A couple of ways this shows up: 1. making your system rugged to handle extreme weather. These sites need to last 30-40 years without breaking, which pushes you to use pretty heavy + large components. Piles get driven several feet into the ground, so even with unfolding systems you're still probably pile driving. 2. tracking -- adding the complexity to enable rows to rotate to face the sun makes it harder to make the system portable. Basically all large-scale solar getting built is single-axis tracked. 3. module cleaning -- it's important that vehicles can traverse rows to clean dirt off of modules on a regular basis. Having structure that connects the rows together may make this more difficult.
None of these are intractable on their own but together they make the approach you describe very difficult.
With panels getting so much cheaper, is tracking necessary still? Maybe if land is at a premium, but I know the aerocompact commercial deployments don’t support tracking.
Factory assembly and field deployment is a far faster, safer, and higher quality method of building solar farms.
Now that that’s taken care of, we just need some way to get the interconnection queues moving faster :-)
Seems like you could fold them like an accordion into whatever max size can be carried by a forklift, drop them in place, pull them out to unfold, screw the whole prewired assembly down with ground screws, and plug it into the neighboring assembly?
This would probably work best with E/W racking, would go from tightly packed to corrugated.
I’m sure there are challenges I’m not considering, but with modules getting insanely cheap, it seems like racking/assembly/inverters are starting to dominate, and scaling up from single modules to full assemblies assembled in factories seems like a good next step.
(I’ve been building my own 20kw ground mount array, so I’ve had plenty of time to daydream about something we could’ve just dropped and pulled out)