Power lines are made of aluminum and steel.

I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.

Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?

Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?

Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?

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lightedman an hour ago | parent [-]

"Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon."

In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.

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sophacles an hour ago | parent [-]

A solar panel is 4 feet or so on the long side. Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. even if it's topped out at 10A thats still 120KW... you need a hefty cable to carry that panel to panel. Which is the core of the point I was making.

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent [-]

Amps determine how hefty a cable needs to be, not volts. Volts mostly determine how thick the insulation needs to be.

14 gauge wire is basically all you need to carry 10A safely for an extended period of time regardless the voltage. It doesn't matter that you are carrying 120KW.

The proof of this is in EV charge cables. Those bad boys can carry up to 350kW. Yet the cables are often thinner than you might expect. How do they do this? It's by using high voltages (around 900V) which cuts back the amps to around 300->400.

Tesla's chargers peak (or used to) around 600V which has required them to have much beefier cables to handle the high current.

	▲	sophacles 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I get that. I'm pretty skeptical that 120 KW going through the last panel doesn't cause damage, and in the "multiple miles chained together" (to quote op) many MW going through the panel at the end of the chain doesn't run into some sort of issue in the real world. Even small percentage losses turn into a lot of heat or other issues at that scale. If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?