
Ask HN: Who has experience of setting up / running solar farms? - lifeisstillgood
I was listening to the below podcast and at 20 mins in the speaker brings up this &quot;lenders are enthusiastic about lending to solar - its default levels are 0.0001% historically&quot;  Now a business where capital loans are plentiful, the inventory just sits nicely in a field and you are selling what everyone everywhere wants seems a good business.  Especially if we throw in some fun optimisation<p>So what is wrong about solar farming - is it a ground level cash producer at low margins for the next decade? Or is there something I don&#x27;t know ?<p>Pathways to Climate Security https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;war-studies&#x2F;id402434575
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mchannon
There are a few cautionary tales: Around the turn of the century, Southern
Company (Alabama Power) decided to be forward-thinking and put forward one of
the first large-scale solar farms using unproven thin film technology, and
took a huge writedown when the panels failed and underperformed in a few short
years. So the first takeaway is that not all solar panels are created equal.
Some have 30 year warranties and some last 30 years.

PV doesn't maintain itself. Some panels inevitably fail and need to be changed
out. Weed control has to be put in place. Compared to, say, farming corn, PV
is very low maintenance, but it's not zero-maintenance. So you need a staff to
watch over it, maybe brush the snow off...

Another aspect is the question of land value. Land is not worthless, and if
it's land that has other uses, PV panels might not be the best thing to put on
it.

Non-PV (solar thermal) is a totally different animal, with severe issues with
cooking birds, but the potential to provide dispatchable power well after the
sun goes down.

The duck curve is also rearing its ugly head. California's about maxed out for
PV capacity without running into constant wintertime power surpluses, where it
better hope Arizona wants to get paid to take the noontime surplus. PG&E,
S.C.Ed, and the other major California utilities need to figure out pretty
quick that home-based PV needs to have governors to disconnect them from the
grid at noontime when the grid is full, much as some require for air
conditioners. Expect larger-scale and longer-term duck curve problems to start
showing up as PV saturates.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Duck curve sounds so much more dubious than swan neck or s-curve - I like it

