With the industry scaling toward hundreds of gigawatts of installed capacity, even 1% risk represents the potential for significant losses.

As the utilization of large-scale solar plants accelerates into areas more prone to severe weather events, it’s of vital importance on how to manage those weather risks before initial designing. Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate extreme weather risks by addressing site-and region-specific conditions in advance and making strategic design, engineering, and procurement choices to lower those risks.

There exists some solar plants damaged by extreme weather and thus caused huge loss. Actually, it’s a result of a combination of factors such as structural design, product quality, later operation and maintenance, etc.

As a solar tracker manufacturer, Antaisolar has vast expertise in addressing the extreme weather challenge to large-scale solar plants. In this chapter Antaisolar is going to share some insights on structural design and see how it’s important for you to consider it when building a solar plant.

In fact, the threat posed by strong wind is mainly caused by resonance. The multi-point drive solar tracker launched by Antaisolar can perfectly solve this problem. After the construction of the tracking support is completed, there will be a natural frequency f1, and the wind speed around the power station will cause the system to generate a vibration frequency f2. When f2 is close to or equal to f1, the system will resonate, which will cause twisting and lose stability, endangering the safety of the system. The multi-point drive solution is to largely increase f1, thereby widening the gap between the two and fundamentally solving the problem. Due to the use of multi-point drive technology, the system has one third wind torque three times higher natural frequency than traditional trackers. Additionally, the entire cost can be reduced by 5% to 20%, especially in areas with high wind pressure, the advantages will be more.

The solar industry is increasingly recognizing that specialized approaches like wind tunnel testing

are needed for dynamic wind loading because building codes simply don’t apply to these kinds of thin, flexible structures. Antaisolar’s Helios and Clytie series solar tracker are all tested and approved by CPP. Based on CPP’s leadership in understanding the effects of wind on solar collectors, their recommendations can enable Antaisolar designers and engineers to make modifications where needed and ensure the success design of a safe and efficient system.

To sum it up , in order to keep it stable and safe under extreme bad weather, Antaisolar innovative solar trackers are developed from initial structural design to make it stay robust and it’s just one of the key factors for reducing solar project risk. In the next chapter , We will focus on another influencing factor in details, stay tuned!