Hail destroys a 5.3 Megawatt solar farm near Nebraska Wyoming border
 

Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm | Your Wyoming News Source

Wow! that just annihilated the entire solar generating plant. .

The owner acknowledged that the damage to the panels has not been assessed. As an owner of a building with several solar panels, I can guarantee they still work at some level. Most likely just the efficiency has been affected, possibly not by a significant amount. "Destroyed" is a very inaccurate term here.

I am thinking that if the water proof integrity has been lost, that the panel is unusable. . regardless of efficiency when dry. And hail and rain go together, but rain and electricity do not. .

rough back of the envelope looks like 80-90% of the panels have some sort of damage. .
if the return on investment takes 10+ years, a small amount of degradation (10-20%) can render the investment return negative or unrecoverable. . .

but yeah, The owner acknowledged that the damage to the panels has not been assessed.

Hopefully there are no leaks.

The simple solution is to build and set up the panels indoors to protect them from hail.

Toxic Mess
 

Wow, the pics on the news show total destruction. Solar isn’t the way to go anyway. Hopefully the government didn’t fund this boondoggle. What a waste, now what to do with all the super toxic waste created?

They probably received a gov't subsidy to build it of some sort... with that generating power severely affected, I wonder if they will need to use something else.

Reminds me of the Y2K bug and all the development craziness that went on.
- "Is that a vintage app?"
- "Yep. That's the one that works rain or shine."

Funny! And it makes exactly as as much sense as setting them up under a 100 mile blanket of atmosphere!

If anybody ever bothered to do the math, they would discover that solar cells are so inefficient that it would take a solar farm the size of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico to replace our CURRENT electrical needs -- not to mention all those electric cars they want us charging in our garages every night by 2035.

The Sun literally rains more energy on our planet every day that mankind has consumed since the beginning of time. If only we had a bucket to catch it! NASA actually engineered that bucket back in the 60's, when solar cells were half as efficient as they are today -- put them on a satellite and beam the energy back to earth as microwaves. The idea went nowhere.

In fact, we've known how to end petrochemical electricity generation for 60 years, but for some unknown reason, "Climate Change" demands that we destroy the ecology of entire states rather than build a bucket to capture all that free energy raining down a mere 100 miles from here -- straight up, where the sun always shines and there are no hail storms.

The microwave idea was featured in one of the short stories in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" anthology.

Not even close. People have run the numbers. It is approximately 15,000 square miles. That is a square 125 miles on a side. I have seen other estimates that put it at 10,000 square miles (a square 100 miles on a side). Storage and distribution are other issues but those are the numbers. It is an academic exercise, however, since our power will, in all probability, continue to be generated from multiple sources for the foreseeable future.

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf

Regarding the requirement for replacing all autos with EVs, those numbers have also been looked at. We would need approximately 1T kWhs of additional power (per year). This is approximately 25% more than the 4T kWhs we currently generate. Essentially, we have about 20 years or so (maybe more like 30 years, gas cars sold 10 years from now may be on the road for 20 years) to gradually ramp up power production by 25% or so.

You don't have to rely on "people". All the info you need to do the calculation yourself is available online, and it's basic arithmetic. Be sure to cut whatever number you come up with by 2/3rds to account for darkness and poor weather. But a little common sense immediately debunks your "15,000 square mile" number. Between solar and wind (an equally inefficient technology), we passed that number years ago. Take a drive through West Texas and East California sometime, if you don't believe it. And yet, solar plus wind accounts for less than 4% of total energy generation in North America.

Did you even bother reading the NREL website that I referenced? Those "people" (who are experts in the field), along with Elon Musk (who assumed panels with 20% efficiency), have run the numbers and their numbers are between 15000 and 10000 square miles. You are only off by a factor of 30 !!

From Elon Musk:

“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah,” he explained. “You only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States…. The batteries you [would] need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”

That’s just 101 square miles, or as Elon says, “a little square on the U.S. map.” To put this into perspective, that’s about 10% of the 1045 square-mile area of Rhode Island, the smallest U.S. state—although admittedly the desert Southwest has better insolation than New England.

Here is the basic calculation for a solar farm to power the US. As I already told you, it is an academic exercise because the probability of it ever being built is low. By the way, in case you forgot, you are the one who broached the subject.

Power Needed: 4T kWhs per year
Average Power per panel per day (assuming SW US): 1.5 kWhs
Panels needed: 7.3 B
Area per panel: 17 sq. ft.
Area needed just for the panels: 4,300 sq. mi.
Total area needed: Probably need to double or triple the 4,300 sq. mi. for access to the panels to get to approximately 10,000 sq. mi. for the farm (a square 100 miles on a side, not the combined area of TX, OK, and NM that you claimed).

