I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.

> why not build panels anywhere?

Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.

So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.

But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.

Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.

Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.

I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.

Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.

If we can build skyscrapers that can survive tornadoes, can wind turbines be made tornado proof?