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.
Interesting indeed.
They should have bolted the panels closer, with shrouds flush with the concrete around the edges! Or maybe add a coolant loop? Perhaps the concrete helps with that already, but is just too technical to include in this article.
A thermal control loop seems like it might be helpful, but the cost would have to be weighed against the remaining efficiency of a simpler setup.
Or just some person hosing them off (which kinda looks like what they’re set up to do, given the position near the railing).
Depends on the mineral content of the available water. If I hosed off solar panels with my readily available household water they’d be under a hard white (calcium carbonate) crust within a couple of dozen hosings.