[HN Gopher] Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar po...
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Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses
Author : geox
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-04-08 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| duxup wrote:
| Is there a maintenance issue here?
|
| Most solar setups I see seem to focus on simple static structure
| that I presume is intended to be low cost / low maintenance.
|
| Is maybe the altitude / exposure here maybe a substantial
| advantage?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I think that they simply don't want to tear down the dishes
| because they will be expensive to rebuild, so putting solar
| panels on them is a way to get some money out of the dish that
| will at least cover maintenance of the structure.
|
| Then when in the future they need more capacity they can put in
| better receivers and motors quickly.
| duxup wrote:
| Got it, might be "good enough while it's working" and can
| reconsider later.
| usrusr wrote:
| The article does not mention it (or I did not find it
| skimming), but I'd consider it safe to assume that there's
| also a bit of a conservation angle: once a piece of alpine
| engineering is established as part of the landscape, people
| seem to like it a lot. Even the very same people who would
| pick up torch and pitchfork against anything new I think.
| Imagine the outrage a proposal to return the slopes of the 48
| Stelvio hairpins back to their natural state, or the
| Landwasser viaduct, or any of the Kaprun dams. As much
| outrage as a proposal to install new heliostats on yet
| untouched rocks would get, or perhaps even more.
|
| Those dishes are monuments to what in hindsight is called the
| Space Age and while they'd probably fail to qualify for
| conservation for conservation's sake alone, giving them a
| second career as heliostats seems like a very pragmatic way
| too keep them, and keep them serviced even.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Plus, you never know when you might need a giant satellite
| dish!
| dewey wrote:
| "They can be flexibly aligned with the sun and thus generate
| more electricity than conventional solar panels."
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Got to be the most expensive possible way to put up a few square
| meters of solar panels.
|
| In Texas, where land is cheap and sun plentiful, they have a
| project where they're just laying them out on the ground. No
| support structure, no expensive clockwork to tip them this way
| and that. They want to get more watts, they buy more dirt-cheap
| panels and lay them on the ground too.
|
| See, all that support structure costs more than the panels these
| days. Way more. You want to spend your money wisely, ditch the
| supports, buy more panels instead.
| gaazoh wrote:
| This is Switzerland, where land is not as plentiful as in
| Texas, not by a long shot.
|
| Plus, the support structure is free in this case, it's
| definitely cheaper to lay solar panels on those dishes than
| tearing them down just to lay panels on the floor. Also, having
| solar panels laying flat on ground level sounds like skimming
| on infrastructure to save money short term but having to pay
| higher maintenance long term: you have to keep the panels
| relatively clean for them to work, having them slanted and
| elevated a bit means that less dirt get on top of them and rain
| washes most of it regularly.
| thomasmg wrote:
| My guess is: the problem is not the price of the land or the
| price of the structure, but the permits. In Switzerland, you
| can put solar panels on existing buildings without requiring
| a permit.
|
| As the article says, there are many "large" solar panel
| projects planned in Switzerland, specially in the mountains,
| where the snow will reflect the light and increase
| electricity production in winter (where electricity is the
| most expensive). But it takes a very long time (sometimes
| many, many years) until those projects are approved, if they
| are approved at all. This is known to be a problem, and
| government did try to speed this up, but it still is far too
| slow. (I'm Swiss.)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Texas uses robot vacuum cleaners. Not a lot of rain.
| Definitely a sweet spot for them.
|
| Anyway. I'd guess they'd do better to lay them on the ground
| next to those dishes, than the expense of climbing up there
| and fastening them to that massively expensive
| superstructure. Not to mention the danger to life and limb,
| climbing around up there.
|
| Generally speaking it's just a mistake to mount solar panels
| in some difficult-to-reach expensive place.
|
| Optimal: A large flat space near the existing grid, with
| generous road access and clearance. On cheap land and cheap
| supports. Where it can be serviced, not too far from the
| service center.
|
| Those dishes fail on half of those metrics.
| Mashimo wrote:
| But what do you do if you own the a set size of land and
| satellite antennas already?