I'm sure we did. The leaking fluids should really be good for the environment.

I stand corrected!
 

Well, I have to admit, I've been corrected. It's been years since I ran the numbers. Solar cell efficiency has either increased dramatically in the last decade, or the numbers available on-line have been "corrected" to confirm the narrative. In any case, my calculations now come out fairly close to the numbers you posted.

So that made me think, I'd better check my statement about how many square miles are currently used by solar and wind farms. I found this article: Bloomberg - The U.S. Will Need a Lot of Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy

It says that we currently have 7.1 million acres in wind and solar farms. An acre is 1/640th of a mile. So that means we ALREADY HAVE 11,094 square miles dedicated to "green energy". Maybe you could ask Elon how come we haven't already arrived at his energy nirvana? It's a puzzler!

But good news, everybody! Look at the chart at the bottom of that page. Bloomberg (a long time advocate of green energy) says we've currently only mowed down the equivalent of Missouri and Iowa, because we've got Hydroelectric and corn! (But you might note that little black 3.5 million acre corner of their map for dirty old Natural Gas, over there by DuBuque, which is currently providing 80% of our energy needs!)

Keep scrolling, and you will find the map that really scares me. It's the one that tells you what we'll need by 2050, when we're "Carbon Neutral" and we're all driving EV's. In addition to Missouri and Iowa -- Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana all get mowed down for wind farms. Where did they get their math? Didn't we just prove that wrong? Wait -- does Bloomberg know something we don't know?

Oh well, who needs 'em, anyway? Flyover country, right?

Once Congress passes legislation to control the weather this won't happen again!!

I have heard/read from a couple of sources, most recently Elon Musk, that to meet the needs of the entire US, we would only need a piece of land 100 miles by 100 miles.

It is not a puzzler to me. The energy density of wind turbine farms is about an order of magnitude less than solar farms, IIRC. It takes a lot more land to support wind turbines than solar panels. I was responding to your post about the area of solar panels needed to generate the 4T kWhs that the US generates each year. I really don't care about the other stuff you brought up.

I guess you didn't read post #10 and #12.

This is no problem. Green energy is supposed to be renewable - our government said so. I have no doubt those solar panels will renew themselves. Just wait and see.

Actually, I think you might have that exactly backwards. According to this article by "Elemental Green", "one wind turbine can generate the same amount of electricity per kWh as about 48,704 solar panels." A single windmill takes about one acre. 48,704 solar panels would consume 19.26 acres. And windmills can even make electricity at night!

Wind vs. Solar — Which Power Source Is Better?.

But the really interesting statistic is the equivalent Kwh of a single natural gas well, which also takes about one acre: The average well produces 20 million cubic ft per day. At .29 Kwh to the cubic foot, that means a single acre of natural gas production gives us 5.8 MILLION kWhs PER DAY!

Personally, I prefer the option that doesn't require leveling forests and mountains and ruining the ecology of entire states. If that means the world's average temperature is 2 degrees higher 100 years for now, I still call that a win.

From

ShieldSquare Captcha

Abstract
Power density is the rate of energy generation per unit of land surface area occupied by an energy system. The power density of low-carbon energy sources will play an important role in mediating the environmental consequences of energy system decarbonization as the world transitions away from high power-density fossil fuels. All else equal, lower power densities mean larger land and environmental footprints. The power density of solar and wind power remain surprisingly uncertain: estimates of realizable generation rates per unit area for wind and solar power span 0.3–47 We m−2 and 10–120 We m−2 respectively. We refine this range using US data from 1990–2016. We estimate wind power density from primary data, and solar power density from primary plant-level data and prior datasets on capacity density. The mean power density of 411 onshore wind power plants in 2016 was 0.50 We m−2. Wind plants with the largest areas have the lowest power densities. Wind power capacity factors are increasing, but that increase is associated with a decrease in capacity densities, so power densities are stable or declining. If wind power expands away from the best locations and the areas of wind power plants keep increasing, it seems likely that wind's power density will decrease as total wind generation increases. The mean 2016 power density of 1150 solar power plants was 5.4 We m−2. Solar capacity factors and (likely) power densities are increasing with time driven, in part, by improved panel efficiencies. Wind power has a 10-fold lower power density than solar, but wind power installations directly occupy much less of the land within their boundaries. The environmental and social consequences of these divergent land occupancy patterns need further study.

I doubt you will find anyone who will argue that the energy density of fossil fuels is very high.