4000ac solar farm in Texas devastated by hailstorm

Has anyone investigated the consequences of all the sunlight that’s leaked into the environment because of this disaster? What sort of clean up are we looking at and how long will it take?

The effect on the local goth population will be devastating.
It's okay, this happened outside the environment.
- Well, it’s just not supposed to happen.
The problem when photon containment breaks like this is that we can never be 100% sure which photons were SUPPOSED to be there, and which ones leaked out. We'll need a dedicated team of particle physicists with very small tweazers to have any hope of sorting out this mess.
- Unfortunately the VST (Very Small Tweezers) project is running a decade behind schedule and needs an additional $10 billion in funding, but the older RSP (Rather Small Pliers) project could be retrofitted to support photon retrieval with a bit of light-absorbent paint.
We've began the process of capturing all the seabirds exposed to the sunlight and scrubbing it off them with a combination of lye and baking soda.
They seem unhappy about this process.
😂

I feel like this is one of those things that definitely has to have happened before now; after all, grid-scale solar isn't something we've just started doing in the last two or three years, we've been at it for at least 15 that I know of. And hail isn't exactly a new phenomenon in TX. So I wonder why we're hearing about it like it's news. Is this fossil fuel funded bad press? Did they skimp on protection they shouldn't have?

It's Texas. So without doing any research, it's *probably all of the above and also there's corruption in there somewhere...
Idk, here in the PNW I had only seen hail once in the past 10 years, this spring it has hailed over a dozen times... climate change is wild
- Ah, the solar power epicenter that is the PNW.
- Really? I grew up near Seattle (>20+ years ago) and I remember getting hail fairly frequently, probably more frequently than snow, at least in my neighborhood. Then again, the hail was quite small and only lasted a few seconds to a minute most of the time.
Solar farms on rust scale are relatively new, though. So this might have happened countless times before, but not that concentrated on a single entity.
theres more solar than ever, the news is doing less interesting things now than it ever has been. Big oil is losing more money at the mere smell of none oil based power.
Makes sense really.
Maybe it's just good footage. Photovoltaics are synergetic with fossil fuel power, both in terms of green washing and actually prolonging dependence.
- Can you please elaborate?
- PV prolongs dependence on fossil fuels
  That's an unusual take.

My 200W panel just got slammed camping over xmas and not a spot of damage on it—its made to have some sort of protection from hail strikes. Meanwhile the 4×4 got smashed windows and dents all over.

Wow that's a huge hail ball! I get excited when they're marble-sized.
It might have cracks in the silicon crystal that might burn in over time.
But yeah, impressive that it could take this big of hail balls without braking the glass.
There's a truck in my neighbourhood that was hit by hail. The owner repainted it, but left the dents. He has a little bumper sticker explaining what happened. It looks pretty amazing, IMO, and must be an awesome conversation starter.
- It's not uncommon where I live, but certainly starts conversations of people comparing their worst storms. My own favourite was the damage done to a massive carlot near the docks and airport that stored new cars coming into the country to freight out around the state. Thousands of cars, no cover. They all went on sale massively discounted as hail damaged but the downside being people couldn't get additional non-compulsary insurance until repaired. So new car, but probably barely making a saving after fixing it all. Or, just leave it and o ly have compulsory insurance, which only covers damage you do to public property with your car and not your car or other people's.

Placing hardware cloth or similar over the panels with a couple inches of stand-off should prevent most any damage from even lege hail. It will probably reduce sunlight by a few percent across the entire field, but considering the storms Texas gets it would likely be worth it in the long run instead of having most of an entire farm wrecked.

But then Texas isn’t big on protecting their power sources from environmental impacts, are they.

Nah, how else will Republicans cry that solar energy is bad, and that we need coal and oil?
How strong that cloth and attachment would need to be to survive gusts from a storm that's capable of generating such big hail?
- Hardware cloth is metal mesh, so any wind strong enough to remove it would have long since destroyed the panel it was attached to thanks to the surface area of the panel. The standoffs would probably need to be “L” tabs or similar arranged in a grid across the face of the panel. Heck, just erecting a screen over the entire field would probably be better and cheaper than doing individual panels, but a field-size cover would probably end up with needing higher strength posts to mount it because of the greater drag over surface area. That said, I’m not an engineer, so the most efficient and effective method of protection is going to have to come from someone with more knowledge than my guesswork.
- Yeah, might want a metal grating/mesh or something instead. Should do better in the wind.
- the likelihood that you get hail that is capable of damaging pretty robust fabric is incredibly unlikely, and will start damaging other things. So you really only need to protect against the most common types of hail.
Why are we so dumb? Just put a large rolling cover over solar fields. Truck beds have this “technology”.
- Keeping political power matters. Actual function, like electrical power, does not. They would rather rule an empire of dirt than be an ensign in starfleet.
Wow. It was only after reading comments on this post until that I remembered WHY I was more than happy to leave Reddit behind. Too bad so many of these diseased children moved over here.
It took just one comment: ' What is “4000ac”? ' to start the drool-fest.
- Better find a new place then.

Should have put them underground.

Why didn't they just cover them with metal sheets to protect them from the hail? Are they stupid?
- Yeah why don't they just build a roof over them?

What is "4000ac"?

Armor Class,
It is very hard to hit
- Hailstorm was consistently rolling them nat 20s, need to check for loaded dice
- It was much easier to hit in 2nd edition.
- but I have ... a plus 2 modifier with improvised thrown weapons? does it still miss?
4000 acre?
- Americans inventing new freedom units instead of using squared meters...
4000 acres A unit of measurement for plots of land
4000 alternating currents.
4000 asshole cunts

All the people arguing for nuclear, are you sure Texas is best place to handle that? I'm fine with nuclear as long as they have a reasonable plan to store the waste, but Texas is horrible at managing anything energy related.

