another victim of Hurricanes and other violent weather: Crucial Green energy infrastructure

Hurricane Milton is a reminder of what 100 mph wind can do to man-made structures as it tore roofs off houses and wrecked the top of the Tropicana Stadium in St. Petersburg, among other calamities.

But there’s also another issue: It can also wipe out solar installations and wind turbines.

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Solar panels have to be built in an extremely sturdy state to avoid heavy weather damage, with, Luis Ceferino, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, telling Grist that “We’re still understanding what impact these high winds bring on solar panels,” both on roofs and in arrays at ground level.

In terms of wind farms, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reported, “Wind turbines are vulnerable to hurricanes because the maximum wind speeds in those storms can exceed the design limits of wind turbines. Failure modes can include loss of blades and buckling of the supporting tower. In 2003, a wind farm of seven turbines in Okinawa, Japan, was destroyed by typhoon Maemi and several turbines in China were damaged by typhoon Dujuan. Here we consider only tower buckling, because blades are relatively easy to replace (although their loss can cause other structural damage).”

What this comes down to is a the creation of a new generation of design, and that could take years to create and deploy. The process is also extremely expensive given the size of the largest wind and solar facilities.