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Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps. The plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys (www.ecoportal.net)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

As far as I can tell from what I've been able to look up, that's not quite how it works. The wind itself isn't converted into electricity. The turbine extracts kinetic energy from the moving air and converts a portion of that energy into electrical energy. As a result, the air leaving the turbine is moving more slowly than the air entering it.

That reduction in wind speed is real, but it's localized. Atmospheric mixing continually replenishes the slower-moving air with faster-moving air from above and the surrounding area, so the effect largely dissipates as you move away from the wind farm. The amount of energy extracted is so small that it doesn't have any meaningful effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the wind farm.

🤷

I don't know. It's alarming how many people don't even have a rudimentary understanding of basic scientific principles. We were taught the laws of thermodynamics in elementary school here in the states in the early '90s for me.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    The wind itself isn’t converted into electricity. The turbine extracts kinetic energy from the moving air and converts a portion of that energy into electrical energy. As a result, the air leaving the turbine is moving more slowly than the air entering it.

    That's what I said, just without mentioning all the stuff in between - I'm sure that there's cables and other boring details involved as well ;-)

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I don't know. It's alarming how many people don't even have a rudimentary understanding of basic scientific principles. We were taught the laws of thermodynamics in elementary school here in the states in the early '90s for me.

    The biggest lesson from thermodynamics is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We may only be taking a minuscule fraction of the wind energy, but taken to an extreme there are bound to be some bad effects. In between those extremes, there are likely less predictable effects like disruption to local wind patterns.

    I doubt we’re anywhere near that and there’s probably little chance of ever getting close to that without huge jet stream harvesting generators or turbines covering most of the land, but we can’t pretend that the energy is free and completely without side-effects.

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