards would call out this misrepresentation but apparently they think it’s OK to lie for “the cause”.
The ASA are investigating the claim by another UK energy supplier who made the same of similar nonsensical statements.
I received this reply to a complaint I made about an advert about 100% renewable.
Thank you for contacting the ASA with your complaint about Shell. We would like to sincerely apologise for the delay in providing you with an update.
The ASA has reviewed a number of ads that contain potential breaches of the environmental rules, and we have decided that the Shell TV ad should be formally investigated. For administrative reasons, we have decided to take up the complaint ourselves as an ASA challenge, and as such you won’t receive a direct update about the case. However, please feel welcome to check our website, http://www.asa.org.uk over the next few months for relevant rulings, or sign up for updates here.
Many thanks once again for taking the time to alert us to the matter.
Kind regards
Good man
“I think there is a case for solar backup, at least to keep the freezer going, if you live in a district which suffers prolonged power outages and flooding after big storms.”
Not hardly.
Your solar will provide enough power during the day with peak sunlight and an inverter, but you are going to need battery backup which will double or triple the price of your solar installation.
And you better not have lithium ion batteries as your battery backup because if they get flooded in the storm they’ll burn down your house or condo complex and turn it into a toxic waste dump.
Get a dual fuel generator, because propane doesn’t get stale and you can store it longer, and the tanks can be refilled without electricity.
Good point.
“Your solar will provide enough power during the day with peak sunlight and an inverter, but you are going to need battery backup which will double or triple the price of your solar installation.”
Thanks. I was wondering what happens when the sun goes down, not to mention when it hasn’t been there during the day due to all the clouds from hurricane weather. I was pretty sure the picture wasn’t as rosy as they painted it.
I was pretty sure the picture wasn’t as rosy as they painted it.
You can count on that whenever the majority of the “news” media are “reporting” on renewables. And as we are learning from the EVs down in the effected areas that were exposed, batteries and salt water don’t mix well.
I have solar on my roof in good old Crummyfornia. The dirty secret of many/most solar installs on homes is this: unless the “grid” has power, your solar is shutdown; your house is without power no matter how bright the sun shines!). Think about it – your solar is connected to both your home and the grid. If the grid is down, your solar will still energize the “grid” (as well as your home) and that will endanger any (PG&E) worker trying to get the grid going. (One day, I may ask an electrician what can be done about this.)
We just had a 15 hour power fail (during the heat of early September). Only my DeWalt gas powered generator kept the fridge and freezer going – the solar was off. (It also kept the Internet, WiFi, computers, TV, and portable fans running.)
Ok, explain to me exactly why the solar power to the house needs to shut down when the grid power fails? I can see a valid argument for disconnecting from the grid, but I see absolutely no reason why the house should remain unpowered.
I seem to remember from a long time ago, that this was maybe at the insistence of the power companies, that really hated the idea that people could install these systems and then disconnect from the grid – loss of all those “fees” even when you use zero electricity.
The total generation is fed back into the grid … not the residual. Like filling the communal water tank with your bucket of water and then taking some out at the communal tap.
Yeah, I always thought the house would remain powered by the solar – but NO! That’s why I call it “the dirty little secret”.
No idea why not (I’m (well, was; retired now) a programmer, not an electrician). But I can guarantee there is no power from the solar to my house when the “grid” aka PG&E fails. Maybe there is an electrician looking at this thread that can explain it. Who knows, might just me more Crummyfornia “code” silliness.
You can have a solar system that works when the grid is down, but only if you have a battery system to store the power.
Solar direct to the inverter isn’t stable enough, so they don’t do it, they just feed the power into the grid, while you take your power out of the grid.
Think of the chaos to your appliances when the sun goes behind a cloud 10 times a day for even 2-3 minutes. You can’t run a washing machine or even a blender when the supply is that unstable, and God help your electronics.
When you have battery “backup”, it’s not really backup, you are running off the battery even if it’s charging as you are using it.
You can have a solar system that works when the grid is down, but only if you have a battery system to store the power.
