Looks expensive. The grey ones are the broken ones.
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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.
Richmond! 🖤
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.
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.
It’s okay, this happened outside the environment.
Well, it’s just not supposed to happen.
😂
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.
Hardware cloth is a metal mesh.
Ah okay, I wasn’t familiar with the terminology.
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.
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
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.
I lived in Seattle for a while and it never hailed, late 20-teens, but in the Willamette valley it is pretty rare, yet it has been hailing every few days this spring/early spring, we also have been having lightning storms. It is an unusual beginning to the yeat
Huh, I’ll have to ask my parents, who still live near Seattle. I left around the late 2000s, so I’m mostly talking about the 90s and early 2000s. It never hailed a lot (like 2-3 times/year), and thunderstorms happened a few times in the spring.
That said, more than 5 times in the spring would definitely be unusual. That, plus the bonkers 100F+ weather two years ago (I think? I wasn’t there) is kinda nuts.
Lol it’s been well over 110f every summer for the last 8 years in the valley…
https://www.plantmaps.com/en/us/climate/extremes/f/oregon-record-high-low-temperatures
Ah, the solar power epicenter that is the PNW.
I meant that yes hail happens in Texas, but these freak storms are getting worse and it is a new phenomenon. Also most houses around here have solar
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.
PV prolongs dependence on fossil fuels
That’s an unusual take.
There are good applications for PV, but it is not reliable thermal power, so it will never sufficiently dispace fossil fuels. We need nuclear, concentrated solar, and/or deep-well geothermal power plants in order to accomplish that.
babies first electric resistive heater prototype would like to disagree with you.
I think they might be taking issue primarily with the “reliability”, the argument that solar is all well and good, but because generation isn’t uniform, it can’t fully replace fossil fuels. And I can see the argument for using nuclear for base-load and supplement with solar as it’s available to use.
i know what they’re saying, but they’re objectively wrong. Sure it’s hard, it’s not the most trivial thing to do. Harder than engineering, designing, and building a CCG turbine plant from the ground up? Highly doubt it, probably more expensive though.
Nuclear base load is an incredibly good strategy though, although nuclear isn’t fossil fuels, so.
Can you please elaborate?
No, because they’re shitposting at best and trolling at worst. See their other comments.
Because photovoltaic and wind power are inherently unreliable, they create a need for fossil fuel power sources to always be ready to go in order to fill in the gaps. Fossil fuel companies like to talk about how they’re all for a green transition, but what they don’t say is that they want the transition to last forever.
This is brain dead, we have plenty of green energy storage methods available. We just need a big enough green energy surplus to store.
The benevolent fossil fuel industry will be there to help with every step of this revolutionary transition to renewable energy.
You know what, you’re right, we’re all fucked, there is nothing we can do, let’s gather round and jerk ourselves off about how miserable we all are until the warm embrace of the ocean washes over our heads. Thanks for helping me finally see that.
What’s with the histrionics? Nuclear power is a mature technology that’s practically a drop in replacement for fossil fuel power. No need to redesign the grid to make it smart and add problematic battery storage.
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.
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.
Wow that’s a huge hail ball! I get excited when they’re marble-sized.
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.
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…
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.
You know what the plan to store a lot of nuclear waste in America is? Bury it in west nowhere, Texas.
What is “4000ac”?
Armor Class,
It is very hard to hit
Hailstorm was consistently rolling them nat 20s, need to check for loaded dice
I mean, make enough attacks and you’re bound to make a ton of 20s in there.
If the average bad hailstorm drops 7500 pieces of hail… that would come out to about 375 nat20s… if my napkin math is accurate.
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…
If by “Americans inventing” you mean “Europeans inventing” then yes
Non English Europeans aren’t savages who use non metric units. 🧐 Smh
Bitch it was the romans who “invented” most of the units.
And unless I see y’all adopting metric time in the near future I frankly don’t want to hear about how oh so stupid anyone who isn’t doing metric is.
Plus there’s just the idiocy of it being base 10 when base 36 is so much better, uses the whole keyspace of numerals and latin alphabet letters, “10” is a perfect square that’s the product of two other perfect squares, plus “10” has 9 factors, it has a number of factors equal to one of the perfect squares that it factors into!
Huh I didn’t realise there were people who might actually prefer imperial. I thought it was just sort of grandfathered in for many people. To me metric just makes more intuitive sense. But I’ll use both.
Metric time I don’t care for and I don’t think anyone is seriously using.
Wait a hectosecond.
It’s good when the people of eternal Rome use the old measurements, for they were the citizens of the coolest empire of our time.
It’s not good when the americant’s use it to measure screaming eagles per burger or something. 🧐
Something something metric units something 🧐
If “European countries” excludes most European countries then yes European countries didn’t use acres.
