Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?
Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)
Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.
The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured.
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Read more: https://www.lokmattimes.com/national/madhya-pradesh-summer-storm-damages-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-at-omkareshwar-dam-watch-video-a514/
A video of the disaster;
Anyone who has ever owned a boat, particular a large boat which gets left in the water, knows what a harsh environment the sea can be. Some kind of failure was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a storm, there are plenty of other things which could have gone wrong.
Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?
Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.
Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.
Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.
Even though it is the crown of stupidity to build it and the lessons that need to be learned are obvious, destruction is never great and the impact of cleaning it up is also bad.
I prefer….
Heh.
Destruction of wickedness is GREAT! The cost of cleaning it up is GREAT! It makes another such waste of money far less likely. 😃
In case the intended tiger allusion wasn’t clear:
GO, BIG OIL! 🙂
Exactly what I was thinking. The more these epic fails are reported – especially with dramatic video- the more people and politicians will start to question.
the snag is – will we see this kind of thing on the BBC etc?
“far less likely”… you have great faith.
The assessment of this destruction will have to be included in future environmental impact studies. Which bears the question, are green projects even subjected to environmental impact statements?
You all misread what I said.
After I watched the video I ordered a Happy Meal.
🙂
They couldn’t see this coming?
You are absolutely correct.
You actually need to investigate possible outcomes to see them coming.
The only things they investigated is HOW MUCH the cronies would make, and what % of that would be kicked back to the politicians.
Yuh see, guys that’s how a sailboat works. 🎼⚓ Heave her ho boys. Let her go boys!
Exactly It’s silly to call it a flawed idea when the only part that matters to those involved worked perfectly.
Of course they did, but distorted incentives lead to the abandonment of risk concerns. The progressive credo is just do it and blame someone else when it goes to hell. Just look at the premise: “The climate is getting worse, so let’s build infrastructure dependent on and extremely vulnerable to weather with someone else’s money. We get rich and don’t have to take responsibility.”
From a comment over at [X]:
“One might suspect the same team of scientists working the climate models.”
Time to Wake Up and smell the Uranium
“Smells like Victory”
Strong winds, corrosion, sacrificial anodes!
You are talking like an engineer.
Stop that at once.
This is climate change we are fighting, not facts!
When I had my big 50’ custom twin diesel on Lake Michigan (freshwater), we still had to replace the transom sacrificial zinc anode every spring before we put her in the water.
It occurred to me that some “layman” readers (like me) might not know what a “sacrificial anode” is.
Oversimplified:
Different metals are more prone to give up or gain electrons. Supply a conductor, such as water, and one will corrode. Introduce a third metal into the circuit completed by the “conductor”, and it will corrode before the metals you want to protect.
(Your hot water tank has a “sacrificial anode”. Warrantees are generally set to expire based on how long the anode will last under the worst water quality conditions. When the anode is gone, the tank itself will begin to corrode.)
Thank you! 🙂
This was a problem in the Navy for awhile. Superstructures on steel ships were aluminum. This caused bi-metal galvanic corrosion. They started putting rubber gaskets under the superstructure and that reduced/eliminated the problem.
Unless it’s glass lined. I have an almost 40 year old electric 50 gallon glass lined water tank (built by Ford no less) still in service. Think it was designed for solar use. Have had to replace the heaters once.
I have an Aluminum boat permanently in a marina.
The key takeaway is that shore power is a never do due to residual voltages at a battery charging level, my pick is that the neutral in a three phase system may not be at exactly zero volts. Solar panels for battery maintenance needs to be well isolated, but are better due to being local to the boats system.
Water is a very difficult environment, stuff grows in it, and stuff dissolves in it. These are not recent discoveries.
They could yield good crops of mussels on these structures. I like mussels.
Shore power of the guy next door to you can also create problems.
It is only right… it IS called ‘sacrificial’, after all.
A potential Sci-Fi plot.
“Man-made Climate Change, thanks to AI, has taken on a life of it’s own and is attacking Man’s efforts to stop it from taking over the World!”
