Wow, imagine where we’d be if Oil and Gas hadn’t convinced almost everyone that solar was never going to work well.
Imagine where we’d be if leftists embraced nuclear power instead of killing it off everywhere they could.
Here in Italy, the only parties that seem to be favorable to nuclear are right-wing.
And of course, they got elected and didn’t actually do anything towards it.
I’d like to specifically blame the vocal greens and not left or center left people in general.
The weird thing is that in this scenario these panels are still applicable for replacement probably because the the solar panels of today compared to then are about ~40% more efficient. So compared to a new replacement it’s at around 60% efficiency. A major site plans profit off of 30 years and plans to replace glass at that time, so while it may still be somewhat useful long term it’s probably more profitable to replace them.
It’s good to know that they have pretty good longevity. One thing complicating this is that panel technology has gotten better and better during that time. There’s a graph on Wikipedia plotting how much better the various types of panel have gotten since the 70s. A lot of them have doubled in output since the early 90s.
So on the one hand, these old panels are outputting 75% of what they started with, which is good. But on then other hand they are only outputting about 37% of what new panels could.
Not that we should throw old panels away. There’s plenty of sun to go around (though I guess the average homeowner only has one roof to use). It’s just interesting how fast the tech has improved and how that might factor in to some longevity calculations.
I thought that solar panels that old performed much worse or stopped working. Especially considering where the tech was in the 1990s.
I thought that solar panels that old performed much worse or stopped working. Especially considering where the tech was in the 1990s.
“performed much worse” is compared to today’s manufactured panels. As an example, a 100w panel in 1992 was likely around 12% efficient. This means “of all the light energy hitting the full panel under perfect light and temperature conditions”, 12% of that energy is converted to electricity and would produce 100w. Compare this to a middle-of-the-road panel you’d buy for your house today the efficiency is 21%. Both the old and the new panel’s efficiency will go down over the years.
What the article is talking about is how much of the original efficiency is retained over the years in real world tests. Lets say we have a 1992 100w panel from my example above at 12% efficiency. That means under the best possible conditions it would generate 100w. Because of age, the article notes that efficiency has degrade to produce 79.5% of its original rating. Meaning this 1992 100w panel today would generate 79.5w. That’s still pretty darn good and useful!
Sounds like you should install double what you think you need. Reason? The panels will start losing efficiency over time and your electricity usage over time will do nothing but grow. That’s very common.
Dude.
Those panels lost only 20%, so far from half, in 32 years.
That’s impressive.
I didn’t say they lost half but they lost 20% so you need to have at least 120% today and then you need to account for the fact that you will get more electric devices in the future. How are you going to charge your electric car if you don’t have the electric to do it? So therefore you should probably double it.
This is gonna sound so dumb… But they had solar panels back then?!
Carter called for solar panels to be installed on the White House in 1979. Modern ones are probably way more efficient but they were definitely a thing.
Solar panels have also been used in space mission for a very long time. The first solar powered probe was Vanguard 1 in 1958