Before the enactment of the metric system, many countries in Europe used their own official acres. In France, the traditional unit of area was the arpent carré, a measure based on the Roman system of land measurement. The acre was used only in Normandy (and neighbouring places outside its traditional borders), but its value varied greatly across Normandy, ranging from 3,632 to 9,725 square metres, with 8,172 square metres being the most frequent value.[clarification needed] But inside the same pays of Normandy, for instance in pays de Caux, the farmers (still in the 20th century) made the difference between the grande acre (68 ares, 66 centiares) and the petite acre (56 to 65 ca).[50] The Normandy acre was usually divided in 4 vergées (roods) and 160 square perches, like the English acre.
*Europeans invented the acre 1000 yeats ago
Before the enactment of the metric system
Yes… long before…
So backwards…
I’ll convert it to a metric unit for you so it’s easier to visualize: the solar farm is 2*10^27 square Angstroms.
Hope that helps!
Thanks, It actually does, because the conversation factor is easy.
2e27 Å2 = 2e7 m2 = 20 km2
So an area 5km by 4km. You can now easily compare it to the size of your neighborhood, town or city.
Finally, a unit i can get behind
That is actually helpful. It’s easy to convert from Angstroms (10^-10 m) to meters, to kilometers (10^3 m). That means it’s all just basic arithmetic. 27 - 2*(10 + 3) = 27 - 26 = 1. So, it’s 2*10^1 square km, or 20 square km.
How many Texas’ is that?
Texas’s?
Texi?
Oh, oh no. Thinking isn’t your strong suit is it?
4000 acres A unit of measurement for plots of land
4000 alternating currents.
4000 asshole cunts
sucks to be the insurance in this case
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?
I wondered if this was the one from years ago, or new.
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.
Looked expensive. Looks like garbage now.
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.
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.
That is fair, I would call that a bit of perspective, bit not unfair perspective. Yes, it did take significant disasters to make the mistakes apparent, so who’s to say if anybody would’ve noticed or how much of a problem they would’ve been.
Yeah. In hindsight a nuclear power plant in a country with frequent earthquakes has to be hardened against earthquakes. Earthquakes can cause tsunamis so any plant on the coast has to be ready to handle tsunamis. Tsunamis come a while after earthquakes, so they have to be prepared for the double whammy of an earthquake with a tsunami just a short time later. And, to be fair, it’s not like they hadn’t thought of those things at all. It’s just that they made some design mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.
But, it’s still significantly better than power plants that just melt down completely on their own due to incompetent design and incompetent operations, with no triggering natural disaster.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. The disinformation around nuclear power is extremely damaging to humanity.
Not a problem. To me, nuclear power is the answer to the mantra of “technology will solve the climate crisis,” and we’ve had it for years, yet we’re too afraid to use it!
Nuclear power plants are an affront to God. The only nuclear power plant we need is the Sun.
This is officially the worst argument yet. Who cares about what some fake god thinks, we have to deal with our own very real issues around power generation and anthropogenic climate change.
How could you speak such blasphemy on this Holy Saturday‽ After all, what did Jesus on the cross resemble, but a solar panel on a telephone pole?
KenM, is that you?
It’s good to have fun on Lemmy.
Satan Satan Satan
Dead baby Jesus
Satan Satan SatanWhat is more hellish than the core of a nuclear power reactor?
Other people.
Centralia, PA.
*citation needed
It’s not my job to educate you.
No no, this should be easy. Which Bible passage mentions Nuclear Power? Which Bible? Which Faith?
If you’re making a claim, it is your job to back that claim up.
Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you.”
I don’t see any mention of Nuclear Fission Reactors. Even the passage claiming Pi equals exactly 3 is more straight forward.
Fine, don’t use power from nuclear reactors. You can sit in the dark with your bronze age book and talk about how actual positive steps forward are an affront to an ideology from back when people thought the sun rose because it was pulled by a chariot across the sky.
God’s holy light will drench our solar panels and our LCDs will be forever illuminated with the Good News that He Is Risen. Happy Easter!
You could say that about all of our technology. What are we supposed to do? Run around gardens wearing fig leaves and talk to snakes while eating apples?
Are you suggesting that coconuts are migratory?
Well they are designed to ride the ocean currents in search of a new home
You might be on to something there.
I mean if I had more body confidence, I’d be down for a quick jaunt through a garden.
No one can stop you (if you run fast enough)!
Religion: god makes universe and everything in it but gets pissed when you try to use it. You have to guess which things piss god off.
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”
Ah yes, fission power plants, famously vulnerable to average thunderstorms.
I mean, we all saw how well one of them held up to a tidal wave
You realize that thunderstorms are unrelated to tsunamis?
Take a minute and rethink this comment.
Take a minute and rethink this comment.
I mean, we all saw how well one of them held up to a tidal wave
Nowhere in the first comment did the poster claim that tidal waves and thunderstorms are related.
