this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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These seem fragile and very inefficient...
Vertical solar panels have been shown to be surprisingly efficient.
https://www.solarwa.org/vertical_bifacial_solar_panels
The plants also have a cooling effect on the panels, which further increases efficiency.
They have made the fences tall, which creates an impression of fragility, but we don't see how deep the posts run into ground. :)
I have a solar fence in operation for 1 year. My version is 1 panel width tall - about 1.2 meters tall, and I built it extremely cheap - 5 cm rectangular wooden posts with a metal screw tip running 30 cm into ground. Assembly using household screws and luck. During storms, it does change position, but I haven't noticed disassembly.
During hail, it would survive events that would smash my other panels, because a vertical surface exposes less target area and offers more oblique angles of collision to hailstones.
As for efficiency, my vertical array is the most efficient array I have during winter. It's never covered by snow and catches low sunshine better. In summer, it is the coolest (but not most efficient) array that I have, because it creates verticial convection and gives away heat more efficiently. But it differs from theirs because it's an east-west array (they seem to have used a north-south geometry to catch morning and evening sunshine).
As for what they said of their results: