By P Gosselin‘
Multimillion dollar solar project gets reduced to a heap of toxic rubble by one single hail storm.
The Scottsbluff, Nebraska 5.2 MW Community Solar project was part of the NPPD’s Sunwise program that consisted of an array has over 14,000 solar panels. It’s reported that it had been put into operation in 2019.
Surely the project had been ceremoniously put into operation, with dignitaries and proponents proclaiming it would reliably deliver cheap and clean energy, reduce the state’s carbon footprint and contribute to a bright and climate-friendly future.
Now it has been just recently reported that the multimillion dollar solar energy park was literally reduced to a heap of rubble as hail literally pummeled it to a pulp in just a matter of minutes days ago.
The disaster underscores once again just how vulnerable to the forces of nature solar energy parks are. The system’s 25-year expected lifetime was cut to down to less than 4 years, and makes you wonder if setting up such weather-vulnerable plants make any sense at all.
Dreams vs reality
“This project will help the city achieve its goal to reduce our carbon footprint and stabilize city costs for the next 25 years,” said Nathan D. Johnson, City Manager, City of Scottsbluff. “Through projects like this, we hope to offer an affordable ‘green’ option to our residents, both residential and commercial, to reap the benefits as well.”
That was the dream. A couple of days ago we witnessed the reality.
Now residents will surely have to rely on good old, reliable fossil fuel power to keep the electricity flowing.
And how long will it take to clean up the toxic mess left behind?
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Solar panels are sitting ducks for hail and high winds, as this vividly shows. That said, there are more than a few places on earth where solar should not be used. Obviously places with little sun or in the far north, but also places where there is hail (and tornados and high winds).
Funny that traditional power plants (gas, nukes) seem not be bothered by natural disasters and storms. The only one I can think of that was is Fukushima. Even wind turbines can be damaged or destroyed by too much wind.
But gee, I guess the greens must think that if we switch to all renewables, there won’t be any more storms!
Any information on pollution from the damaged panels getting into atmosphere or ground water?
When anyone asks me about renewable power sources, I give them this simple analogy
You have two fields, some miles apart – in field one, you install a 100Mn wind farm and a 100Mn solar farm, in field two, you install a 250Mn wind farm and a 250Mn solar farm, all financed via taxpayer funded contracts and subsidies
On any day when the wind is too low (less than 9mph), or too high (55mph or greater), at night, all that almost 1 billion pounds worth of kit, is producing zero, zilch power – in any given year, that happens a lot, more so during the dark, wind stilled winter months – you just need to check the generation graphs on the gridwatch website to see this is fact
These taxpayer subsidised renewable farms are replicated in their thousands, onshore & offshore and the same basic laws of physics apply as above
if someone asked me to voluntarily invest my hard earned cash, family home, pensions into these expensive, intermittent power sources, I would decline, as it is in reality, taxpayers cannot decline, these useless engineeringly incompetent power sources are just foisted on them
Indeed, if these renewable farms were simply left to market forces, no lucrative CfD contracts, no subsidies, no lucrative constraint payments etc, no one would invest in, or willingly subsidise them and they would simply fade into non existence
Intermittents will never replace coal, gas or nuclear power generation, it’s only a matter of time, probably after cold winters and power cuts, that our incompetent, ideologically compromised leaders cotton on, by then, society will have been plunged to new depths of poverty, starvation and cold related deaths
Wheres the analogy? I’d have called it a lecture.
“hail literally pummeled it to a pulp in just a matter of minutes”
I’ll drink to that!
*clink!*
My first thought upon reading the title was:
“HA!” 😀
All hail Joseph!
now I’m waiting for one those big tornados that hit mid America to waste a big solar or wind “farm”
Think large hurricanes—the tolerance for impacts with wind-driven trees is not very high.
A few years ago, a hurricane managed to destroy most of the solar panels in Puerto Rico.
I’d call it divine retribution. The good Lord clearly is peeved off by the pagan climate cult.
Better put up a windmill farm to replace that array. /sarc
story tip
Wind Turbines That Shake and Break Cost Their Maker Billions (yahoo.com)
Seems to me that fiberglass wind turbine blades will also be vulnerable to hail.
They hail probably won’t destroy the blades, but it will mess up the surface of them so that the efficiency goes way down.
They’re not that great in normal weather:
https://diysolarforum.com/threads/wind-turbine-blades-can%E2%80%99t-be-recycled-so-they%E2%80%99re-piling-up-in-landfills.29933/post-360732
“All hail, Solar panels” as Caesar might have said.
“The system’s 25-year expected lifetime was cut to down to less than 4 years, and makes you wonder if setting up such weather-vulnerable plants make any sense at all.”
I gave up preaching this problem over ten years ago. There has been a hailstorm with sufficient size hail to cause this somewhere in the broadcast area of the local TV stations Annually. Even the choir was not listening.
Over-engeneering stopped with six sigma.
Same thing happened to a solar farm not too far from my little piece of Texas about a year ago. I suspect that there have been many more that don’t make the news.
“literally reduced to a heap of rubble”
I don’t think this means what you think it means.
I also noticed the “favorite word” repetition, but the panels look very bad. “heap of rubble” might be okay as hyperbole.
Well, the panels are all still in place, just shattered surfaces. Nowhere close to rubble.
The geniuses who proposed & promoted this through approval and implementation didn’t think of hail storms. And/or they simply didn’t care if the entire thing got destroyed.
Apparently they asked about hail storms. The salesman assured them the panels wouldn’t be broken by hail, and demonstrated by having a batting machine fire baseballs at a panel at 100mph. Two problems with that: a baseball-sized hailstone is much heavier and harder than a baseball. And terminal velocity is 150 mph – that’s over double the energy of 100mph.
During the six years I spent at Cannon AFB, NM, I saw baseball-sized hail twice. That wouldn’t be all the times it happened, just the two times it was falling when I finished a shift, and I waited for it to end rather than walking out the door and risking concussion.
The best-laid plans of mice and men…
FWIW, Scottsbluff is one of the most prone areas to large hail in the US; Not a great place to be considering a solar farm:
Nebraska comes in second after Colorado in number of hail events per year, and most of Nebraska’s hail storms are in the west end, in the area directly north of Colorado. Guess where Scottsbluff is…
If only there was a national weather service or something like that whom they could have asked about possible environmental problems which might be bad for thousands of glass panels laid out in a field.
This plant was probably intended to replace part of the output of the now closed Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant.
OPPD, the owner of Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant, is planning on building [or contracting a private company to build and then OPPD would buy the power] two similar sized solar farms in the easter side of Nebraska. The light blue section in the chart above.
2 days before we arrived at a Texas RV park 4 inch hail had broken almost every windshield in the park. The roof on every RV was pock marked like a golf ball, with the underlying foam insulation crushed and broken.
Pole barns for RVs are very common in the US south where UV and hail are a problem.
Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if they had not tried to stop the climate changing. Doh!