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

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49103510

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.

    • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago

      I mean if they can access the dam walls to install it, I’m sure they could access it to do maintenance, no?

      • e_chao@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        They probably installed them from one end to the other in sequence. Now that they’re all in place, how do they get to the ones in the middle?

  • P00ptart@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    That’s smart. Now let’s use them for shade over large buildings and parking lots. Imagine how much money Walmart would save by covering every Walmart in solar? Now even if they only did half the parking lot, it would draw people there over other places by bringing shade to a brutally hot walk to the door.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Here’s a better idea: let’s destroy the parking lots, build buildings that are actually useful in their place, and then put the solar panels on top of that.

      Or if you must insist on having big-box stores with lots of parking, at the very least put it under the store!

      • iocase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        crawls out of a manhole

        Aaaaannnnddd we can do district heating and cooling with combined heat and power plants! Denser cities are well suited for a shared heating/cooling grid that’s a lot cheaper and efficient than owning your own equipment for heating and cooling. It also leaves more rooftop available for greenspace or for solar panels.

        Additionally you can use combined heat and power (CHP) plants to make the heat needed for the system, including using heat to make cooling with absorber chillers.

        The Danes have one of the most advanced thermal grids in the world so far by complexity. They even use heat pumps to recover waste heat from sewage, data centers, and supermarket fridges/freezers (which actually makes them far more energy efficient btw since it’s a smaller thermal lift, and the pumped energy is sold into the grid to make money instead of just being waste)

        We could literally heat and cool the entire world but we dump it all as waste heat 🫠

      • P00ptart@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        I don’t disagree with you. Parking underneath with solar above is a great idea. Unfortunately I’m not in any position to tell these places what to do. I can’t even get the company I work for to understand how much solar would benefit us considering it’s a giant uncooled foundry. Shading the roof, AND free electricity?!? Considering how many people are heat casualties per year, or call ins because of it, it just makes business sense and they’re like “nah, we’ll just install another fan.”