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scruss Regular Member Joined: 20/09/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 83
Posted: 01:04am 21 Sep 2021
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Hey,
So I'm mostly here for the microcontroller bits, but I've got a few decades of experience in utility-scale wind and solar. I'm originally from Scotland (where there's more wind than solar, but it's still worthwhile) but have lived in Canada for almost 20 years. I don't have any renewable equipment installed at home, but am a member of a couple of wind and solar co-ops.
I thought you might like to see a bit of standard field installation equipment used in some Canadian solar farms:
This is a cable tie installation sled. It's a cheap office chair cable-tied to a kid's sled. It allows the field worker to scoot about under the panels, installing cable ties around the guides in the racking. This would have been in use, but on the day we audited the site, it was a slightly brisk -38 degrees C, and the installation crew had been sent home because the cable ties were getting brittle and would snap with the cold. It was cold enough that soles of your boots froze, as did your over-trousers. We were walking around like Frankenstein all day.
This site's a 10 MW monocrystalline installation in the far west of Northern Ontario. It's about a kilometre north of Rainy River, the border between Canada and the USA (Minnesota) to the south. It's part-owned by a local First Nation, and brings in good money to the local indigenous people. This was built under the Ontario Feed-in Tariff, the now-abandoned incentive to build renewable energy when our manufacturing industries cratered after the 2008 crash. All the inverters, racking and modules were made in Ontario.
Needless to say, on a bright sunny day with light reflecting off the snow at -38 degrees, the inverters were screaming. I'd also like to say that you get just as painful a burn touching the frame of a module with your bare hand at -38 C in Northern Ontario as you do at +48 C in Arizona. You probably knew that, but I proved it by experiment.
johnmc Senior Member Joined: 21/01/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 282
Posted: 01:52am 21 Sep 2021
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Good Day Scruss,
Welcome to the forum , most interesting update. When in the merchant navy, I went to Duluth Minnesota and the great lakes in mid summer 1961, beautiful looking, especially the islands in the lakes. Also went to Churchill in Hudson bay, cold overnight even in mid summer. Canada is a vast and interesting country.
Cheers johnjohnmc
Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1578
Posted: 02:49pm 21 Sep 2021
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How is snow kept off the panels? Is it a machine operation or manual? I have read of people getting over panel rating outputs due to the cold and the sun reflecting off the snow. Is that something you ever see where you are?
Saw one guy whom was getting substantially over panel rating after creating reflective snow berms to concentrate more light onto the panels. Quite Brilliant.
Also saw where some people were mounting panels flat on walls and still getting excellent outputs due to the light reflected off the snow and of course snow build-up was not a problem on the vertically mounted panels.
Do you still have the ability to transfer summer RE generation to offset your winter Bills and do you get a Feed in return on the power you generate in excess of what you use?
scruss Regular Member Joined: 20/09/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 83
Posted: 11:37pm 21 Sep 2021
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It's not. Typically when it's snowy the days are so short that the generation is very small. When it's a bit warmer you might have to worry about ice melting and refreezing, shading the lower cells of the module and knocking your generation out. But when it's that cold, the snow either blows off or sublimates off. The racks are fixed: very few of the Ontario FIT projects used trackers.
Cold panels produce a very high voltage. It's voltage that makes the smoke come out of an inverter.
Maybe for domestic installations (well, not any more since our (unprintable) of a premier canned all RE programs) there's season offset, but these large projects just get paid a flat rate for what they generate.
SimpleSafeName Guru Joined: 28/07/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 319
Posted: 04:43am 22 Sep 2021
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Canada's a lovely place. I've always had a great time there, and the Canadians that I've met have always been wonderful!
That said, you can keep the cold. :)
I grew up in Colorado, and I also know what -40C (or -40F, same thing) feels like. It feels like it's time to move to Tennessee.
Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me.
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