Most of the costs of building a solar plant is the years of bureaucracy, and the majority of projects (the ones that get built that is) end up massively reduced in scope. So more expensive but more efficient panels are a boon, and won't change much in the total price.

Good resource to solve any solar panel glare problem. Useful for solar on the free spaces around airports as well.

Plus I see tons of solars here on rooftops, on new buildings etc. Colleagues with houses got some tax breaks so they poured some serious money into these and drive teslas basically for free (doesn't change TCO that much given how brutal repair costs or more frequent changes of those big tires & brakes are, but still, they have a warm fuzzy feeling about it).

Regarding brakes: that is pretty far from the truth as other sibling commented they use regenerative braking.

Tires - yeah. Well, except minivan or some pickups weights the same as Tesla so it is not like out of ordinary.

And those bigger cars - thats not majority on Swiss(=european) roads, we have tons of narrow roads, parking spots are short and narrow too. Roads with traffic generally look very different compared to US.

There's also very little appetite (and it's been the case since the 80's) for hydro anyway. Even before the biodiversity argument, simply moving whole communities is just no longer a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrator_photovoltaics

This should allow swapping out a small PV module and more cheaply upgrade a farm as PV module efficiencies improve in many small steps.

One could argue that one would have to upgrade the inverters at every step, but that would be wasteful: just size the inverters to accomodate many future increments (if inverter lifetime is bottleneck one has to estimate future efficiencies of PV modules, if inverter lifetime is not the bottleneck just use the thermodynamic maximum efficiency to size the inverter once, and only upgrade the PV module over time).

There's not as much mileage in panel upgrades as you might expect. It's not Moore's law, it's much slower, and surprisingly the rated life of inverters tends to be shorter than that of panels. Once panels are installed they're going to be left alone as much as possible (because that costs money) for twenty or more years.

A great deal of the utility-scale solar in the US uses 1-axis tracking.

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_...

"Projects using single-axis tracking have consistently exceeded fixed-tilt installations since 2015, and dominated again in 2022, with 94% of all new capacity using tracking -- the greatest ever."

Look at the price for upgrading the solar farm over time, N times the price of solar panels may still dwarf the cost of the optics.

Concentration doesn't work on diffuse sunlight, scattered off clouds, dust, or the air itself. In non-desert regions diffuse sunlight can be significant fraction of total insolation.

Concentration is also more complex and can require cooling of the PV cells. On the plus side, very high concentration can increase cell voltage and hence efficiency.

Vegetables too! This operation is in the town where I live:

https://sproutcityfarms.org/jacks-solar-farm

Colorado is hot and dry, but like you say with pasture the taller panels shade the plants enough to give the them a break from the sun and heat. Too much heat and photosynthesis stops for a lot of plants.

Also just like for pasturing the panels help keep water from evaporating and creates three micro-climates within the micro-climate of the solar farm itself. There's cool and wet on the east side of the panels, cool and dry right under the panels, and warm and wet on the west side of the panels. I'm using "wet" liberally given that we get about 14-17" of precip per year.

Your mention of lower mortality for sheep surprised me, I didn't know it made that big of a difference, but it turns out that people farming veggies get the same benefit. I'm watching the video at the link above and the farmers keep talking about how much better it is working in the shade, and that's a good point. Vegetable farming is hard work.

Colorado isn't light-limited so we can afford this shade. The same can't be said everywhere, but the bottom line is that in many places solar farms can actually help crops instead of limiting them.

I think you meant irrigate :-)

https://www.jurchen-technology.com/products/solar-mounting/p...

Having these things unattended in the middle of nowhere would cause major maintenance challenges.

Any particular reason why you did/didn't go for a micro-inverter setup?

I've also have three-phase AC at home, and battery storage, so not sure how it would combine with that.

I'd also need to look up installation requirements, particulary how it handles de-energizing the grid side when the power cuts out. My string inverter has current transformers installed at the connection point to the grid, so that it knows when the power goes away.