3.4M Solar Panels
by marklit on 4/22/2026, 12:04:30 PM
https://tech.marksblogg.com/american-solar-farms-v2.html
Comments
by: himata4113
Florida and most dry / sunny states having little to no solar panels is pretty damn wild.<p>I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy.<p>I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage.<p>The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.
4/22/2026, 1:50:34 PM
by: noduerme
What's the big deal with having a whole liquid cooled workstation, and why is it important information for me to know what this dude's hardware is? And seriously, is there something about the rig that is necessary to chew through a dataset with a few million rows?
4/22/2026, 1:14:32 PM
by: ragebol
Would be kinda interesting to see a histogram of the azimuths and/or tilt angles.<p>In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.<p>Curious to see what it would be in this dataset.
4/22/2026, 12:58:56 PM
by: showerst
Pretty cool, although the heatmaps have a little of the "this is just a population density map" effect. <a href="https://xkcd.com/1138/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1138/</a><p>It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.
4/22/2026, 12:59:48 PM
by: zahlman
It'd be nice if it described up front what kind of information is available per panel.<p>For that matter, I'd be interested in details of how "a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS" (from the previous article) actually collected the data.
4/22/2026, 12:39:47 PM
by: yogthos
To put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-100-solar-panels-a-second-as-total-pv-capacity-tops-1-terawatt/" rel="nofollow">https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...</a>
4/22/2026, 12:59:10 PM
by: ck2
look how cheap now, it's crazy<p><a href="https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html</a><p>I'm old enough to remember Carter putting them on WhiteHouse roof and they were thousands of dollars then (and less efficient)
4/22/2026, 12:58:00 PM