|
| Tearing the antennas down down also cost money.
|
| I don't know the rules for new solar structures, but keep in
| mind in some places in Switzerland you can't even paint the
| house the color you want.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| They've already got the dish. They can use it for solar panels
| for now and if business comes back they could take them off and
| use again for its intended purposes.
|
| It's a little wacky, but at RF the dish performance isn't
| actually degraded as much as you might think by the panels.
| It's possible that at night the system could be used for its
| original purpose and then in the daytime generate solar.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Again, one step better than that is to just put them nearby,
| at ground level. Safer, cheaper. And probably, don't go up
| there into the mountains at all, but put them near the grid
| in some convenient place. All improvements over climbing up
| on dishes in the mountains.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They're not mounted at all? Texas also has wind, and storms,
| and tornados. I'd think panels literally lying loose on the
| ground would be at too much risk of blowing away, or getting
| covered in mud.
|
| I can maybe see just mounting them to concrete sleepers or
| something....
| mNovak wrote:
| The whole thing is a red herring. How many of these old
| antennas exist, maybe a dozen? At "25 homes" each, it doesn't
| meaningfully impact the cited 50 TWh need.
|
| Sure the structure is free so why not, but even that needs
| maintenance, just ask Arecibo. It's unclear from the article if
| they plan to use these as sun-tracking panels, but the burden
| of that would make it rapidly economically unfeasible.
| rurp wrote:
| Putting solar panels on existing structures, as is the case in
| this article, is much better than on undisturbed land. The
| upper crust in a lot of southwest desert stores a significant
| amount of carbon which gets released when you tear it up for a
| construction project. Such projects also use a lot of water,
| which is a scarce resource in many desert areas. Plus
| destroying the land harms a lot of native plants and wildlife.
|
| Putting solar panels on existing structures avoids all of those
| problems and produces just as much energy. There is a _lot_ of
| space on existing buildings that doesn 't yet have solar panels
| and we should be making much more of an effort to improve on
| that.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "Global glut turns solar panels into garden fencing option"
|
| https://archive.ph/AAIKe
| ponector wrote:
| >> US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen pressed China to stop
| flooding the market with cheap green technology exports.
|
| What a joke! Wouldn't everyone benefit from cheap green
| technology?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| US-based panel manufacturers won't benefit.
| yumraj wrote:
| Exactly, and when China has a monopoly, they can jack up
| the prices.
| bootsmann wrote:
| But solar panels aren't chips, the hurdle for new
| entrants is significantly lower. I don't think this is a
| strategic move by China and more a result of Xis attempt
| to reignite their economic growth.
| amenhotep wrote:
| It depends if they're actually producing them at that price,
| right? If they are - and I do assume that's probably the case
| - then that's great, everyone benefits from cheap solar
| panels/whatever else and we can expect them to keep getting
| cheaper, brilliant. If they _aren 't_, if they're losing
| money on each panel/whatever they sell, then it's economic
| warfare rather than progress and the point would be to drive
| other manufacturers out of business. Not brilliant! Not good
| for future expectations! Yellen would presumably be
| justifying her stance based on a claim of (2) and maybe she
| privately believes (1) and it's simple protectionism, but it
| would be surprising if she admitted that.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Chinese industrial policy is quite a bit more sophisticated
| than just dumping money and subsidizing industries. They
| only do that in the beginning. They first subsidize and
| erect barriers to outside competitors. It then becomes a
| chaotic place with many domestic competitors. They then
| lower (or eliminate) the subsidies and basically it becomes
| survival of the fittest among the domestic producers. This
| is when domestic producers innovate and become more
| efficient. Once they are sufficiently strong and
| competitive, they start taking down the barriers to foreign
| competitors and also start exporting. This is exactly the
| playbook they used for EVs.
|
| (BTW, this isn't new or Chinese. Both Japan and South Korea
| had done versions of this. Japan originally learned it from
| Germany.)
|
| All this to say by the time Yellen or anyone has started
| complaining, the subsidizes are gone already. The Chinese
| companies has been incubated into very competitive
| companies.
