Storm Hardening Solar Panels

The drones will survey power lines throughout gulf power s service area from pensacola to fort walton beach to panama city in advance of storm hardening and reliability improvement projects.

Storm hardening solar panels.

Hurricane irma alone left more than 6 7 million people without power. While solar arrays can survive severe weather events in some case systems are. Those numbers helped irma one of the most expensive storms in history. Select best practices for resilient ground mount pv systems with hurricane exposure discusses the root causes of pv system failures from hurricanes and describes recommendations for building more resilient solar pv power plants.

Investments to make our energy grid stronger and more resilient helps improve reliability for our customers in both good weather and bad while keeping costs low. Rocky mountain institute s rmi s latest report solar under storm. There are several cases where solar panel systems came out almost completely damage free after huge hurricanes like hurricane harvey and irma as well as other severe storms including a hail storm in the denver area that only damaged one out of 3 000 solar panels. Evidently over 8 months of testing went into their solar flare emp hardening design.

With recent and ongoing hardening substation. The mainline powers the many branch lines that power your home or business. Storm hardening upgrades include stronger poles narrower cross arms that help wires deflect falling branches stronger wire and smart switches that. For more background on these measures please reference robinson 2018.

Of note one of their engineers tested solar systems and panels at white sands new mexico emp test range. Over the past. Solar photovoltaic pv power has many advantages as a resilient power source including the ability to provide power after a natural disaster. For more background.

More frequent storms and aging infrastructure mean utilities can no longer afford to ignore the threat of. This report investigates 13 storm hardening measures for solar pv systems summarized in. During 2018 nts testing and certification services verified the sol ark 8k solar generator withstood 100kv m emp while in use. While this year s hurricane season has ended gulf power continues work to harden its infrastructure as we prepare for next year s storm season.

This report focuses largely on specific design features that can help make pv system s more resilient but ensuring quality construction and installation is equally important this report investigates 13 storm hardening measures for solar pv systems summarized in table 1. Solar in the caribbean. This handbook is the result of 10 years of international collaboration carried out by experts from the international energy agency s iea s solar heating and cooling shc solar paces and photovoltaic power systems technology collaboration programmes. Gulf power s program is taking lessons learned from a similar program employed by florida power light company gulf power s sister company.