Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
My wonderful friend Willie Soon sent me this photo.
Curious about the backstory, I used Google Images to identify the location and found an article describing the carnage. It happened last Friday. The article is stupendous, published in the “Cowboy State Daily”. As an erstwhile cowboy myself, I can only approve of the newspaper’s name.
The installation in the photo is a 5.2 MW solar farm, destroyed in a heartbeat by a hailstorm … “cheap electricity” they said …
The best parts of the article are the comments of the manager:
“Kevin Spencer, Scottsbluff city manager, told Cowboy State Daily the Nebraska Public Power District, which owns the solar farm, is still assessing the damage, but it’s going to need some repairs.”
“Gonna need some repairs”? Ya think? …
But it gets better:
“He said he was previously told the panels were hail-proof, but that might have meant hail up to a certain size.”
Ya think?
Oh, yeah, one more beautiful detail.
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency ranks this area in its the highest category for hail risk on the national index.”
Is there a Darwin Award for suicidal climate projects?
w.
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I just cracked up reading this . .
Maybe they should combine wind and solar. That way the blades on the turbine could act as baseball bats, and harmlessly knock aside the threatening hailstones. Win/win…
At least that’s what my computer models told me.
Aha – I think we’re defininitely on to something here. Why not put the solar panels onto the wind turbine blades? That way they can simultaneously be a moving target and knock them away – plus you get both solar and wind energy from the installation. We should so patent this idea, it’s brilliant!
And put a ring of mirrors aimed at the windmill with a Stirling engine to get thermal solar + waste heat from the wind generator. The cold side Stirling radiators can be in the shade of the mirrors.
“Man plans, God laughs”.
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. We are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for earth’s climate and we are not going to reach a tipping point and suffer irreversible global warming.
I think a Darwin Award should only be available to those who show an intelligence greater than a slug. Green energy enthusiasts and ClimateCult™ members do not qualify.
Failure awards for engineered projects do not seem to have a single catchy-title award.
Articles online suggest that you have to have an array up for at least 6 years to reach the “break-even” point. Considering that hail is only one of the “extreme weather” evernts that can destroy your investment, how valid are the 25 year warranties I see online? What is the decay rate of power production? Don’t they get fogged up?
Just like solar energy is “for free” so solar panels are “hail proof”.
He sounds like a Brit, we are the masters of understatement and self-deprecation
Yes, it’s called Net Zero
Now THERE’S a theme worth developing –
Net Zero = Darwin Award
Just erect a metal canopy above the panels to protect them from the hail – problem solved.
Green – n + d = Subsidies
I am surprised something like this hasn’t happened earlier. Makes you wonder how roof top solar would cope.
I’m not sure how much of a problem it would be to lose the solar generating capacity, considering that these installations are mainly undertaken to get subsidies for installing the panels. However, there’s a chance the winds that generally come with a hail storm would tear the panels off the roof, leaving massive leaks – and flying panels would damage the neighbors’ houses, too.
I’m remembering an hour of high winds in Gaylord, Michigan in the 1990’s that tore apart a roofing and siding warehouse, blowing both the warehouse’s roofing and siding and the entire stock into the new high school. The school had just opened, now it was closed for months for repairs.
I can see the headline now…..”Climate change stopping efforts to stop climate change”
Can you imagine building any power station on a fault line ?
We have solar panel farms in Alberta as well as hail storms/thunder storms. Yup – repairs needed. Funny how coal-fired and natural gas fired generating stations aren’t affected by hail. But then – what do we know?
That will buff out in no time,no worries.
And now the rain can leech heavy metals into the ground.
Fantastic, Dave the planet by killing it.