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A comment on After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit. Parent comment

Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by mdorazio on Saturday July 04, 2020 @04:27PM (#23734706)
This seems kind of like a bullshit excuse where they just didn't really want to fix the issue. There are a number of waterless cleaning systems that have been available for years, for example [1]. Additionally, why the hell would you throw away the water used for cleaning? Filtering the dust particulate out of the water is pretty straightforward (hell, you can go from muddy to fairly clean water with nothing more than a cotton t-shirt), then you reuse it to clean more panels. 1L/panel with even basic reclamation is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdidbRQaUEY

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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by ianai on Saturday July 04, 2020 @06:53PM (#23735455)
Agree. They could probably just have people walk around with blowers to blow the sand off.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by indigo945 on Sunday July 05, 2020 @06:50AM (#23737808)
I would suggest that blowing off sand with a strong airstream would scratch the solar panels, further reducing their efficiency. Or maybe there's other problems; in any case, I find it somehow ignorant to assume that nobody in the Pakistani government has ever heard of or considered a blower (or a broom).
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by ianai on Sunday July 05, 2020 @12:17PM (#23739754)
I assume they have heard of blowers and probably knew sand would be a problem with this install. My take away is that project was a bad faith effort to serve as a strawman against renewables for oil. This is an engineering problem not a technological problem of solar panels. Having skipped over it implies questionable motivations.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by smnplk on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:08PM (#23735520)
Would those be a gasoline powered blowers ? ( ͜ʖ)
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by datameta on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:37PM (#23735646)
Perhaps a step down transformer that directly feeds a dyson blade style blower at one of the edges of each panel. More up front equipment and infrastructure cost but no employee wages. However I'm sure this is full of holes due to cost multiplied by number of solar panels and the number of transformers needed. It is also only able to clean only during the day assuming no battery or pumped hydro storage.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by philg_jr on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:42PM (#23735670)
What about solar powered golf carts with blowers?
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by thelittleone on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:00PM (#23735491)
I wonder how much of the 1L evaporates.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by Jedd on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:41PM (#23735661)
During the night and very early morning, probably very little.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by heavyset_go on Saturday July 04, 2020 @09:56PM (#23736113)
Evaporation often happens at night because of the temperature differences.
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Re:After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit by Jedd on Sunday July 05, 2020 @09:02AM (#23738363)
> Evaporation often happens at night because of the temperature differences.

I'm not sure the phrase 'temperature differences' exhibits a profound understanding of evaporation.

If a location gets 45c (as per GP's reference) during the day, this doesn't necessarily speak to night time temperatures.

I'll note that Bahawalpur's temperature profile is available at:

https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Tem...

For the three hottest months of the year the average lower temperature is around 25C, which suggests quite a low evaporation rate overnight.

It would be great if you could provide some more detailed insights.

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