Mother nature knows best... (2026 Update)

The problem is that that is MUCH more expensive than the fixed panel approach which is why hardly anyone does it like that.

The records of hail big enough to damage solar panels is excellent.

Knowing that there was hail in the past doesn't mean that it can be predicted in a timely manner in the future so that the panels can be protected.

Would the panels need to be protected in every heavy rain storm just in case that the rain turns to hail within a period of seconds/minutes?

In this case if it had been predicted then would have all those people have deliberately left their motor vehicles in the open to get damaged?

The predictability probably depends on the local climate. I remember decades ago in Brittany we were having a beautiful August day on the beach, clear blue sky, hot sun, calm sea. Then all of sudden all the little boats out on the bay started coming in, some of them really motoring. What the hell? we thought. Then the sky went black and everybody started racing to the car park. We just got into the car when the hail started. Literally the size of golf balls. Our camper van with its near-vertical windscreen was OK, but at least a dozen of the more sporty cars with the sloped-back style of windscreens had them smashed.

alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> wrote

You don't do that by prediction.

You decide from the historical records if hail that can damage the solar panels is likely enough to warrant protecting the panels, and then turn the protection on if that involves active protection when a thunderstorm shows up.

Does no harm to do that given that the panels won't be doing anything useful electricity generation wise when the heavy rain storm shows up.

Plenty don't have any choice and plenty won't have been warned about the possibility of hail and plenty will just let the insurance cover it with such a rare event.

Back in the day the joke was to never buy a car with a vinyl roof in Jo'burg, because that was how you 'fixed' one that had its paint stripped off by hail.

Why did we ever bother with steam locomotives and then diesels when we could have had electric trains?

At any given time the cost of labour, the level of technology the availability of resources and of course the political flimflam dictates what is the optimal solution

In the case of Fukushima the backup systems did not fail. The containment contained...

Now the fact of the matter is that a large - very large - reactors is more efficient in terms of resources but the political flimflam makes it immensely long to get certified. Not built: certified.

Small modular reactors are more expensive in terms of resources, but need less approval due to no active scram cooling and being able to be approved just once at the factory.

This makes them nuch faster to bring online., 3 years maybe

timing. I don't think electricity had been invented in time,].

The first electric motor ran some years before Stephenson's Rocket. Technology takes time and someone's money to develop, and steam looked easier to scale up, and did not require a large and complex fuel distribution infrastructure. Even today, not all UK railway track has electric power. There are still diesel engines, though now they normally drive electric motors.

The earliest cars were driven by steam and by electricity, but hydrocarbons took the lead fairly quickly. Even today, electric cars are much more expensive and of lower utility than hydrocarbon-driven cars, and are driven by politics. Had they been driven by economics and practicality, they would have become popular decades earlier, and would have forced battery development much earlier than actually happened.