You bolt them to something solid and cover them with a decent covering of plexiglass and you've got something about as tough as anything else that will survive a hurricane.
Putting things underground near a coast(or an island) is problematic due to water tables and the threat of water intrusion in a flooding scenario. All your solar is going to be a pile of junk if salt water flows over and seeps in.
This is also assuming there's no loss through the tube and you're able to capture as much as you would from a surface panel.
Solar is cheap now, however. I imagine it's cheap enough that adding all the infrastructure around a panel that would allow it to be put underground and protected wouldn't offset the cost of having to potentially replace them a few times. That's always the tradeoff in hurricane prone areas. You can build yourself a bunker if you want, and it'll survive anything that doesn't completely wipe the geographical area off the map, but it'll cost you. Or you can just build reasonably, get insurance, have a plan to protect a limited set of things (by evacuating, usually, although some people do have smaller storm shelters or reinforced rooms.) and finally cross your fingers.
I'm not saying the "cross your fingers" method is the best. We really SHOULD be building better. But economics forces us to compromise.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4196558 times)