Solar power accounts for much of Australia’s energy generation. Sean Carroll looks at emerging technologies that help commercial solar farms protect their investment.

Rooftop solar panels connected to the National Electricity Market generated 24.6TWh over the past year, and solar consultant SunWiz reported in early 2024 that solar farms in Australia exceeded 30GW and about 2GW of large-scale solar farms were in production in Q1.

It doesn’t look like it’s about to slow down anytime soon. The solar industry is looking for more ways to create farms with Partners in Performance, a global consultant, identifying unused commercial rooftops and car parking spaces as potential vacant real estate for solar farms.

One of the major concerns regarding solar farms is weather-related damage, particularly hailstones damaging the panels. Plenty of mass solar panel installations come with tracker technology that’s designed to follow the sun, optimising energy generation. With accurate weather forecasting, tracking technology can be used to put panels in a safer position during an extreme weather event.

Several weather forecasting solutions have entered the solar industry in recent years, with technology developed specifically for solar farms. At All Energy Australia in October 2024, Early Warning Network (EWN) was one of those companies.

“We’ve been around since 2006, and we were the first Australian company to issue severe weather alerts on a B2B basis. It’s still well and truly our bread and butter but the solar farm industry is one that we’ve started specialising in,” EWN head of sales Martin Katzmann says.

“We currently service several solar farms across Australia with our portfolio and it’s mostly for our hail alerts. So, we alert these solar farms at a given time when hail may be coming, what size the hailstones will be and how long it’ll impact the space.”

“EWN doesn’t just relay automated alerts from the Bureau of Meteorology. The company integrates proprietary monitoring systems, and advanced technologies such as high-resolution radar and 3D volumetric analysis to forecast and monitor hail events. This multi-layered approach ensures unparalleled accuracy and reliability for solar farms.”

Martin says that EWN’s first solar farm was the Woolooga Solar Farm in Queensland, which lost in excess of $30 million following a major hailstorm: “This was a trigger for the industry in general. In fact, several farms realised that they were poorly prepared for large hailstorms, so anything above 2cm in diameter.”

US-based risk assessment and assurance company, DNV, provides hail forecasting and risk analysis solutions for North American solar farms.

DNV says that Texas alone, an area that isn’t historically prone to hailstorms, has seen more than US$600 million of damage due to hail in the past three years.

The increase in resulting damage, as well as new uncertainty about hail-prone areas, has precipitated changes to insurance policies and threatens the financial viability of solar projects in these regions.

“The threat of extreme hail damage on solar plants in the US is driving higher insurance premiums, stricter caps and more exclusions, leaving project owners and investors more exposed,” DNV principal scientist of energy systems Daran Rife explains.

“We developed a new forward-looking method to precisely quantify future hail risk under climate change, empowering project partners to make informed decisions on site selection, design, mitigation and protection strategies.”

Hailstorm severity is set to increase with further climate change according to UNSW’s Timothy H. Raupach article, The effects of climate change on hailstorms, published in Nature in 2021. Historical data no longer provides an accurate assessment of hail risk, especially when it comes to the size of the hail and the location of the hailstorms. Recent research on hail patterns indicates that over the last few decades, severe hail events have shifted northward in the central and eastern US, to areas with a high density of installed solar.

Presently, the DNV forecasting solution isn’t available in Australia. EWN says it’s committed to the commercial solar industry and it’s one of the fastest-growing industries for them.

“We’ve also invested heavily in this technology over the past six years. We partnered with members from the University of Queensland on research projects, built multiple algorithms around hail size and have turned it into a solution for this market,” he says.

For electricians and solar consultants in the commercial space, this technology is something to add to the toolbelt and use to build the offering. Especially as climate change, the thing that solar power is trying to combat, is likely leading to heavier, more frequent hailstorms.