Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys
www.ecoportal.net
High in the Swiss Alps, on a concrete dam wall more than 8,000 feet above the sea, someone bolted thousands of solar panels to a place almost no one thought

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.

  • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
    90·
    5 hours ago

    In the United States, this is called treason because it makes Donald Trump PP in his pants

      • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 hour ago

        This is the Internet. Everything is about America. for fucks sake, we invented it.

        sorry to sound like a dick, but seriously… If you don’t like that, invent your own Internet

        • green_link@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          44 minutes ago

          the itnernet wasn’t created by the US. it started as ARPNET, which yes was created in the US. but the internet that we know today wasn’t created in the US, the WORLD wide web was created in Switerland in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). the world wide web, or the internet, uses a lot of the same protocols that ARPNET created. but ARPNET is not and was not world wide until Sir Tim used the same protocols to allow regular people to traverse ARPNET from around the world. the US built the underlying tech, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN built the internet on top.

          claiming the US created the internet is false, just like saying Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. when Edison bought the patent from two Canadians named Henry Woodward (a medical student) and Mathew Evans (a hotel keeper) from Toronto Ontario, who actually invented the incandescent light bulb 5 years (1874) before edison bought the patent. Henry and Mathew only sold the canadian and US patents in 1879 to edison because they lacked the funds and could not find any investors to manufacture them. at best what edison did was improved the filament inside so they lasted longer. but buying a patent is not the same as inventing it.

          just more failure of the US education system.