(If they make a movie, I get 10%.)
Another potential plot…
“Engineers” are hired to come up with something that nobody competent thinks will work, at great expense. When it fails, more funding can be demanded as they can blame the failure on a “climate catastrophe” (and possibly AI, which can exist underground, given a sufficient supply of electricity, and may not need humans at all in the future).
Did this project ever generate significant power even under ideal conditions?
Looking at the results and the construction, it seems the intention was that it would be expected to fail from the start. Is there such a thing as a Potemkin Floating Solar Farm?
I imagine that if green ideologues are ignorant and foolish enough to actually attempt the idea of floating solar farms, they are probably foolish enough to attempt floating wind turbine farms as well.
If the sonar blasting for anchored wind turbines does indeed kill whales and other marine life, someone sooner for later will suggest floating turbines — and never mind that they will eventually get hit with a destructive storm.
Floating works well for Nuclear though
Yep, in a nuclear sub, air craft carrier of ice breaker, it works great.
After Iniki a US nuke sub powered one of the Hawaiian islands, Kaua’i, on its own for a while. Go to Wiki where you will not find ANY mention of that. Leftists know how to edit the good of nukes OUT of a wiki post.
Finally, floating nuclear generators for electrical production to supply the “grid” would make great sense since they could be built at shipyards and floated to where needed.
The Russians are already building them for delivery.
Rosatom has at least 4 orders, one already delivered.
See the Wiki.
Plentiful supply of cooling-water there.
Also a great solution for Australia back-filling “renewables” with nukes, since, if they obtain nuclear subs (AUKUS), they won’t have to change any laws. And another cost-effective perk, most of the energy-guzzling population of Australia is near the coast!
And possibly one more, very few in the population have the Tasman or Indian ocean in their “backyard” and if they do, one could bribe them, say with lower council-rates or property-tax, or even free electricity if they’re within 2-5km of one of the nukes.
by statistics we’ve had more events with floaters than the concrete ones
They are looking at putting wind mills on rafts.
Floating wind turbines still have to be anchored to the bottom. Those anchors are still going to have to be driven deep into the sea floor.
That’s true, of course. The point being that windmills on rafts are as vulnerable as those solar panels, probably much more so.
All sea anchors will eventually drag. Hell, even the aircraft carrier Eisenhower (CVN-69) dragged anchor one Christmas off Paradise Island in Nassau, Bahamas. You’d think the U.S. Navy would know how to design anchors that don’t drag if that were possible :<)
actually the anchors on ships are designed to drag, the chain pile is what keeps the ship in the general area
Interesting. That might work in low current and wind conditions, but I was always taught that if wind or current was expected the anchor must be set into the sea bed by backing down on it with proper scope, i.e., chain length of 6 to 10 times the water depth. Until the anchor is set, any substantial wind or current will slowly drag out the chain until tight, then the boat, chain and anchor will drag until the anchor finds a location it can properly set into the sea bed. In other words, you don’t know the final position of the boat until the anchor is properly set. For the Eisenhower, Christmas leave was canceled because the bridge crew was tired of having to motoring into the current because the anchor wouldn’t set.
As will the “anchored” ones, and neither will survive.
See BVG Associates recent Guide to Offshore floating wind farms published on behalf of Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, The Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland. 176 pages with lots of photos.
Search BVGA-1644-Floating-Guide-r2.pdf
Was the biggest of it’s kind in the world. Now, it’s just the biggest pile of solar panel trash in a lake in the world.
I”l bet they don’t use solar powered boats, excavators and winches to clean it up.
I have to wonder is the water behind the dam is also used for drinking water downstream.
… its india
Renowned for how frequently arsenic is found in the ground water.
Come on guys, this isn’t a disaster. It’s a in the nick of time rescue as the groups constructing this now no longer face having to find another boondoggle to generate cash flow but can keep milking this one by “repairing” it!
Yeah, but it would have been dead great and safe if Climate Change hadn’t caused the storm!
