Hail storm destroys thousands of solar panels in Texas

Thousands of panels on a solar farm southwest of Houston, Texas, were damaged by a powerful hailstorm on March 15, which peppered the panels with baseball-sized hail, according to NewsMax.

Aerial footage showed rows of cracked photovoltaic cells at the Fighting Jays Solar Farm near Needville in Fort Bend County, local news channel KTRK reported on Saturday. Baseball-sized hail stones were observed falling in the area overnight, per Houston Chronicle.

The solar project, which began producing power for Texas’s energy grid in 2022 is supposed to generate 350 megawatts across 3,300 acres of land.

On its website, the solar developer claimed the project would generate electricity for 35 years. The project came online in July of 2022, which means it was in service for less than two full years before it was destroyed.

Questions of who pays for the damaged panels and whether the disaster is covered by insurance have been circling Twitter, so I decided to reach out to APSolar Holdings, which owns the Fighting Jay Solar facility.

As of March 26th, the company’s website is blank, and the phone number associated with the company on Google has been changed.