Up on the dam, almost everything that looks like a problem becomes an advantage.
The plant sits above the fog line, in thin, clear air that lets far more sunlight through.
The higher you go, the stronger and cleaner the sunlight becomes.
Cold actually helps, because solar panels work more efficiently when they are not baking in heat.
And then there is the snow, which acts like a giant mirror, bouncing extra light up onto the panels from below.
Scientists call it the albedo effect, and it can lift a mountain plant’s output well beyond anything possible in the valley.
A test site at a similar height recorded yearly output far above a typical Swiss plant.
I’ve thought for YEARS that we should to the same thing with the Hoover Dam. Should also mount wind turbines on the face of it to catch the updrafts out of the canyon. You all acting like green energy has to be mutually exclusive to one another. Wind turbine blades have a lot of surface area that could be covered in solar panels, which solves the issue of solar panels energy output decreasing with heat because then they’d always have built in cooling. No wind? There’s still light and some wattage is better than no wattage. Put the turbine blade head on a giant hinge and they can catch rising air from the grounds’ radiant heat at night. Free energy is everywhere if you just know where to look and how to take advantage of it.
That is a stupid idea. Blade weight is one of the biggest engineering issues for wind turbines.
if you can get a solar cell in a 6 oz calculator, I doubt highly that incorporating it into the design of the blade is going to add much more weight than the expanded aluminum and fibreglass that’s already there.
Are you listening to yourself? Because a 4 cm² solar cell fits in a 170 g calculator, that means that 200-300 m² of solar cells will be fine for the 35 ton turbine blades at around π/2/s of angular momentum with the outer radius of 100m? Those concepts are barely related.
You have no idea if the fiber glass blades have the tensile force to spare to deal with 3 tons of extra weight from the panels alone, or what it will do to the bearings in the generator if you load them 10% or 15% more, or how much flat panels will fuck up your blade aerodynamics, or how expensive it will be to get custom curved panels to preserver the aerodynamics.
Just hand waving everything that stands against your idea away as solvable is magical thinking, not visionary brilliance.
Any extra weight is too much. Plus a 6 oz calculator doesn’t usually fly at 300km/h in open weather, you will need some strong (heavy) glass or plastic too protect the panels. Much simpler too just put them on the ground next to the wind turbine.
if it’s a structural engineering problem then it’s probably solvable. perhaps they can be added like fins on the blade which would disrupt turbulence, reduce drag and sound, much like how an owl has ragged feathers to allow them to have silent flight.
But why? We’ll make better blades without the extra weight of the solar panels and cheaper panels by just putting them on the ground.
“infrasound” complainers
It’s a great idea but impractical with existing tech.
Always be aware of people who throw that word “stupid” around. They are usually hiding their own deficiencies.
I thought making turbine blades significantly heavier was the stupidest idea in this thread, but you’ve proved me wrong!
Maybe it’s no big deal, but I imagine there’s a significant complication of the blades to do that. They’re basically wings, and (again, I’d imagine) are structurally sensitive.
Agree with your general point of mix and match and combine
solar cells are basically a membrane. it’s usually the mounting frame that adds the weight.
I think a problem could be that the wind turbines are moving parts, so they somehow vibrate, and that could be a problem for the dam while panel on the other hand are basically a layer of paint.
Putting solar panels in a valley in Switzerland is… a graphic demonstration of tunnel vision.
I certainly don’t. But I agree, there’s a lot of ideas that die on the cutting room floor because they don’t pander to a specific lobbying interest.