Yes with a number of solar options as you can see-
What is the difference between AC & DC Coupling? (AUS) – YouTube
Now the battery is the very expensive wear item although if you had a V2G EV you could hook that up to give you some backup capability in a grid failure but it would be like robbing your car fuel tank to run a backup genny. You’re also wearing out your expensive EV battery.
So in a Mediterranean climate like South Australia the most economic solution is to max out rooftop solar panels and with a grid connected AC inverter use the energy to heat a large resistance storage HWS. Whilst you can also add say a pool pump or aircon here to use any overflow (once the HWS has reached temperature?) a solar diverter controller automatically prioritises any household use first-
Energy Efficient | Power Diverter Australia Pty Ltd | Australia
When I pay 39c peak and off peak 19c for HWS at night (bearing in mind that will change with coal’s demise) and only 5c feed-in and dropping you can see where it’s at. Use it at the source or lose it.
very true. and refrigeration compressors hate power outages that last only a few minutes.
You could if you had a transfer switch that shuts off your solar power from the grid. Most solar installation don’t do that. The reason for the transfer switch is to make sure your power does not energize the line out on the grid. More than one lineman has been killed by generators and other back system improperly set up.
It’s called a transfer switch between the meter and the house’s main breaker. When the grid goes down you throw the switch to disconnect from the grid. Once the grid comes back on and is stable you reconnect.
The problem with that is throwing the switch needs to be fully automated and fail safe. Transfer switches work fine for gas or propane whole house generators because the generator forces the xfer switch to activate before sending power to the house – if the generator can’t force the switch, no power gets to the house. In the case of solar, there is no fail safe mechanism to force the xfer switch to activate and relying on homeowners who may or may not be home to throw the switch is a recipe for deisaster.
Have only a small freezer and stock dried and tinned supplies then use on a first in first out system. Once the power goes or becomes unreliable, freezer first long life stock second. .
Solar is very hurricane resistant. Not.
Ouch.
I wonder how many of those panels wound up on someone’s rooftop. Rooftop Solar generously installed by Ian
I’m sure none of that stuff is toxic.
Clean up should be easy too, just take the shards down to the recycling center.
Clean up is an absolute BREEZE
I would think it would be more expedient to bulldoze the whole damn thing &
start over from scratch.
Where did you get that pic?
The aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (2017).
Wind didn’t hold up well either.
Take a lesson from Florida in recovery from severe storms. Their recovery has been quick compared to other states. The storm problem should not be compounded by storage batteries catching fire and failing to produce electrical power.
EV cars are catching fire now after the storm as their salt water exposed batteries are shorting out.
Indeed, they are and the Florida firemen and NOT happy campers about them. It takes 6 hours for them to put out a EV battery fire. Yikes!
Electric vehicles are exploding from water damage after Hurricane Ian, top Florida official warns https://www.foxnews.com/politics/electric-vehicles-exploding-water-damage-hurricane-ian-top-florida-official-warns #FoxNews
Now imagine what would happen if the home battery back up systems they have been pushing and subsidizing became common place.
You’d be nuts to use LiIon batteries in a residential application, I used these for my off grid house and had 16 which gave me 12 hours + of power: https://www.trojanbattery.com/smart-carbon/
The bright side is that you won’t have to worry about these vehicles showing up in the used car market.
Not sure what the insurance companies will think if these kinds of batteries start showing up in home installations. Is it cheaper to replace a home that has burned to the ground or to repair one that is just flood damaged?
i wish it were true, but that immaculate white clean tesal being looked at by firefighters has in no way had a runaway lithium ion main battery fire.
They NEVER PUT OUT the fire. It just burns until there is no more fuel.
Yet another false news story, both by the reporter AND the Fire Chief.
The public need to know the truth about lithium batteries.
An alleged 100% solar community endured Hurricane Ian with no loss of power and minimal damage. Photos they showed of their solar farm showed no damage from the hurricane, indicating the photo was taken BEFORE the hurricane struck. Sorry but that is NOT a post CAT 4 picture.
Its nearby solar array — made up of 700,000 individual panels — generates more electricity than the 2,000-home neighborhood uses.
ALL THIS FOR 2000 HOMES ?