|
| The US is starting to reconsider the idea of industrial
| policies now. The recent op-ed by Marco Rubio suggests even
| the traditional free-market party is rethinking it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Chinese industrial policy is quite a bit more
| sophisticated than just dumping money and subsidizing
| industries. They only do that in the beginning.
|
| > All this to say by the time Yellen or anyone has
| started complaining, the subsidizes are gone already.
|
| Just because the subsidies are gone doesn't mean they
| haven't had their effect. Once you've already paid to
| develop the technology and build the factory, the
| incremental cost of making more units is much lower and
| you can outcompete companies that never received
| subsidies to do that.
|
| > The US is starting to reconsider the idea of industrial
| policies now. The recent op-ed by Marco Rubio suggests
| even the traditional free-market party is rethinking it.
|
| One of the big problems the US (and Europe) have is that
| subsidies aren't just money. We keep passing rules the
| cost of which can be absorbed by large established
| companies, but make it harder to get new companies off
| the ground. Meanwhile developing countries don't impose
| those rules.
|
| That isn't a short-term disaster when you already have a
| lot of large established companies that have already
| recovered their startup costs, but it's a long-term
| disaster. New companies form in places where that isn't
| the case, and those companies start to take market share
| from your own established companies.
|
| But it's a hard problem to solve because the inefficiency
| doesn't have a single cause. It's not some specific
| individual rule, it's the existence of thousands of
| separate rules that require teams of compliance
| bureaucrats to operate under, and identifying and
| eliminating the ones that can't survive a cost/benefit
| analysis is specialized detail-oriented work not easily
| turned into a sound bite. Meanwhile the ones who most
| know how to identify the least efficient rules are the
| compliance bureaucrats, but they want to keep them
| because that's their paycheck.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| For what it's worth, with Bifacial panels (they make power from
| both sides) and the right layout, vertical panels like a fence
| actually do work.
| mey wrote:
| https://youtu.be/5AVO1IyfA9M this person did a side by side
| experiment on their property with both angled and vertical
| bifacial with some interesting results. Their advantage
| didn't seem to be efficiency but consistency.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Just want to know, why are they using bifacial solar panels,
| considering the cost benefits?
| nolist_policy wrote:
| AFAIK it's not uncommon for the cells to be visible from both
| sides even with normal panels.
| ambyra wrote:
| Is that really the optimal arrangement for solar panels on a
| dish? Looks like 40% empty
| sedatk wrote:
| I'm more like a glass 60% full kind of person.
| ape4 wrote:
| Of course, the issue is fitting rectangular panels into a
| circle. Since, apparently, solar panels are cheap now - perhaps
| they could overlap panels to cover all of the circle.
| whiterock wrote:
| Overlapping doesn't work due to the fact that individual
| small cells of a bigger panel - when shaded - greatly
| diminish the output of the entire solar panel.
| hinkley wrote:
| And yet they left the focal point and its support poles
| there. No I agree with the people calling
| bullshit/publicity stunt. This array irritates me.
| ambyra wrote:
| Yeah when I read the title I thought they were covering
| the old dish with mirrors and putting a collector at the
| focal point. This is much less interesting :(
| hinkley wrote:
| Right!?
| robocat wrote:
| I presume they point the dish at the sun, so the shadow
| is in a fixed position. However the video shows during
| installation so not pointing at sun - but shadows that
| you see don't appear significant
| turtlebits wrote:
| Considering it wasn't built to support solar panels, maybe
| that's all the mount/dish can support?
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's leaving the feedhorn in I find the most baffling. Now you
| have a giant shadow generator right in the middle of your
| setup. Why?
| Aspos wrote:
| My old house has a roof with complex geometry which does not lend
| itself to rectangular solar panels. I wonder why triangles are
| not the standard shape for solar panels as triangular panels
| would be more efficient in tiling surfaces available.
|
| I bet those antennas can be tiled more efficiently with
| triangles.
| Hextinium wrote:
| Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to
| make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away
| a different tiling advantage.
| Aspos wrote:
| But triangle is a rectangle cut in half, no?
