Limiting solar panel damage

Solar panels are increasingly being used in vast arrays on the roofs of marine construction halls or the charge workers electric vehicles. The large surface area and thin glass construction makes these panels very prone to damage from extreme weather events, especially from over-sized hailstones, with whole solar farms being written off in just a few minutes. Other events such as floods, wildfires or lightning strikes can also cause catastrophic damage. The world’s changing climate is making these events more common, just as ever larger renewable energy installations are being built.

In 2024, for example, thousands of solar panels in Houston, Texas, were destroyed by hailstones the size of golf balls, and it took engineers three months to restore the operations of the 3,500-acre site. According to Adrienne Peters, Technical Planning Manager at DSD Renewables, this kind of damage isn’t unusual anymore. In the USA last year, there were 27 weather disasters costing more than US$1 billion each. This is up from an average of 9 similarly costly disasters per annum between 1980 and 2020. Climate change has been blamed for a dramatic rise in the power and strength of wildfires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, hailstorms and blizzards, each of which can damage facilities and cause severe power outages.

However, researchers are finding ways to mitigate the damage from ‘once in a generation’ storms that now seem to be hitting every few years instead. Whilst solar farms have been built to withstand ‘severe’ weather of 25mm hailstones and 120mph winds, they are unable to cope with the new types of extreme weather. Hailstones the size of basketballs, for example, destroyed 14,000 panels at a site in Nebraska in June 2023.

The solution is in two complementary approaches – one is using data as a diagnostic tool, helping to better evaluate the risks, whilst the other is creating solar arrays that can quickly tilt to resist the weather.

Writing for Renewable Energy World, Peters explains: “Modern surveillance tools can turn your storm response from reactive to preventive. Drones, IoT sensors, thermal cameras, and high-resolution SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems now feed data into platforms to surface problems early. These monitoring tools can be used to identify issues on-site and assess potential structural damage or soiling on panels due to things like smog or debris.”

With a better idea of the likelihood of potential damage, the extra costs of preventative measures can be calculated, and justified.

“Projects in colder regions are being designed with steeper tilt angles to minimise snow accumulation and take pressure off the racking,” Peters writes. “In hurricane zones, rows are shorter, piles are thicker, and anchoring is tighter. Lightning-prone areas like Central Florida are upgrading grounding and surge protection. Sites at risk of flooding have elevated inverters. Historical weather events can also refine best practices. During a 2022 hailstorm in West Texas, operators stowed solar panels at 60 degrees, the steepest angle available. That protected most modules from 2-inch hail, but damage spiked where stones reached 3 inches. After the storm, engineers reviewed site data, modelled alternative scenarios, and found that a 75-degree angle could have prevented nearly all damage.”

For anyone thinking of fitting solar panels to a large yachts or boat building halls, Peters’ advice is to research the likelihood of extreme weather where the boat is heading, or the hall is to be built, and then use that intelligence to design a more resilient system.

“Put all that data to work,” she concludes. “Use it to guide your long-term strategy. Benchmark performance against regional baselines to spot degradation early. Run diagnostics before failures, not after. Build climate projections into your models instead of relying on what happened decades ago. Design projects with tomorrow’s codes and regulatory standards in mind. Leveraging these insights along with evolving technologies will help advance resilient solar systems that can contribute to the grid for the long haul.”