How much does it cost to install solar panels?
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/solar-energy/how-much-do-solar-panels-cost.html
The average cost to install solar panels in the United States is about $12,000 after federal tax incentives. On the low end, you can install a smaller system for around $5,000, while a high-priced Tier 1 solar panel system can cost $40,000 or more. [Which option do you suppose these rich Liberals would choose for their Solar Panel Paradise?]
There are additional costs that go into an installation project beyond the price of panels. In fact, only about a quarter of the installation costs are actually for the panels. Labor costs, operational costs and additional equipment, such as inverters and control circuitry, make up the rest of the price.
After solar tax credits, the cost for a solar panel system on an average-size house in the U.S. ranges from $11,144 to $14,696, according to EnergySage. If you need a few panels for a small DIY project, expect to pay around $200 to $250 per panel (around $1 per watt).
700,000 individual panels X $225 (average of $200 and $250) = $157,500,000
I call BS on the whole story….that’s like buying a $100,000 EV to keep from having to pay $3.50 a gallon for gas.
Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center covers 440 acres and is INLAND from the Gulf of Mexico. Friends have been there. The homes there are not the best looking and the overall community appearance is not up to Florida standards of lush and green. It basically is out in Nowhereland and next to Nothing.
Do you mean that the photo shown above is the Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center and in what part of Florida?
Thanks for the info.
I didn’t research any further than the article, but it appears someone is trying to gaslight the world about a Potemkin Solar village somewhere in the Punta Gorda and Ft Myers area of Florida. If it sounds too good to be true,…..
Sits north of Fort Myers and SE of Port Charlotte
Here is the Google Maps link to the PV farm
https://www.google.com/maps/@26.860486,-81.7296418,14z/data=!3m1!1e3
Or paste these Coords into Google Earth
26.860486,-81.7296418
Pan around a bit and notice the areas adjacent to the existing panels that have already been prepped (cleared and leveled) to receive even more useless infrastructure
That picture does not look like a “photo”, before or after Ian.
That was my thought, too. Maybe the truth will come out eventually.
The parking lot in the lower right certainly does not look like a photo.
Good catch, I missed that. It certainly looks like an artist’s conception.
Yes, it and the rest are too “clean” and parts identical to others.
Lots of copy/pasting that don’t show pasting it really took! 😎
It is, kinda
26.858208, -81.743001
It’s a Tesla Megabattery location
Yes. It’s not a car park and those ‘boxes’ aren’t parked semi-trailers.
The one white pickup truck in the image is probably the truck that brought the drone used to take the image. Just guessing, of course.
What’s up with that orange thingy in about the middle of the image? The ‘antennas’ on top of the building look about right. And what about those single trees in the distance in the field in the upper left of the image? The scale and perspective ring true, at least to me.
I’m not particularly convinced that it’s a generated image. I’d want to see a pixel-by-pixel analysis that shows the image was stitched together.
But I don’t think anyone here gives a rat’s @$$ enough to go to the bother.
It certainly isn’t an after picture. Zero debris on all that white shell road. I am not buying that.
Just to add… I think it’s a ‘vanity’ picture taken just before operations began. It’s really pristine.
Most of the factories I worked in had such ‘vanity’ pictures taken at completion but before operations started. The pictures were usually put up in the lobby or somewhere in the halls of the offices. The pictures were also used for “This is us” brochures, and now web pages.
A year or two of operations and a facility never looks as good again. Take the best shot while you can get it.
It’s a promo picture, IMO, and the Yellow Stream Media used that image.
My thoughts too, looks like a photo-realistic generated picture. Many tell tale signs particularly the carpark area.
Besides, if this was post Hurricane Ian there would be a decided lack of undisturbed greenery.
The panels can produce more energy than 2000 homes can use, during the day.
What percentage of the energy needed by those 2000 homes is being produced by the solar panels at night?
They claim to have battery backup, but it did not say how much or how long they would last if the panels were not producing.
Maybe those are white trailer-looking things in the parking lot?
There Tesla Mega Batteries
The extent of the battery farm would be substantially more than those blocks drawn in the carpark.
