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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.

The people down the street from me in Houston are currently powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had to abandon our house.

Last year, I went on vacation to Alaska. Me and my friends airbnb'd an off-grid home/cabin in Talkeetna, about several hundred miles north of Anchorage. It was powered entirely on solar panels on the roof and right by the house. Water from the rivers. Granted, it had a wood stove, like most cabin/homes are in the north. Just want to chime in and say that renewables are absolutely very prevalent in colder, remote climates.

it isn't that big a deal to run a fridge and some led lights on solar pAnels. As you identified heating and cooling are the big energy users.

Miles north of anchorage? How many hours of sun were you getting? 3? 1?

I was curious so I used sunrisesunset.com to see.

Looks like at June 21 (picking a day around the summer solstice) sunrise is at 4:04 am and sunset is midnight. That's a nice 20 hours of sunshine.

On the flip and dark side, Dec 21 it is sunrise at ~10:30 am and sunset at ~3:30 pm. A sadly short 5 hours of sun. Ouch.

Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered.

As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself.

Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.

Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost.

But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.

I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean.

I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!

The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper.

Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.

If they're still producing any power, they'll have some self heating just through waste.

I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off.

After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water

Turns out you can actually design around that. Heck, my solar panels cleared themselves of the foot of snow we received (Idaho) without any intervention on my part. If necessary I could’ve gotten up there with a broom and ladder.

Solar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow isn't the cause of the deficiency today.

Texas is pretty large and their solar resources are way the hell out in Pecos County where it hasn't been snowing. This is actual ideal to have your solar power plant far to the west of your population centers, to handle the evening load peak. If Texas had California-scale solar power installations, they would be warm and happy right now.

In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.

i have solar panels in texas, snow slid right off.

Natural gas plants also had to shut down. This was a systematic failure to plan for cold weather,

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