Why aren't sun-tracking solar panels in use at scale? Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs, increased maintentance costs, or just because they won't add much extra output?
> Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs
Economically infeasible because of decreased hardware costs. Panels are so cheap compared to tracking systems.
(Quick envelope calculation: Amazon offered me a 400w panel for £200. Amortize that to about 6h of effective daytime use, that's 21600 seconds or 8kWh/day. 25 year warranty lifetime; derate that by, say, 20% to allow for degradation. 20 years is about 7300 days. That's about 58,400kWh. UK electric costs are all over the place at the moment, but at £0.30 that means .. you're buying £17,520 of electricity for £200.)
NOT INCLUDING BALANCE OF SYSTEM COSTS, solar panels are really cheap.
Tracking does not significantly increase the amount of available energy out of a plot of land. It just reduces the amount of PV panels you need to efficiently utilize it. If you tile land with horizontal PV, all photons that hit that land hit them.
And once PV is cheap enough, the expense of tracking (and especially the maintenance expense of tracking!) to deploy a little less silicon does not make any sense.
I think a while back solar panels got cheaper than the curved mirrors used in molten solar based solar thermal plants.
'Cheap lower efficiency solar cells' became uneconomic when the non silicon cost of the panels became too high a proportion of the total cost. Because half the power per panel at 2/3rd the cost per panel doesn't pencil out.
Your calculation is way off. Getting 8kWh a day from a single 400Wp panel would already require 20 hours of operation at theoretical peak power, so under real-life conditions you can only expect a fraction of that per day.
This doesn't invalidate your point though - even if you're one order of magnitude off, your £200 solar panel will buy you about ten times its price worth of electricity.
I have 22 solar panels rated at 370w, I live in Phoenix Arizona where it’s normally cloud free and sunny. I have them facing southeast and southwest. My most productive panel produces about 2.5 KWh a day.
Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but you’d get no where near 8KWh a day from a 400W panel.
Trackers are used at scale but it depends where. If a solar plant isn't intended to maximize output because peak prices can be negative, then there isn't much point. However at locations where something other than price is a driving factor, trackers are common enough at grid-scale facilities.
The energy market systems are somewhat distorting perceptions of power in general and some reliability planners are worried that as older dispatchable generation goes offline for good, rotating blackouts may be in the future for many high demand areas.
The tracking hardware is expensive both in terms of initial outlay and maintenance, relative to the increase in output (which is significant: ~30% or so), when compared with the cost of just adding more panel area. Tracking is useful if you are constrained by the area of panels you have or the area you have to put the panels, but if you are constrained by neither and just optimising for price they lose to just building more fixed panels (in fact, with the rate at which panels are getting cheaper there's even a bit of a push towards not even bothering with building the mounts to orient the panels in the best fixed orientation and just putting them flat on the ground).
Why aren't sun-tracking solar panels in use at scale? Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs, increased maintentance costs, or just because they won't add much extra output?