a question about solar panel farms and hurricanes?

around my town there have popped up hundreds of acres of solar panels in last 2 years.
my question is this if a hurricane comes and kills local power grid but leaves panels mostly intact will they keep generating power and if so what happens since there is no longer a grid to shop collected electricity away. could it cause fires? reason i ask i was away from home from my little town of 250 people for 2 years and when i got back this week town was surrounded by several hundred acres of solar panels replacing farm land.

Capital letters and punctuation matters.

To answer your question...how could we possibly known without at least some level of understanding of the infrastructure and how it's implemented?

a reply to: RMFX1 its tapped into local power grid.

a reply to: proteus33

With several hundred acres of solar panels, very good batteries and/or capacitors to be and stay charged during off sunlight or very cloudy days, and a very good - well installed inverter(s), there is a very good possibility that the solar panel system could theoretically keep the town with electricity for a long time. Years in fact as long as the system is well installed to combat high winds, tornados and heavy rain with hail up to 6 inches, travelling at speeds up to 250 mph.

The town's distribution and service wiring should all be placed underground as well as the transformers to power the houses and businesses. Placing the distribution and service wiring underground and sealed against water intrusion should keep the town high and dry. Not knowing where exactly the town is located, you would have to worry about direct hits from tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes and vandals.

To answer your question, yes it would still power the town with the appropriate switches and reclosers installed.

You are asking about danger.

There is always danger when lines go down. Is there battery storage?

The panels can be taken offline if lines go down. It may be set up to do that automatically now. There are regulators in use so it doesnt matter how many panels there are. The controllers sense the battery levels, and open relays to charge the batteries as needed.

I have panels, a controller and giant gell batteries here at the house. I built this set up. At our cabin, we have panels, controllers, and two sets of batteries that run on separate circuits. One set is lead acid, and the other is expensive large Lithium batteries.

I wouldnt be overly worried about your situation, unless its a real Oakified set up

a reply to: NightFlighti I live in eastern north carolina and the panels are supposed to sell electricity back to duke energy but the way its wired has it feeding thru local substation . I just was wondering because we seem to get hit by a major hurricane every few years and was not sure how the tech would handle not being able to send out generated power if transmission likes were kaput. after florence it took a week or 2 for towns electricity be partially fixed

a reply to: proteus33

If the town is incorporated, I would get the politicians (mayor, councilmen) involved. If not, your state representative and senator for your county should be contacted and asked if the appropriate equipment could be installed to keep the electricity flowing in case of a natural disaster. The worse they could say is no.

Then you should look into installing your own generator and switching system.

a reply to: proteus33

I would not worry. Solar panels are much too fragile to survive a hurricane. Probably require 80 to 90 percent to be replaced.

If you want solar for backup after a storm, keep the panels in your basement until the storm is over.

a reply to: proteus33

All someone from the utility has to do is disconnect the panels from the inverter station. Most times it's automatic.

Depending on the location (alaska and rural areas), the panels may charge a large battery bank but that's not the norm.

Typically the inverter will shut down if it doesn’t see a 60 hz sign wave from the utility provider. That stops the solar farm from killing some poor linemen working down the road. It’s mandated to be automatic and near instant. The biggest obstacle to overcome is storage, photovoltaic panels produce Direct Current which can be stored in any number of different batteries. Battery density is extremely expensive at the utility level, and they have a given life expectancy. The battery bank for a very small town could cost many times the cost of the panels.

The panels are pretty tuff. At a conference at Solar World I saw a demonstration, they built a dance floor of panels and had a Spanish Dancer stomping around with no damage to the panels. My company set one up at a baseball game and had a contest, I invited anyone to try and break a panel with a baseball and win a hundred bucks, It survived.

The main concern about storms is the wind, I saw one tracking array destroyed in a wind no more than 40 mph. And it was parked in table top mode. Meaning in the safest storm configuration. Properly install, non tracking framing is very strong. But nothing is indestructible.

Somewhere Solar arrays survive storms every day.

a reply to: proteus33

If the grid is down and these are not special island grid inverters, the solar power plant will just shut down, if it was still physically there. It's a security measure so if the energy company shuts down the lines for maintenance, they won't have to deal with the PV plants, that would still produce energy.

But I doubt it would work even if that was not the case. Even if the construction holds, and the mounts hold, the tilted PV panels act like an airplane wing. The air on top needs to flow faster to make the race and that produces lift in the modules.

They either fold at some point and are ripped out of the mounts, the glass will shatter. And all that ignores the high possibility of an object impacting the panels.

It's more viable to set ten 300Wp panels aside and the inverter, build it up when the hurricane is over. You need special sinusoidal wave inverters that can do it without external grid guidance.