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.
Yeah people and the media have this weird fascination with putting solar panels in new places. I don’t think finding locations to add them is as big of an issue for how much people seem to care and want to “solve” it.
In a lot of way, the electric grid binds us all together because we have to maintain and improve on the other side of that, it’s a powerful way to motivate folks(rimshot). A lot of countries have had issues with this over the years.
Trying to put solar back in that “box” is not a good use of our time.
It’s not cold fusion, but it just may be close enough.
Could fusion is and always was completely nonsense, it was a design flaw of a measurement instrument that made people think it worked, even though everyone who worked in nuclear fusion immediately dismissed as impossible. There’s a great book that covers the subject called atomic adventures, written by one of the guys very involved in disproving the idea