Right now the flattening change of the panels is handled by the game's internal C++ code that manages wall gates, so the flat solar panels have an almost zero effect on UPS. In order to reduce their power, I'd need to check for player proximity, and manage the animation via LUA (the wall gate animation does some momentum and direction calculations, which would be hard to match exactly), which would come with a UPS cost. I haven't actually profiled to see how big it would be, but I don't really think it's worth any UPS cost, personally.