However long 10 Mega Batteries last
from Tesla
“”Each unit can store over 3 MWh of energy—that’s enough energy to power an average of 3,600 homes for one hour.””
And I hit google earth, Map as of 1/6/21 and there are 10 installed Megabatteries it looks like (as shown in the above pic), but no other location has the distinctive trailer looking things I can see. So if the housing was say 1/3 occupied (600 or so since started in 2018) I would SWAG it probably 10 hours per trailer if they were ALL fully charged, so 100 hours? I would put money that in reality it is actually half of that so maybe 50 hours? So uh…possible I guess if they got the grid back VERY quickly. However if fully occupied (2000 homes) it would only be maybe 20 hours from fully charged. And working as an Engineer that is not nearly enough capacity to my mind. However your mileage may vary.
It is near my house. maybe I will go up there and pretend I am interested and gather some info.
One thing is, that area is prone to pretty bad flooding that can last for months when Lake Okeechobee overflows and the Caloosahatchee River is full.
They get a 10-30 mile wide sheet flow from Okeechobee to Charlotte Harbor.
And just north of me is where the 20+ inches of rain area is.
That is just north of me.
BTW…after enlarging it, I think it is an actual photograph.
Who would draw a fake sky like that, and paint shadows all over the panels.
In the distance it looks exactly like what the landscape looks like up there.
That ranch is immense.
The installation was designed for expansion of the community.
That’s not a photo … it’s an artist’s impression for a sales document
Just above, I speculated that it was an actual image, but as you say, for promo or for the record.
Where did you find that information about it being an artist’s rendering, saveenergy? That’s a good find and puts paid to the speculation.
That picture inadvertently points out one of the big problems with solar in Florida. Close to half of the panels being shown are being shaded by clouds. There’s no way those panels are producing at anywhere close to 100% capacity.
No loss of power in a storm that made it nearly as dark as night for the entire day?
That place is just north of where I live.
So, they must have immense batteries, or else it is grid connected and the 100% means with net metering they make more than they use.
Because off grid 100% solar is not going to have any power at night or in heavy rain unless they massive battery backup.
I am gonna be surprised if they have enough battery power for several days of normal usage, which is what it would have taken to maintain power from when the clouds rolled in to when it was sunny again, two days later.
But maybe they did and do.
Obviously someone decided to spend a lot of money.
But I am pretty sure they have power because a lot of customers in my area still do.
It would be ridiculous to not have grid hookup and net metering if they are making more than they use.
I think it is real. That is what the landscape looks like up there, and the sky looks real too.
It is just new and clean and very neatly done work.
Lots of places in Florida look very new and clean.
Because they are very new and clean.
That is one of the things that appeals to me about living here.
After growing up in the grimy concrete jungle, where nothing looks new or clean for long, I like it.
So let’s discuss the “regular” roof mounted solar panels, the ones everyone has on their roof. These panels would have been decimated by Ian. End of discussion.
Decimated means one tenth are killed/destroyed.
It is a term that originated from the armies of the ancient Rome.
People think it means “totally wiped out”.
But it means a tenth, deci, are.
Intact roof, check. Intact panels, check. Ecogray solution, check. Well, it’s an alternative, but only marginally viable.
I’ve looked at 3 different solar deals in the past few months. My installed cost was at least 3x those quoted for a house that does 1200 kWh/month. The typical switching is that you don’t get house power when the line power is out. When I asked about a disconnect that would allow this, I was told that they don’t do that. I didn’t ask about solar panels being roof/shingle protectors. The article is largely wishful thinking BS.
I learned about that after Irma. A lot of irate panel owners.
Apparently you can have power during an outage if you have a complete battery back up system in place.
I suspect but am not sure it is because of “What happens to voltage if you are making more than can be used, or turn on more stuff than the panels can deliver?”
They disconnect in an outage for an obvious reason, to prevent backfeeding. But if you have a whole home generator, you get an automatic transfer switch that disconnects you from the grid while the backup is on,and turn it off and reconnects you when power is restored.
So why can panels not use that same kind of switch?
They are not even all that much money.
During Irma, I bought one that came with transfer switch included.
