It’s a reasonable use of water imho where you have a lot of it you don’t mind evaporating off in return for higher solar generation.

Certainly, you wouldn’t want to use water for this in water constrained environments.

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gnabgib 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It really isn't..

> “In our single-panel prototype setup, the parasitic energy consumed by the pump and fan actually exceeded the immediate electrical power gain generated by the cooling effect

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toomuchtodo 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d be interested to see how the math changes if you use excess solar power that would’ve otherwise been curtailed to pump the water, perhaps using the excess power to pump water up into elevated storage and use gravity to distribute for cooling when you want to increase generation.

Lots of solar is being curtailed today because there isn’t enough daylight load and batteries to soak it up. There is potential to shift that power around on site, power that otherwise be wasted, to increase generation at other times. But perhaps it’s simply not worth it when applied at utility scale.

	▲	reverius42 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And at the point at which you're pumping water with excess solar power, is it better to just use the water as a battery? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...