| lazide wrote:
| From a manufacturing and installation perspective,
| triangles are twice the hassle for a given square footage.
| Aspos wrote:
| True! Assuming manufacturing will be +10% and
| installation will take 2x time and assuming half panel
| will produce half the power, my back of the napkin
| calculation suggests my solar roof would pay for itself
| not in 5 but in 6 years and would keep producing $ for
| the rest of its lifespan.
| lazide wrote:
| My point is that you're an expensive niche (manufacturing
| and installation wise) in a market usually competing on
| $/sqft.
|
| Manufacturing would be more than +10% because existing
| lines would need to be retooled to produce it, and it
| would require different packaging. Volume will be lower
| as well, so margins need to be higher. 50% more
| expensive? Or maybe even the same price as a normal panel
| twice the wattage.
|
| Installation would be more than 2x because standard
| mounting wouldn't work, so it would be 3x the time
| (probably) plus figuring out how to mount them. Since you
| have an odd shaped roof, that would also likely increase
| difficulty/costs.
|
| Very high snow load or flexible solar panels are similar
| (but larger) niches.
|
| Looks like someone does make them though! And my guess is
| someone does already have all the mounting knowledge, it
| just may not be the regular solar install guy, so it may
| take tracking someone down.
|
| [https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-
| module...]
|
| Unlike the other products in their site, that link
| doesn't have specs and wants someone to 'contact us for
| details' which doesn't seem like a good sign.
|
| This is also why utility scale solar has been the trend
| lately - it's often more economical to turn some random
| low value flat land half way across the state/country
| into a maximally cost effective solar installation and
| then sell the power. Which means square panels on the
| simplest and easiest racking they can figure out.
|
| Every random person figuring out their own bespoke
| solution is a lot more expensive.
|
| if it will actually pay back that quickly, that's awesome
| - then you get to bypass whatever insanity your utility
| is doing to cause those high prices. I haven't heard of
| any up to code installations having nearly that good a
| payoff. Where are you located?
|
| Bespoke is a lot more fun/cooler though.
| Aspos wrote:
| Makes sense. Thanks! I am in NJ and my house has good
| insolation. And with all the federal and state incentives
| plus no-financing cash purchase solar panels may pay off
| just like installer is promising. I wish I had a larger
| and flatter roof though.
| hinkley wrote:
| Triangle would have wiring problems.
| pkirk wrote:
| This italian company https://www.trienergia.com/ [Trienergia]
| produces (in Italy!) triangular panels.
| MiguelHudnandez wrote:
| The panels themselves are squares fit into triangular frames.
| But there is a lot of empty space on the dish installation
| and this would absolutely use more total panel area.
|
| See product page & screenshot: https://www.trienergia.com/pro
| dotti/residenziale/73/modulo-f...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Weird, a parabolic dish makes no sense if you point it directly
| at the sun. Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles. A
| flat plate mounted on the existing az/el tracking of the original
| dish would be optimal. Stuff that plate full of panels and track
| the whole contraption to the sun and all panels will be perfectly
| aligned.
|
| If you replace the panels with mirrors and have an ultra
| efficient high power panel in the middle the dish form factor
| would work (and this is how they built them in the 80s though I
| think they were heating water for steam back then) but that's not
| what they're doing here.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah the real story here seems to be that solar panels now so
| cheap that people can waste them on pointless stunts like this.
| pcl wrote:
| Put more generously: solar panels are so cheap that other
| factors (existing scaffold, ease of installation, aesthetics,
| ...) dominate installation decisions.
| zardo wrote:
| You save maybe a few thousand dollars in solar panels by
| installing the flat plate, but you have to validate the
| additional structure.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Most panels will be pointed at suboptimal angles.
|
| I do wonder how electricity pricing plays into this: having
| panels that are optimized for production in mornings and
| afternoons will produce less overall, but could provide more
| valuable power overall.
| blkhawk wrote:
| you could just add a triangular shim under each panel that
| make them flat towards a common level. Each ring would need
| their own shim height but since you need some mounting
| hardware anyway this would add only a bit of weight.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Good point! That would work yeah. The placement will have
| to be modified a bit to avoid shadows but that would work
| just as well.
