[dublin]

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!)

[naniwaduni]

> 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?

[extropy]

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.

[blacksmith_tb]

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.

[bradstewart]

A falling bullet broke a solar panel? How big of a bullet.... Mine have survived hailstorms without issue.

[alliao]

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?

[benj111]

Water cooling (in a closed loop) could solve point 1.

Bonus if you use that heat to generate more power at night.