The future of solar doesn't track the sun

Trackers are useless when the majority of the incoming sunlight is diffuse (as is the case where you live).

Trackers are useful when the majority of the incoming sunlight is direct (America has a mix but the western half and parts of the south have a lot of direct).

Trackers are essential when you use concentrated sunlight.

A tracker that doubles the amount of sunlight hitting a panel is not free, but it also makes the panel take up 2x the area, or more, to avoid shading its neighbor.

The thing people tend to forget about trackers is they offer this trade-off where you can trade shaded area for power per rated panel. When land is cheap and panels (or arrays, heliostats, power towers, etc.) are expensive, trackers make sense.

The reverse has been the case for the past ten years, and continues to get more true by the day. I doubt we will ever see the day return where land is cheap again and/or PV are expensive again.

Trackers tend to suffer from mechanical failures. Even 15 years ago, there was only one way to make money out of solar panels: Install them and forget them. If you need to waste time and money on the installation then the small profit vanishes really quickly. I really don't know how those companies convienced the investors for trackers.

i saw chicken wire used for something unknown to me on top of old 1800s greenhouses in France. it was not used for hail because it was resting directly on top of glass. i do not know what it was there for.

but hail and flying debris i got past few years is so big and so frequent that im not sure chicken wire will do the job.

a lot of gardeners use shading cloth for lowering sun light intensity. but that is not always enough to withstand hail.

A lot of times there is multiple pieces of hail stuck in one hole. some just bounce off.

i have PV on roof and not had issue with that. but i had few broken glass pieces of greenhouse glass. even tho it is on same property. it is glass-glass bifacial, i did not do it for back light but for longevity, i saw too many plastic backing tear off, or delaminated or how to call it. so i did not want that. and im not sure if that is also factor in not having broken PV.

doing it on huge PV areas should atleast be by my feeling too much of hassle, investment.

But some people mentioned in other comments small arrays of, if i remember correctly, 5kWp. so that is roughly area im doing it on. so in those small arrays it can be done manually.

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/fruit-walls-before-gr...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/adventures/trips/peru-machu-pic...

The thing is that most solar projects are commodity energy projects optimized for cost per watt, not necessarily reliability or efficiency (watts per area). We're not building them for the constraints of Mars bases or fancy spacecraft, just run of the mill generation.

Thus the tracker has to not just pay for itself, but be a better investment than simply buying more modules. The goal isn't reliability at any price, but cost effectiveness compared to making the project a little bigger and adding a few more modules.

Even with home rooftops (which have limited space), it's much cheaper to buy more premium modules with higher efficiency, or optimize their outputs with per module micro inverters or optimizers, than to mount the array on a tracker. With big commercial installations, there's even less of a space premium.

Trackers aren't just a one time upfront cost of manufacturing either, but an ongoing maintenance cost over the lifetime of the project. They get more expensive as less and less of the industry uses them and fewer parts and labor are available for them. They just can't compete with the Chinese dumping of cheap modules, which are so cheap now that almost all non Chinese manufacturers have gone bankrupt. So the industry is left with a glut of modules, which are probably just going to get cheaper and more efficient, while tracking technology and costs haven't improved anywhere near the same amount. It's all relative, and the trackers are losing big time.

Sure, as a science project with infinite funding, maybe you can make a super reliable one. In the real world, though, installations across the world have found them largely unappealing from a cost effectiveness standpoint.

Wouldn't it more reliable, day to day, to oversize the production during the sunniest parts of the day and then dump that into storage to use whenever you wanted, not only during twilight but whenever it was cloudy, freak weather conditions, etc.?