Your comment shows you really don't know much about solar PV. Deserts are horrible for solar, for two major, and a bunch of minor reasons:
1) Heat kills PV efficiency, since, to a first order approximation, current is proportional to irradiance (deserts good), but voltage is inversely proportional to temperature (so deserts very bad). You make way more power on a clear winter day in Colorado (assuming no snow on the panels!) than you do on an Arizona summer day. If you don't like this, take it up with God, since it's just the way he built the universe and the quantum physics of semiconductor junctions.
2) Dust (and/or salt, if you're anywhere near the ocean) is a huge enemy of solar power production (so deserts bad, again). Dust or salt spray can easily cost you nearly half of your power output. PV panels are scarily susceptible to even small shading from leaves or even bird crap on them. I can throw a business card on most panels and take out 1/3 to 2/3 of that panel's output. If wired in a string, as is typical for utility scale PV, the loss of that single can take out the power production of that entire string (typically 12-22 panels worth), since it can no longer reach the inverter bus voltage set by the unimpaired strings.
Oh, and cleaning panels is really expensive - it was $0.50/panel a decade ago when I was collecting the largest database of DC solar panel data in the world - I don't imagine it's gotten any cheaper... (One of the big selling points of our software was that it could optimize cleaning and maintenance timing and intervals. This can actually make the difference between breaking even on the array cost or not!)
> I can throw a business card on most panels and take out 1/3 to 2/3 of that panel's output. If wired in a string, as is typical for utility scale PV, the loss of that single can take out the power production of that entire string (typically 12-22 panels worth), since it can no longer reach the inverter bus voltage set by the unimpaired strings.
Wait, how does this shit even work at all, then? Are solar farms just perpetually functioning at <50% capacity because everything broken all the time?
This used to be true for cheap panels. Better panels would have bypass diodes for every cell (the 10x10 cm square) and would only loose the output of the affected cell.
You'd like to think there would be some monitoring - on my roof at home, I had something smash one of my 20 panels, right in the middle of the grid (probably a bullet falling after someone shot up in the air, but I like to pretend it was a meteor...) I didn't notice the output was halved for weeks.
i had a hunch this was the case on cleaning, I think around my area Auckland, New Zealand not able to clean it yourself is the difference... does this mean the maintenance company are rent seeking the margin, and if so why aren't panel makers do cleaning as well? or is cleaning such a un-scalable operation that it's best left to lowest bidders?
I've been wondering lately if it wouldn't make sense for power companies to offer a battery incentive program to homeowners. They'll cover 1/2 the cost of a battery but mandate that the system be set to draw from the grid when production is high (middle of the day mostly) and be used to power the home in the evening when demand is high but production is tailing off.
Some companies do Time of Use contracts which do this to a degree, but flat incentives (cut a one time check to the homeowner) seem much less complicated. The grid gets smoothing and the homeowner gets to keep the lights on when the power goes out and doesn't have to spend nearly as much on the install. The power company doesn't have to manage a big bank of batteries somewhere and saves on distribution costs. Plus the homeowners technically own the systems so when something goes wrong the power company doesn't have to roll a truck to fix it.
The only real problem with this scheme is that the battery market is already squeezed with so many companies jumping into the electric vehicle business and production lagging behind demand. However, this is likely to be a short term problem, so hopefully in the next couple of years something like this will be practical.
True, but there are numerous other costs with doing industrial scale storage. You need to buy the land. Need to design and build the facility and interconnects. Need to do the permitting, environmental review, and other paperwork. Need to do the maintenance and deal with security. Building a facility like this usually involves buying all of the batteries at once, which is difficult in a supply constrained market like we are in now.
A sharing program foists most of this complication off on homeowners.
I wonder if it would be a possibility to relay electricity across the US with large battery stations from big solar farms, or if the loss in transit + the expense of the batteries would make something like that intractable.
So Cal has Sunrise Power Link which is high voltage transmission lines specifically designed to bring in power from the solar and wind farms in the desert. The proliferation of solar farms in the desert is a clear indicator of how that has gone.
Growing up in San Diego I hilariously remember environmentalists protesting the Sunrise Power Link. The reason given by my high school classmates who were involved in the protesting was that it threatened some desert tortoise's habitat or something like that. There were also some NIMBY types protesting the transmission lines.
From the gas and oil companies' perspective, with enemies like these, who needs friends?
The issue is really mostly the difficulty of smoothing production over consumption. And transmission.