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RANGEfire! | Heat wave renders massive UK solar farms useless
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Originally found on RANGEfire!.
by Michael Austin for Western Journal
Solar Panels Suffer Stunning Failure as Weather Becomes ‘Too Hot’ for Them to Handle
Well, it looks like solar panels aren’t going to be saving the planet any time soon.
In fact, some aren’t even able to work efficiently when the sun is too hot, which defeats the purpose of solar energy.
We know this because reports indicate the record heatwave tormenting the United Kingdom has effectively rendered solar panels there useless.
In an article Tuesday headlined “Weather ‘too hot’ for solar panels,” The Telegraph of London reported Tuesday that temperatures of over 104 degrees Fahrenheit — “for the first time ever in Britain” — severely negatively impacted local solar panels’ ability to store energy.
As temperatures rise above 77 F, solar panels become 0.35 percentage points less efficient with each increasing degree Celsius, the report said.
“The efficiency of solar panels is impacted by temperature, with high temperatures above 25 degrees [Celsius] negatively impacting on performance,” Tim Dixon, an analyst at Cornwall Insight, told the outlet. “It is likely that the extreme temperatures have impacted total output levels.”
Luis Villazon of Science Focus offered an explanation in answering a question about whether solar panels work better on hot days.
“Surprisingly, they perform worse as the temperature rises!” he wrote. “Solar panels work by using incoming photons to excite electrons in a semiconductor to a higher energy level. But the hotter the panel is, the greater the number of electrons that are already in the excited state. This reduces the voltage that the panel can generate and lowers its efficiency.
“Higher temperatures also increase the electrical resistance of the circuits that convert the photovoltaic charge into AC electricity.”
Now, it should be noted the past few weeks have been far from a failure on the solar energy front.
According to Fortune, Germany hit record levels of solar energy output over the weekend, although “if temperatures remain elevated for long” that output will certainly regress.
Despite this, the question remains: If climate change is truly the existential threat leftists claim it to be, won’t “extreme temperatures” be the new normal?
At that point, won’t their precious solar energy sources become more and more useless?
When it comes to solar panels, wind turbines and other “green” sources of energy, some experts believe there are already many better alternatives we could be using today.
Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger used to be a climate change alarmist and green energy enthusiast, but then he looked at the numbers.
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