Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys

High in the Swiss Alps, on a concrete dam wall more than 8,000 feet above the sea, someone bolted thousands of solar panels to a place almost no one thought was worth it.

For years the assumption was simple, that solar belongs low and warm, on sunny roofs and flat fields, not up in the freezing thin air of the mountains.

Most solar plants sit where life is easy, near towns and roads and mild weather.

Turning that idea on its head is a small plant clinging to a dam most people will never see.

And what it does in the dead of winter is the part that changed everything.
The panels bolted to a wall in the sky

The place is the Muttsee dam, in the canton of Glarus, about an hour from Zurich.

At around 2,500 meters, it sits at the highest reservoir in Europe, behind the longest dam wall in Switzerland.

Along more than a kilometer of that wall, crews fixed roughly 5,000 solar panels, a plant named AlpinSolar.

The wall curves to the south and catches sun from morning to night, and its steep face lets the snow slide off on its own.

The dam cannot be reached by road, so every part had to be flown in by helicopter.

Building anything at that height, in that cold, was a serious feat of engineering.

Snow and storms batter the site for much of the year.

Running since 2022, it makes about 3.3 million kilowatt hours a year, enough for around 700 homes.

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#solar #SolarPower #energy #ecology #Switzerland

Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said

^{Hugo Rojas (ecoportal.net)}