About $3500 if I recall correctly.
Costs more than that to buy a 1000 gallon propane tank and have it buried so you do not have a 1000 gallon propane tank next to your house.
If you use propane for an appliances, they give you a tank to use for free, you pay only for propane. But if it is only for a generator, you have to buy the tank.
And I had just bought new range, water heater, dryer…all the things that I could have used propane for and could have then gotten propane tank and installation for free.
But propane is not as cheap or as convenient as having piped in nat gas.
But propane may be the most reliable after a hurricane.
To what extent are the power lines in Florida and neighbouring states have them underground. Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin in 1974 which virtually demolished the city, all power lines were buried underground except for a few suburbs.
Underground you say. What about flooding? I’, sure there is a fix for that situation. It would be a lot cheaper in the long run if buried underground or the vast majority of the power lines were, instead or repairing the power lines every time a hurricane hits landfall.
Regards
Climate Heretic
Buried cables generally mean that the transformers are installed at ground level.
How long do those transformers take to dry out after being flooded?
What happens to transformers that are flooded by salt water?
I have one of those large transformers at ground level connected to under ground power cables in my back yard. The house was built in 1979. There have been torrential rains that formed a small lake in the back yard and the transformer has never failed or even needed to be serviced.
I know of a buried power line that failed Mid winter in Minnesota it was totally unusable. Its’ failure may have been due to past flooding. In any case it was temporally replaced with power pole on the road shoulder and later with overhead line on far side of the roadway. No attempt was to replace the underground.. The line ran for miles. My development had buried power lines in dry Arizona, the have been replaced due to to many failures. They can’t be much over fifty years old. If that the track record here in Arizona I hate to see what happens in a moist climate like Florida maybe 25 years at best. Oh by the way the transformer on my property line was replace also.
I also know poor materials gets buried, I walked in a rural electric company and the manage was levied what a contractor had put in the ground a few short years earlier. The conductor was not centered in the insulation on side had a eight of an inch at best. Line men also disklike buried lines, moisture gets in them and it may take the months to find the intermittent short. Most of the time that the low voltage run to the meter.
I have personal experience in what happen if a buried line goes bad the office I worked in in Scottsdale had it air condition fail, the problem was not the air condition unit it was one of the legs of the three phase had failed. The ran a temporary line across the surface and had to have a security watch that 24/7(7000v is not something you want a copper thief to cut into.) It took the a few days to run the new line since it was not in conduit the had to dig a new line in. That was done digging several holes every so often and then tunneling a small hole between them. The equipment that was developed to do that is amazing.
Buried lines have problem to, there are no good answer when mother nature starts banging on the door.
The process of burying pipes and such without digging a trench is called directional drilling. Pretty standard item for installing all manner of things, getting under roads, etc.
I used to work for a lake management company, and we also manufactured floating fountains and lake aeration systems. During installation of the lake aeration systems, directional drilling was a common thing we had to contract out to get air lines under roads. Placement of the compressors was often done with noise mitigation a top priority.
Here is a video from a guy with a you tube channel called Practical Engineering. He explains why repairing underground power cable is nearly impossible, and describes how it was done near where he lives and how it was accomplished:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-wQnWUhX5Y
Here in Florida, most gated communities have underground distribution, but the transmission and primary distribution is nearly exclusively overhead.
Underground is very complicated and costly over wide areas for several reasons.
It is why even when grids get repeatedly damaged by storms, ice storms, wind storms, hurricanes, it is always, AFAIK, replaced as is.
As much as possible, they try to rehang everything on new poles that got broken, and to splice cables that snap. It is just too expensive and unnecessary to replace anything but what is actually unusable.
There are in depth articles and reports and studies explaining why burying power lines is impractical except in the downtowns of cities and small communities.
Main issue is cost: Overhead costs 1 million dollars per mile on average, but it can be half this or triple this depending on location particulars.
Overhead lines cost about 100,000 dollars per mile.
But installation, IOW initial cost, is not the only reason.
As noted, repairs are difficult to impossible, depending on the voltage and how the lines are buried.
