The panels still generate power even if they're disconnected as long as they're in the sun.
In a home setup they'll probably just get warm, but if you're making a lot of current you'd want it to not do that.

I think a lot of home setups will switch to a water heater, since that's easy and also a potentially useful way to spend extra power.

I did some googling to try to get an idea of what happens if you just quickly disconnect a solar cell, and things seemed to indicate that it's the inverter that switches the DC to AC that likes it the least.

Regardless of the specific reason, I'm quite confident you need something in the mix to eat the excess power from an underutilized solar plant, because otherwise the electrical engineers who built them probably would have taken the seemingly obvious and easy way. :)

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

solar panels are typically pretty warm already. There are even panels that allow you to push water through them to keep them cool.

I wonder if that would be more effective than dumping resistive heating into water. I suppose it could still be bad for the panel, i would assume panel manufacturers would have data on this, but im too lazy to look it up because whatever site they have is probably a shitfest that i wouldn't be able to navigate easily.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, when I looked them up they recommended a dump load to mitigate fire risk, since however hot they get normally is the baseline for when all the energy they produce gets turned into heat on the panel as well.

Gotta send extra power somewhere, and better to send it someplace built for it than into the expensive thing that's not.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 months ago

yeah that checks out i suppose. One of these days i will get around to looking into it out of curiosity.