Maybe you came in after CrimeDad made their comment.
I can understand the confusion.
Done. No change in my position. In what way do you think that thunderstorms (a weather phenomenon caused by atmospheric conditions) and tsunamis (a wave caused by an earthquake or large underwater landslide) are related?
I mean, we all saw how well one of them held up to a tidal wave
Where did the original comment say that they were related?
You made something up.
If you feel like it’s relevant I guess that’s your choice.
What are tsunamis, but thunderstorms of the sea?
what are thunderstorms but the ocean of the sky?
Now you’re getting it!
well, no, because the sky is the ocean of the sky.
Lol concrete and steel doesn’t give a shit about hail
Sounds like something Big Concrete and Steel would say.
They wouldn’t say anything.
And they’d make sure you didn’t either.
Real Boeing hours
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.
“Am I out-of-touch?”
No, it’s all the people I insulted with my edited comment who are wrong!
Please. Stop double and tripling-down on bad comments and just take the L…
How the fuck does a sneeze guard insult anyone.
If you are, it definitely isn’t me who is wrong.
(And the only edit was the comment, you humorless fuck)
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.
This. mirrors focused on a boiler work best, but then you get random fried birds…
That’s a solid negative. Sorry you’re being downvoted to hell. You might have some points we could all talk about.
Thanks. I do not take it personally at all.
Utility scale coal and NG plants seem like a worse idea.
Certainly, but PV isn’t the thing to replace those.
If you agree that Coal is worse then PV, then you agree that PV should replace Coal.
Sure, but I don’t think that’s effectively possible. For example, Germany has had to restart coal fired plants even though they were deploying PV like crazy. However, nuclear power actually can replace coal. Incidentally, the good Germans have been falling for fossil fuel interests and getting rid of their nuclear plants.
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.
Nuclear vs fossil gets in to why you don’t/can’t run all nuclear, else things would be very easy. Nuclear’s capabilities are best suited to supplying the base load/minimum demand but they can’t be ramped or dispatched, reactors basically run most efficiently at their designed output levels, so you can’t use them to balance supply and demand. The use of fossils for base load is more a thing in countries with lower regulations, usually because of things like a growing manufacturing economy (ie “global south”), but also in some extraordinary regulatory circumstances (Germany) or just because of when fossil was brought online/refurbished. Fossil’s capabilities are like the opposite and they are most efficient and economical used for load-following, which is even more important with renewables you can’t dispatch.
So fossil is still the main control lever for reliability, and that’s the crux of why a suitable replacement technology isn’t available yet. If it was simply a matter of output level then we’d have no problem. Mitigations to reduce use of fossils when demand is high can even be things like a demand response/dr program for transmission-connected facilities, where they are incentivized to reduce their use during times of high demand. Basically instead of having a higher energy price and all this generation online, you take a bit of what that price would be and use it to incentivize consumers to reduce their demand. Smart stuff but fossils are still a thing with that and if storage could replace them we could easily just have nuclear+storage, even smaller nuclear like those SMRs/small modular reactors.
Another massive consideration with all of this is the logical location of each type of generation at the transmission level. In the event you might have to bring the grid back from 0, or even just handle expected equipment failure, the specific location in the logical grid where types of generation is attached has to consider the capabilities of each type of generation. For example in a blackout situation you can’t just start a nuclear generator when the demand is effectively 0, you have to bring generation and loads online from scratch in very increments initially. During the 2003 northeast blackout there were opinion articles complaining about how the casinos were online before neighborhoods, ignorant to the fact those casinos were instrumental in providing an initial load on the transmission grid.
What are you saying, that fossil fuel power plants, presumably quick responding natural gas fired ones, will always have to be incorporated into a power supply mix? If it is just for emergencies, that seems like a reasonable compromise. Would it even be considered part of the mix in that case? Still, I’m not convinced that that would really be necessary. Couldn’t a properly sized variable load be sited at each nuclear power plant to the same effect? Couldn’t it be as simple as sending a little bit of steam to small turbines that are just for grid start up and then venting the rest?
Not that fossils/natural gas are required per se but their capabilities. Some places like Norway and Quebec are geographically blessed with distributed hydro that can fill a lot of that need. The variable load for a nuclear in that case could be many times larger than the generator itself but I’m not aware of any studies on that. Kinetic storage with massive flywheels is maybe the closest thing to that, or even batteries. You can ramp nukes by venting steam but that heat can cause environmental issues. Similar to hydro how their capabilites are reduced based on environmental factors like handling spring runoff.
There are some very recent reports out of the Ontario regulator who are dealing with this exact issue right now. Long term demand increasing for the first time vs carbon legislation, and the mandate to have a reliable grid.
That’s a really interesting engineering challenge. If you have any links handy to articles explaining the situation in Ontario please share them.
