Duke Energy’s Lake Placid solar power plant suffered an EF-2 tornado during Hurricane Milton, shredding an array of solar panels while leaving most of the facility intact.
A tornado ripped through a solar power plant in central Florida. Footage released by Duke Energy shows an array of solar panels being torn from the single-axis trackers holding them in place.
Local weather reports identified the storm as an EF-2 tornado, with winds between 110 and 130 miles per hour. According to the county sheriff’s department, the tornado struck before Hurricane Milton made landfall, also damaging 20 to 30 homes in the area.
The Duke Energy facility was initially developed by EDF Renewables before being sold to Duke Energy, which completed development construction of the factory in 2019. The solar part of the plant has a grid connection capacity of 45 MW, supported by 63.2 MW of solar panels. An 18 MW lithium-ion battery was added to the site in 2022.
The Duke Energy video below shows the tornado’s path through the facility, although the exact direction of the storm is unclear. Damage was limited to the westernmost quadrant of the facility, leaving most of the plant intact and possibly still operational. The tornado’s path extended mainly from north to south, with the storm appearing wider in the northern portion before weakening as it dissipated southward.
Duke Energy reported that Florida issued at least 126 tornado warnings during Hurricane Milton.
According to documents released in 2019, the solar farm cost approximately $60.6 million to build.
Since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Florida has consistently strengthened its wind codes and implemented innovations over the decades to make structures better able to withstand high winds. An important change was the increase in wind speed requirements for new construction. The solar farm, located in Highland County, would have had to be structurally designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 150 mph.
Several years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory published a report providing guidelines for wind-hardening solar energy systems. The document, Solar photovoltaics in severe weather: cost considerations for storm-hardening PV systems for resilienceoutlines 13 strategies to improve a site’s ability to withstand higher wind speeds, along with the associated costs of these improvements.
In general, single-axis trackers tend to provide less robust support for solar panels compared to fixed rack systems.
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