They have to be cooled, so it is not a simple matter of burying in a conduit what is normally overhead.
The you tube video from Grady(Practical Engineering) is very interesting.
He has a bunch of interesting videos.
The linked article from KCRA-3 is from CNN. As soon as I saw that I started sniffing for the “fake news” angle.
Pretty easy to find.
Did you know that Babcock Ranch is 30′ above sea level?
Did you know that Babcock Ranch is NE of the jut in the coastline where Ft. Myers is located? That means the typically most damaging NE quadrant winds to strike that location had been weakened over almost the maximal amount of land traverse for any area near the landfall.
Did you know that Babcock Ranch has an undeveloped wildlife preserve immediately to the west? This creates a very large area for water percolation to mitigate flooding compared to the surrounding more developed areas with abundant man-made hardscaping.
Those narratives aren’t going to create themselves! Good thing CNN has moved to the center, or the story REALLY would have been biased!
Given how much damage was done to most houses, what are the odds that rooftop solar would have survived the storm?
The reality is that rooftop solar is fragile and would have been shattered by Ian. Look at what happened to the solar energy panels the last time a hurricane hit Puerto Rico. They were destroyed.
The Chariot article is total BS—the 2400 Pa test on PV modules is nowhere close to “hurricane” winds, it is a “moderate” value. PV module glass is quite susceptible to breaking with impacts from hurricane debris, the standard test is only 25mm ice balls at 56mph (terminal speed). True hurricane winds will likely demount them from whatever structure they were attached to and send them into the swamps (c.f. hurricane Andrew in 1992).
“For most people, a gasoline backup generator would probably make more sense.” Except in California, where they are illegal.
Gavin Newsom has decreed that gasoline engines under 25 horsepower cannot be sold in California beginning in 2024. They are not illegal to own or use and you can buy them in other states.
Which raises the question of “Why Bother” to greater heights. Of course the answer to that is because Gavin Newsom is a zealot and wants to “Save The World”.
The Sun is shining…
“Welcome to the age of climate change.”
I can sell you electricity that is clean, green, always available, reliable and cheap:
For further information contact The Unicorn Electricity Corporation . . . . 😉
Solar will not stop trees from falling on power lines.
Here is the folly of battery operated vehicles. As Ian approached, over 20,000 personnel from other states came into Florida ready for the repair work that was going to be needed to the grid. Those personnel and their equipment worked tirelessly for over a week clearing trees, restoring downed power lines, replacing poles and anything else that needed to be done. It still took 9 days for me to get power restored. (others still without) Only fossil fueled vehicles and equipment could handle that response. It is folly, no, dangerously ignorant to think that battery operated equipment could handle the job.
I was lucky, on the west side of the circulation. The presence of thousands of large oak trees in my area mitigated the surface winds. Many, many were torn down but that keep the winds to around 90 mph. Most buildings in my area suffered little damage. However, there were tall trees that were completely sheared off a the tops, probably 60-80 feet above ground. I suspect that the winds up at that level were much stronger.
The Earth is a violent place. Whether it is hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, volcanoes, wild fires, ice storms or whatever, the destruction caused by such events must have fossil fuels to repair and rebuild. Batteries just can’t do the job.
Bah humbug! The notion solar panels can withstand hurricane force winds is pure and utter nonsense! They have tempered glass fronts. Tempered glass can withstand a hammer blow, most of the time, but shatter into a million pieces with a small sharp impact of very modest force, at least 100 times less energy than in a hammer blow!
Take a spring loaded center punch to your car’s side windows and see what happens! (no don’t try this at home). In the old days mischeivous kids would smash a spark plug, and take the sharp bits of the ceramic insulator, and throw it at a car window and it more often than not, it would shatter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xHWe0IL0yY
So debris in the wind of even a modest hurricane or strong tropical storm can and will damage solar panels! Not from constant pressure, but from teensy impacts. (you can stand on a piece of tempered glass supported over large regions of it’s edges, but a tiny sharp impact will shatter it into a million pieces)
Now there is a small niche for solar backup. But not a permanent installation on your home. I live in S Florida and the condo I reside in, does NOT allow gas generators to be used. So I built myself a solar powered, battery back up for when the power is out after a tropical storm/hurricane as in the photo below.