Tbh, I think America in general might be a little too obsessed with personal freedom for us to transfer the entire country over to nuclear energy.
Successful nuclear programs require actual collective work for long term viability. We would need to actually give administrative powers to an agency like the nuclear regulation commission that supercedes the authority of individual states.
Otherwise its just going to be like 30 years of ironing out NIMBY state legislation before anything gets built, just like the deep storage facility we've been "building" since the 80s.
Yeah. I'm not normally an anprim, but for Texas....
You know what the plan to store a lot of nuclear waste in America is? Bury it in west nowhere, Texas.
Sad thing is they have so much land for it! Could get around how so many people are concerned about living near a nuclear power plant, by just putting it in bum fuck nowhere.
- We already have that, it's called Yucca Mountain - and people STILL are fighting it.

Don’t tread on my private infrastructure!!

I think even when damaged they still produce.

More modern vertical arrays might fair better in hurricane-prone areas.

Heliostats seem to be getting popular on large solar farms. You could use them to stow the panels upright to avoid damage in these circumstances.

sucks to be the insurance in this case

I wondered if this was the one from years ago, or new.

It is new: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/large-houston-solar-farm-suffers-extensive-hail-19371591.php

Technology is fragile.

Looked expensive. Looks like garbage now.

Saladbar sneeze guard stonks to the moon!

(Because a hail size sneeze guard would have stopped hail size hail is the joke, you humorless fucks.)

Take your medicine.
- Thanks Empricorn's mom and or dad for such a clever, witty, original, child.
  May this child one day bring you some value.

Solar allows independence from grid companies for people with the land or rooftop to spare. For the rest of the population, solar farms are a massive source of clean energy that shouldn't be ignored, even with incidents like this. Frankly, the panels aren't the major part of the cost of a solar farm after the land, storage and distribution network.
Nuclear is a good second or third choice if storage isn't sufficient. But I'll say if fusion ever leaves the lab, it'll be a different world.
Its not entirely a scam, but it was a prophylactic (that we didn't use) not a cure. Shit being fucked fucks it worse too.
Like trying to put a condom on a dick half rotted from syphilis.

Utility scale photovoltaics just seems like a bad idea.

Why do you say so?
- Because he's paid to.
- PV isn't super efficient. It's great on a rooftop because the space isn't being used for anything else, but for grind-scale there are other solar options, such as concentrated solar thermal arrays that drive heat engines.
  Solar thermal systems can also store and retrieve excess energy using molten salt, allowing load balancing without needing batteries.
- https://lemmy.crimedad.work/comment/607185 https://lemmy.crimedad.work/comment/607645
Utility scale coal and NG plants seem like a worse idea.
- Certainly, but PV isn't the thing to replace those.
Depends on how much there is, what level of the grid it's connected to, and what the overall supply mix is. Without adequate energy storage yet, a lot of times it's fossil fuels filling the gap between renewable output and peak demand.
- That's a huge caveat and the fossil fuel industry is happy to exploit it and prolong our dependence on them. The grids are already set up for thermal power generation, so nuclear is the way to go to really knock out fossil fuels.

Okay, but if this was a nuclear power plant we'd have a second Fukushima on our hands.

Nuclear powerplants are so safe that they've only had a handful of (admittedly disastrous and high profile) failures, and have killed less people per watt hour generated than even wind and solar power. Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, most efficient form of green energy we can get right now. Yes, it can be dangerous if not managed properly. But Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were not freak accidents. Deliberate mistakes were made that were known at the time and should be used as warnings to keep the industry safe, not as sirens that lead is to swear off nuclear energy.
- Thank you for taking the time to write this. The disinformation around nuclear power is extremely damaging to humanity.
- But Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were not freak accidents.
  Fukushima involved bad mistakes and a set of freak accidents. It was hit first by a the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and then by a tsunami.
  Now sure, there are plenty of mistakes they made that seem obvious in hindsight. But, it's fundamentally different from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl where the only causes were design and operational mistakes.
- Nuclear power plants are an affront to God. The only nuclear power plant we need is the Sun.
Ah yes, fission power plants, famously vulnerable to average thunderstorms.
- I so rarely get to reference this "so bad it's good" made-for-TV movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Twister
  This television film was inspired by a real-life near disaster that had taken place on June 24. 1998, when an F2 tornado hit the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio resulting in the loss of off-site power. Despite that, the film bears no resemblance to the actual events at Davis-Besse.
- and famously resilient in the event of a bombing, or direct plane strike, or PWR depressurization.
  Yeah no, they're built like fucking rocks, because they are one.
- I mean, we all saw how well one of them held up to a tidal wave
Lol concrete and steel doesn't give a shit about hail
- Sounds like something Big Concrete and Steel would say.
Believe it or not, the hot stuff is behind meters of concrete and lead plates. Hail isn't going to do shit. And with it's lack of active fault lines, Texas would be fine for Nuclear.
- It's not the hail, it's the hubris.
you'd have a second Fukushima if it was operated by complete fuckwits like you probably.
The entirety of fukushima was fuck up after fuck up after fuck up. "lets build a nuclear reactor on the bay of a tsunami prone location" "hey boss our backup generators are weather tight. Oh well, that's not important anyway" "hey boss those weather sealed doors that we never fixed let tsunami water get in, and now the generators aren't running" "hey boss, we can't get out to fukushima because the tsunami fucked up the infrastructure to get there."
"hey boss, we evacuated everybody form the nearby area, but we forgot about wind, so we accidentally evacuated everybody to an area with more prominent radiation." "hey boss, it turns out there was zero lasting effects as far as we can tell medically, from fukushima, notably with people living in the area nearby, having slightly elevated levels of health issues, however still below the average expected"