Schadenfreude makes me feel vaguely guilty.
Not me, I’m loving it. Ditto every time another worse-than-useless EV lights itself on fire.
Only a question of when, not if. Good that the inevitable happened so quickly.
The picture shows the destruction of $476 million stupidly spent ‘dollars’—actually Rs 3950 crore. Could have bought a nice medium sized 400MW dispatchable CCGT instead for about the same investment.
For those who were paid the $476 mil, money well spilt.
I imagine the next brilliant idea from this “valedictorian engineer” will be a ship with ventilation intakes in the bottom of the hull. Or perhaps a spaceship with screen doors.
Boeing is probably working on the latter.
Put a unicorn in the spacesuit. Catch the farts
The last two launch scrubs have apparently been in the Atlas booster, not Starliner. Although Boeing has its hands in ULA, too…
JV between Boeing and Lockheed.
Must be one “h” of a valedictorian engineer if he sold this ‘barnacle”.
It’s the same insanity that put a huge solar farm in Nebraska smack in the middle of the second most hailed on region of the USA. Nature said “challenge accepted”.
50kph (30mph)? Those solar farms wouldn’t last long around here if they can’t withstand a 30mph wind. The Wind comes Sweeping Down the Plains!
30 mph isn’t much of a wind, great engineering work there
Here is a solar farm in Puerto Rico that was totally destroyed by a hurricane:
(Source: https://www.beaufortcountynow.com/post/63683/push-for-unreliable-solar-power-in-nc-creates-threat-of-blackouts-in-winter.html )
Only 5.2 MW comprising only 13650 destroyed panels covering only 1600 acres.
Panels were supposedly hail proof—but they only tested quarter inch hail, not the golf ball sized hail nature regularly delivers there.
Anything under 1/4 inch is sleet, not hail.
The standard test for PV modules is 25mm ice balls at 23 m/s. This is terminal speed, zero wind component.
Translates to 3mm thick cover glass.
And “Nature” won! Bwah, ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaa!
Die, “renewables,” die!
There are 78 panels per row so the first 4 rows contain 312 panels. Of those 312 panels 72 look pristine and 240 look obliterated. That’s almost an 80% damage rate from one hail storm.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here; What the heck do we care”?
The picture reminds me one of those elaborate “falling dominoes” set ups that didn’t quite go right.
Participation trophy planning team.
On the sidebar: Real-time Global Temperature
(updated every 1-2 minutes)
Why is this nonsense even here? I thought we were about science.
What do “they” (The Man-made CAGW promoters) claim?
Monckton is very good at using their OWN numbers to show they are exaggerating if not flat out wrong.
Also on the sidebar just above it is “Global Surface Temperature ComparisonNASA GISS 1880 – 2022 | Anomaly vs. Absolute Temperature”, which puts the promoted exaggerations into perspective.
The “Real-time Global Temperature” seems to serve a similar purpose.
(From the link below that sidebar)
The Real-time Global Temperature is still so cold that people have to live in heated houses and apartments if they can.
But it’s complete nonsense. How many people live, year round, at the “average global temperature”?
Largest Floating Solar Farm
Sunk
HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW……
The Greenie stupidity never ends.
Even before this storm damage, the whole project is a total waste of time. when you add in the energy cost of the floating infrastructure, this system will never produce as much energy as it took to construct.
In a related note, the Emperor Xerxes has ordered the sea to be whipped to teach it to leave floating solar panels made of flimsy plastic alone.
Also he ordered the decapitation of the engineers who designed this folly.
In defense of engineers: Give em what they asked for. Never ever lie, but give em what they asked for.
The people controlling the money should have consulted with meteorologists and experienced mariners before providing the engineers with design specifications.
They would have just found some who told them what they wanted to hear.
Like the solar field destroyed by a hail storm, these make the news.
Why is if so rare (never?) you hear of common weather knocking out MW of coal fired, gas, or nuclear power generation?
I have to wonder how this affects the % of renewables in the global energy production changes.
Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Not sure about the dumbest placement of solar panels, more about that later, but at least this will have sun in the desert. Been through Boron, home of Borax, rather desolate Mojave Desert. — https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/yes-aratina-solar-project-will-down-iconic-joshua-trees-in-southern-california/
Of course this wasn’t “the sea”, but even so freshwater reservoirs can get riled up quickly by high winds, and a bunch of solar panels on barges or floats just seems like a really bad design decision, as proven out. Sounds like somebody got bought off to sign off.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I wonder if one of the selling points of the scheme is reduced evaporation loss.
I have observed water spouts in alpine reservoirs.
Wait ’til they try this boondoggle on The Great Lakes.
“what a harsh environment the sea can be” — well, this was on a lake behind a dam…but still, any large-ish body of water can be a harsh environment when the weather kicks up. Fresh water is less damaging to metal structures, but not benign.
Hope someone has learned a lesson.
Likely that the result would have been the same if the panels were land-mounted.
The ground doesn’t get whipped up into waves and change the attitude of the panels. Waves will twist the infrastructure floating support.
Umm, earthquakes?
Quiet chuckle….. And the do-gooders want Puerto Rico to install solar panels for reliable power. Ho many tropical storms per year hit the island?
Part of the problem is that a common characteristic of liberals is an attitude that they are smarter than average, when in fact they are probably not as smart. They read about some new technology in a prospectus, and think that it is the solution to a particular problem and accept the claim at face value. They don’t have the experience or technical background to realize that there are obstacles to the effective use of the new technology. They are often in positions that give them access to funds to implement the new technology because they don’t have the ability to be an engineer, and don’t have the wisdom to explore the caveats to its use.
“ probably not as smart” Surely, you jest.
Now we know where Homer Simpson got hired after being fired from the Nuclear plant in Springfield.
Wind packed it up like ice on Lake Michigan. A six-year-old could have predicted this idiocy.
The referred to Read More article said 50 kmh winds did the deed. It was designed to fail. I’m wondering if it’s an insurance scam of some kind, or a scam on the part of the developers to get paid for rebuilding.
buy reject panels from china for haul-away costs … install … destroy … get insurance with very high deductible so as to not scare the insurer … trash the entire thing … get paid for the 60% of paper value and still make a profit.
…
;
Summer storms? When I lived in Scotland, a 50 km/h wind would have been called a moderate breeze.
I’ve read that there are more graduate engineers in India than in the USA and Europe combined. Perhaps they should have hired one.
Waiting for Luser or Fungal to appear to say how great floating solar panels are 🙂
50kmph = 31 mph
A few days ago (May 7th), we had sustained winds of 30 mph and gusts up to 58 (93 kmph).
Such being not uncommon here, I doubt anyone would float solar panels.
In fact, you have to shut down the wind turbines if it gets too windy.
More good news.
“Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?”
The relevant question is, who walked away with the money?
Imbecilic projects such as these bring to mind the adage –
“Consensus science” is to engineering as “herbal remedy” is to medicine!
Brought to you by the department of “DEI” Engineering.
It’s just tax payer money so who cares right?
John Hultquist: “50kmph = 31 mph A few days ago (May 7th), we had sustained winds of 30 mph and gusts up to 58 (93 kmph). Such being not uncommon here, I doubt anyone would float solar panels.”
Big winds have a habit of blowing through central Washington State on a regular basis. Using funding from a government research project, we could float some of these solar panels on Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam to see if similar results are experienced. We could also float some ocean wind turbines to see what happens to these turbines when a sustained 80 mph wind over Lake Roosevelt occassionally occurs.
They’re pretty regular out here on Whidbey Island.
I forgot to mention, I live near Ellensburg — about 5 miles from the airport KELN.
It is almost as if the entire climate change propaganda operation is intended to destroy our wealth and our society rather than what they claim it is all about…
Yes. but the winds were caused by climate change. This clearly shows why much more must be spent to stop it. At least that’s what the green fascists will say.
what do the fish below these panels eat?