There’s a typo in the title. If you go back to the original source (in french), they actually retain 79,5 % of their original efficiency, so even better than the article’s title would have you believe.
Careful using the word efficiency there, as it has a different meaning when talking about solar panels - it indicates how much energy the panel can extract from the light hitting it. The best modern panels you can buy are below 25% efficient, and since these are from the 90s they were probably about half that when new.
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 people didn’t automatically think nuclear power=Homer Simpson
Not Chernobyl?
That too along with 3MI, and decades of negative propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
The two nearest nuclear plants to me both had to do serious cleanup after problems were discovered, it’s not just the list of big problems people worry about - especially when the nuclear lobby say things like ‘they’re safe as long as they’re run properly and no one cuts corners, but please don’t regulated them properly or they won’t be cost effective’
Rich people stand to make a monopoly if we’re all dependent on nuclear and they can’t have that monopoly with solar and wind - maybe it’s time to accept a lot of pro nuclear talking points come financially interested parties too.
Imagine where we’d be if leftists embraced nuclear power instead of killing it off everywhere they could.
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basically exactly the same situation as we’re in now
You think if we take away 50 years of burning fossil fuels we’d be in “the same situation as we’re in now”?? Wtf are you smoking?
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As if it’s fucking green activists blocking nuclear and not the fossil fuel lobby
It literally is, though I suspect the greens are the useful stooges of the fossil fuel propaganda.
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So I quoted this sentence:
As if it’s fucking green activists blocking nuclear and not the fossil fuel lobby
And then you started talking a bunch of blah blah about renewables, which I will note is NOT in that sentence.
And you did not mention nuclear, which I will note is the entire SUBJECT of that sentence.
No, because until we solve the storage issues with electricity. You need a reliable baseline power source in the grid. Solar has 0% cost effectiveness at night. Nuclear is 100 times more environmentally friendly than coal. Even with the long term waste storage issues.
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Hydroelectric plants, batteries, generation on site, wave power, geothermal, … There are lots of ways to reduce the need of non renewable energy.
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.
Never trust right-wingers to do literally anything.
If a right wing party promises to take all the money from the rich and redistribute it to the poor, they’re lying.
If a right wing party promises to invest in public transit, they’re lying.
If a right wing party promises to pass a law enshrining LGBTQ rights, they’re lying.
They’re just a bunch of fucking liars, all they exist for is to make rich people richer.
Oh, I trust them to do everything I wouldn’t like them to do.
For example, so far they’ve been following through with removing LGBTQ rights and lowering taxes for the rich, just as they promised.
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!
There is a solar plant in switzerland that still has functioning panels from the early 80s.
E: Oh, the one I thought of was mentioned in the article already.
It’s funny how all the FUD idiots say that solar panels will wind up in the landfill and shit like that
It’s a stupid argument against solar power, but it is a legitimate argument against cheap and poorly-constructed solar panels that do not have the same longevity as the ones built in the 90s.
Just read to the top comment saying it’s profitable to replace them anyway.
And then the top comment to THAT comment wondering where and how to buy the still-effective replaced ones.
Just buy more and put them next to it lmao.
That makes sense, but I guess the problem is that they take up a lot of space.
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.
If that became a problem, every old panel could be changed by newer ones and the old ones could be installed in a desert until their EOL.
Right, they could be installed in the middle of nowhere as free phone chargers and stuff even if there was no other use for them. Just set them up with a used inverter and some used chargers, whatever etc.
Or maybe a whole lot of them could be put together in the middle of nowhere to make an EV charging station
Oh yeah, how about coal? Does that get any less efficient over time? Exactly. I’ve been burning the same lump of coal for easily the same amount of time and it remains 100% efficient, that’s the beauty of combustible fuel.
/s I’m assuming.
I’m not familiar with that letter.
Assuming you’re asking in good faith, the “/s” is usually added to denote sarcasm online.
Photo?
That is a very neat bow 😄
Fortunately and unfortunately, there have been so many changes and breakthroughs on solar power over the last 50 years that this doesn’t really tell us much about current technology.
I’m getting some new panels installed this year, and I think they’re suggesting they’ll be at 80% after 25 years.
It looks like there is disagreement between the title and content of the article. Title says 75.9, content says 79.5
Either way, does this suggest that new panels might do better than expected over a 30 year timespan?
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