alt Hacker NewsI think a hail net would be feasible for some cases. Golf balls break solid coverings too (and windows, car roofs, etc), but we have nets for them.
You want high tensile strength and some level of flexibility/elasticity to absorb the hailstone energy over a greater-than-zero distance. Or to shatter the hailstone well above the solar panel.
Probably too light-blocking to leave up continuously, and maybe awkward and failure-prone to deploy automatically.
So insurance is probably more cost-effective for most installations.
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medoc • 05/03/2025
Anti-hail netting is definitely a thing (protecting cars or fruit trees), for the reasons you state. Even big hailstones are rather slower than fast golf balls.
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I agree with your implicit point that the key question is probably cost effectiveness compared with insurance. However, in the context of the OP, insurance premiums in hail-prone regions was listed as a prime reason why single-axis-tracking panel installations are, in some regions, probably still a better bet at grid scale.
The point I'm trying to make is just that there are a lot of off-the-shelf (or nearly so) hail protection strategies that seem like they might have better economics than single-axis-tracking installations, which might improve the cost effectiveness of a fixed panel installation to the point where, even in hail-prone regions, it might be doable.
To be clear: anti-hail nets are already a COTS product, just not for this application (as far as I'm aware). Nets are just really, really good at absorbing kinetic energy. I mean, that's effectively what kevlar ("bulletproof") vests are made of -- netting with a very small cell size. But it seems to me like some kind of roll-out kevlar or dyneema netting could be really effective at protecting panels, though I think you'd need some kind of better strategy for safely dispersing the hailstones after they were caught, so you don't end up with a huge collection of hailstones on the net.
I agree that there's probably too much light blocking to leave them up continuously, and I'd also be worried about UV damage. But remember that the comparison here is to single-axis-tracking installations; I think automatic deployment of anti-hail netting could easily be made at least as reliable as the tracking system, if not significantly more so. Maintenance and testing would also be very cheap in comparison, since you could do it at night (ie without affecting power production), and damage to the protection system could be repaired without taking panels offline.
The more I think about it, the more I'd be interested in seeing it deployed.