| nick7376182 wrote:
| Mounting hardware like that can easily cost nearly as much
| as the panels with how cheap panels can be right now, and
| the cost of the extra labor to install standoffs.
| happyopossum wrote:
| That mounting hardware shouldn't cost any more than
| standard mounting hardware - it'd be a simple matter of
| making one pair of standoffs taller than the other. You
| are going to need standoffs, and the labor to install
| them anyway.
| crote wrote:
| Yes, but suddenly you need _different_ kinds of standoffs
| instead of one uniform size. This makes manufacturing a
| bit more expensive, logistics a bit more challenging, and
| installation a bit more complicated.
|
| All of this means it's going to be more expensive than
| standard mounting hardware. Not by a lot, but solar
| panels have become cheap enough that even small
| differences matter.
| tzakrajs wrote:
| Yes, but on my napkin, all of this will create
| significantly more power which more than offsets those
| costs.
| akira2501 wrote:
| The entire thing is on a coaxial mount. If you need less
| power, just turn it away from the sun, intentionally
| designing suboptimal features to chase uneven demand loads
| (between winter and summer) would not be a worthwhile
| strategy.
| hinkley wrote:
| Plus they should have removed the collector, as the arms will
| cause some of the panels to block energy flow in the system.
|
| I'm also not convinced this is the densest layout for the
| panels. Pretty sure I could get 5-10% more onto this dish, not
| counting removing the focus.
| turtlebits wrote:
| The antennas/mount are rated for a certain amount of weight
| and might not support fully packed panels.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| There's something heartwarming about this: Just slapping a
| bunch of panels on any old abandoned structures and calling it
| a day seems so fundamentally un-Swiss -- It's like they're
| starting to become human!
|
| (In humor of course -- Switzerland is impressive, I'm fully
| aware that there's plenty of rural agriculture and other such
| "suboptimal imperfection" there etc.)
| turtlebits wrote:
| With microinverters it doesn't really matter if some panels
| aren't optimally places.
|
| A flat plate won't have the rigidity of the existing dish, and
| replacing it probably will cost more than the project is worth.
| beambot wrote:
| I assumed this was going to be about repurposing the dish as a
| solar concentrator, but they're literally just lining the dish
| with standard solar cells. This makes no sense beyond the PR
| value -- you could literally just put these panels on a
| southward-facing slope and get better net efficiency...
| panick21_ wrote:
| We should have been building new nuclear reactors for the last 20
| years. Its so fucking obvious it isn't even funny. At least our
| idiot nation didn't follow the fucking morons in Germany with
| their 'destroy the nuclear fleet' policy.
| Morelesshell wrote:
| Its not obvious.
|
| And stop insulting my country.
|
| WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in
| Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us.
|
| My parents were probably young parents and it was not clear at
| all what the real impact was. The news suggested to clean/wash
| all vegetables and still TODAY you need to check your hunt for
| too high radiactive values.
|
| It was NEVER obvious and Fukushima showed again HOW unreliable
| it can be and how little we know about this.
|
| Am i against Nuclear? No.
|
| But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years
| ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the
| proper radar.
|
| I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It
| will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV,
| Wind, Battery and EVs.
|
| Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win.
|
| Edit: PV are just crystals, they should be even cheaper to
| build than now and with more flexible PVs you can do a lot of
| interesting and reasonable things. You can use them as fences
| (there was already a news article about it), you can put them
| on facades, around light posts, on your balcony, use them as
| sun shades etc.
|
| Wind became a lot better with no one really talking about it.
| And wind energy grows quadratically by radius. Big wind mills
| make A LOT more energy
|
| Batteries will be a game changer. We need them for EVs anway,
| we use them in laptops and smartphones. In germany we have a
| very good power grid but in 2th world countries like the USA
| you have a lot of Grid problems. Add batteries to it. And even
| in countries like canada you have the 'outback' with grid
| issues after bad weather.
|
| Alone the batteries for EVs will help a lot of providing
| necessary buffer capacity.