It is portable, and fits into a parking space. The lead acid batteries serve as storage and ballast for the stand. The panels and stand go inside for the storm, and assembly takes 5 minutes outdoors. After a storm there are 3-5 days of high pressure, descending air, so it’s clear – thus recharging is done in the parking lot. The batts and inverter can power my fridge, and the microwave for a few meals, and a smattering of low power lights and fans.
But it’s only for condos on the ground floor (too heavy for stairs), which do not allow generators, and have non shaded parking areas. I was going to manufacture some and sell them, but a dearth of storm landfalls happened and I’m glad I didn’t.
I have yet to meet a solar array that will survive Category 4 on a roof.
The US relying China made solar panels and wall mount batteries for power is as insane as Germany relying on Russian natural gas. When they are built and recycled HERE I’ll think about it.
Then you will never need to think about it, because other than the frames and metal supports, there is no way to economically recycle solar panels.
No matter how robust a solar panel might be, if the substrate it is mounted on is less robust it does not matter. If the roof is torn off of a building the solar panels will blow off with it, if the house is destroyed under a solar panel the solar panel is useless.
A solar panel mounted to a steel frame attached to a reinforced concrete base in a wind tunnel is far from comparable to that same solar panel attached to a 60yr old wooden truss under a shingled roof.
Rooftop solar would have been damaged beyond repair. My parents roof was damaged by Ian, so If roofs get damaged, you really think a sheet of silicon won’t be? These people are ridiculous. Of course they can’t even admit, or are willfully ignorant, about there being no statistical link between CO2 and hurricane frequency, so what do you expect, they are just unthinking, unquestioning zealots.
How does rooftop solar provide electricity when the rooftops are gone? Enquiring minds want to know.
My neighborhood in Virginia has all wiring underground.
Unfortunately, the 10+ miles separating my neighborhood from the nuclear generating facility did not install wires underground. Any failure of overhead wires between my neighborhood and the nuclear facility, means my power goes out too.
Keeping led lights going with a major power failure is sophistry, not reporting.
Solar array fed batteries do not run A/C systems, hot water heaters, cooking appliances for long, if at all.
Days of heavy cloud cover reduce or eliminate so called solar array benefits, except for use as real estate agent fairytales.
Most homes in the Babcock Ranch neighborhood agreement areas are far more than average buyers can afford.. That is before Home Owner Agreement annual costs are included.
Babcock Ranch community is less than seven years old. Brand new construction current with modern hurricane country building codes coupled with no old growth trees… Of course the buildings mostly survived, especially without trees to fall on buildings or property.
Alleged wonder community super strength claims rival typical alarmist climate claims. Nothing useful for the majority of people.
Moving 12 miles Northeast of Fort Myers does not reduce hurricane risk! No matter how much the specious news reports want to paint it idyllic.
Yes, your roof will be torn off, but our rooftop solar will still be intact. Genius!
I grew up totally off grid in the 1950s and 60s, we had no mains services until we got a party line telephone mid 1960s. Water from a spring, bottle gas, no electricity, no rubbish/garbage collection and a septic tank sewage disposal.
A very cheap Solar PV source and LED lights would have made life a lot more comfortable. Gas, paraffin and candle light was very depressing, the one thing I’m dreading in the forth coming UK power cuts. I can live without TV, I only listen most of the time anyway.
But I now have the ability for lights (dry cells) even a stock of candles, and to cook (camping gas with spare cylinders) for several months with no electricity 24×7, nothing rechargeable, bike and spare fully operational. I talk to people who say they’re OK as they have rechargeable lights, ask what do you do if the grid goes down for several days or even a week? Do you know what retained heat cooking is? (Griff you might find this useful) Blank looks. I can still even do a decent job hand washing clothes at a push, although I don’t have a mangle unfortunately, they were fun.
Solar panels will let all your food spoil every single night.
And when it is cloudy.
During Ian, my whole-house Generac came through just fine. We get solar sales droids through here all the time. Big rip-off operations, all of them.