Rain does most of the cleaning. I clean my panels twice per year with a squeegee and a water hose. I do it after pollen season is over, then again half a year later. IMHO, this is very minimal work and not a good argument against the left's mandating to solar/wind.
The fact that solar and wind are intermittent are what we should focus on. The left's claim that we can rely 100% on them is hogwash. My solar is successful for me because "success" as I define it isn't being 100% dependent on them. They greatly reduce my power bills (only 20% of my power has to be pulled from the grid).
Because the grid has to be 100% reliable, making the grid dependent on solar is a very bad idea. The only way I can support solar farms going to the grid is if there would be a way to make fossil fueled plants scalable -- able to cheaply turn those up or down depending on when solar isn't doing enough. To my knowledge, that capability doesn't exist.
“Because the grid has to be 100% reliable, making the grid dependent on solar is a very bad idea.”
When the alternative is the end of life on an incinerated Mother Earth, the assumption that the grid has to be 100% reliable is downright dangerous. There is no real reason for people to be doing anything at night, Just turn everything off, then the grid will be fine. //OFF SARC
These people have a swindle going. It will catch up to them. The electric vehicle part of it already seems to be catching up to them.
Natural gas generation is able to provide dispatchable energy on an as-needed basis to the grid. Since solar and wind generated energy are unreliable and also tend to destabilize the grid the more of it penetrates, this standby “spinning reserve,” is essential given current infrastructure. It doesn’t necessarily come cheap, however.
The reason Texas almost collapsed a couple years ago was that when the wind generation failed, ERCOT had to cut the feed to the gas fields, which meant compressors and pumps in the NG system failed. The media of course blamed NG instead of the real culprit, 7000 wind turbines freezing up or simply falling idle when the wind died.