|
| We tend to forget how big and impactfull our oil consumption
| actually is. Its a lot easier to have batteries and 'thin'
| power lines than transporting oil from the ground to refineries
| to gas stations.
|
| The current situation is not better, its just paid off
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm Swiss. Complaining is what we do.
|
| > WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in
| Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us.
|
| Sadly yes, but at least we didn't lose our brain as much as
| Germany.
|
| The whole 'we are psychologically damaged and so can't
| evaluate properly' doesn't really work for me as an argument.
|
| Yes, my parents are also psychologically damaged by this
| episode, if you show them scientific data they get angry. The
| last 50 years of fear mongering and propaganda have worked
| well. The whole 'any mushroom might kill you' is just
| nonsense.
|
| > But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20
| years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on
| the proper radar.
|
| Nuclear is a good idea climate change or not. Most nuclear
| reactors were build for practical reasons not climate.
|
| And nuclear would have been commercially the best option by
| far, if back then we actually evaluate coal plants the same
| way as we do now in terms of fossil fuels and regulation.
|
| We already have the right combination, water and nuclear. But
| instead of having our own policy we adopted the 'Germany will
| surely have cheap energy for us' strategy and that backfired.
|
| > I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it.
| It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in
| PV, Wind, Battery and EVs.
|
| My math indicates something very different. Germany in 2000
| had 20% nuclear, even with minimal learning effects, building
| nuclear would have been considerably cheaper then all the
| cost Germany had for their 'green' (coal energy) strategy.
| Not just the investment, Germany also had very high
| electricity prices during that whole time. And with the
| energy crises the amount of money they are using reduce the
| impact of the energy crisis is immense.
|
| And with all that investment and cost, they aren't even close
| to fully replacing fossil fuel.
|
| Battery are nonsense, so far can only be used for grid
| stabilization, not any serious outage. And if you take the
| cost large scale batteries (that have yet to be invented)
| into account, the whole solar/wind/battery plan looks even
| worse.
|
| Go look at Li-Battery prices, they are not coming down in
| price anywhere as close to as people thought. And the grid
| scale battery startups are all taking much, much longer then
| claimed or are bankrupt.
|
| > Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win.
|
| A single nuclear reactor is economics of scale. And if you
| build many of them, you get economics of scale in that too.
|
| As I said, even if you consider the price paid by UAE for
| South Korean plants (literally built in a country with no
| nuclear regulator and no educated workforce), and you just
| take that cost. Germany would have saved money. If you take
| into account the cost reduction from building 40-50 plants,
| its not even close.
|
| The simple fact is the fastest most efficent and cheapest de-
| fossilization ever done has been done with nuclear. We have
| literal prove that this is true. When all these countries
| were sitting around formulating the Kyoto protocol, France
| already had a green grid.
|
| P.S: Fukushima killed less people then German coal plants do
| every year. German coal plants have been systematically
| murdering the population for centuries, not to mention
| causing all kinds of health issues, particularly in children.
| All this ridiculous panic about radioactive mushrooms,
| despite there not being a single reliable cause of death from
| that while everybody is having lung issues because of coal.
| Its just incredible how people who are usually smart and
| informed on a subject believe all the Greenpeace panic
| propaganda.
|
| Turning of nuclear before coal is a gross criminal act, and
| the people responsible should be imprisoned.
| Morelesshell wrote:
| While i'm slightly surprised by the overall quality of the
| comments here:
|
| It looks really really neat.
|
| It looks like something out of a scifi movie and i like big
| dishes.
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but I think the dishes they are using here
| were once part of Onyx, a rather large communication interception
| system [0].
|
| It got famous in 2006 when it intercepted proof of CIA black
| sites (mentioned in the Wikipedia article as well). Until then,
| the Swiss public didn't really know the scope of the system.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)
| gumby wrote:
| > "Former satellite antennas are ideal as solar energy systems,"
|
| Trackers almost never make economic sense; panels are now so
| cheap that it is usually cheaper to just take up more area.
|
| But when the hardware has already been deployed and then
| abandoned, this can work. Hence the word "former" in that quote
| in the article!
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