This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I guess we can blame the French's confusing number system for that.
People seem to be angry at you for not knowing how the French count. My condolences. I found it funny tho. Have un upvote
Well, I DO know how the French count and compared to English it IS highly confusing. You can hardly convince me that saying "Four times twenty and ten" is as straight forward as saying "Nine tens".
And just to be clear: I'm not some Yankee or Brit with a superiority complex, no, I am German, and we have our own shitty version of this: Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in "Four hundreds and two tens and nine", we do "Four hundred and nine and two tens".
Wow, it’s like US uses metric system for counting and y’all do “imperial counting”
It indeed is.
It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the "score", see for example Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which famously starts with : "Fourscore and seven years ago...", meaning 87 years ago.
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
Is it too much to ask for people to not get their political opinions from cartoons?
Instructions unclear, politics informed by WW2 doctor Seus propaganda.
The great thing about nuclear power is that the real cost only comes after the power has been generated. How do you store the spent fuel cells and what do you do with the reactor when it can't be used anymore. Just before that happens you spin the plant into its own company. When that company goes bankrupt the state needs to cover the cost, as it isn't an option to just leave it out in the open.
Privatise profit communalism cost.
Here's all of Switzerland's high level nuclear waste for the last 45 years. It solid pellets. You could fit the entire ~~world's~~ US' waste on a football field.
It's not the greatest challenge mankind have faced.
Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.
More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that's not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release
It's not that difficult to store it's just a rock. You just pop it in a sealed casket, put it underground, mark the location as do not enter and then forget about it. Hardly the greatest of economic challenges.
Anyway you're assuming that we won't have a way of recycling it in the future and there's increasing evidence that we will be able to pretty soon.
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 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!
Great explanation.
One other point I see I left out was physical size of panel as related to efficiency of converting light to electricity and the reason that 2024's 22% efficiency is so important over 1992's 12%. The 2024 100w panel will be about half the size of the 1992 100w panel. This is important because space to put panels (and cost per panel) are large factors in being able to install solar. So you'd be able to install many more 2024 100w panels in the same space as 1992 100w panels.
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.
They work fine, just not at full capacity. Financing and payback calculations tend to assume they'll be replaced after 30 years, but that's just guesses made by accountants, not reality.
As far as I know that's nothing to write home about, monocrystaline solar panels get like ~30 years dropping down to 80% and then slowly begin to fail from there. I'm far from an expert, but my understanding is this is the norm and that if we found out they weren't lasting this long then people would be getting worried about a messed up cost calculous.
That's correct, but most of those calculations were based on theoretical figures used by artificial aging methods and computed failure rates. Now we have real world data from panels that actually aged that long.
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.
The one's made now have plenty of longevity. They don't base the replacement time on when they actually go bad, and as long as they're not abused or get hit by bowling ball-sized hail or something, they'll keep producing some kind of power for a long time. It's just that for the space they take up, it may be worthwhile to replace them.
Same with EV batteries. They might have limited range after 10 years, but they could still be useful for things like home backup power without having to do a whole recycling job.
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.
... And since they're still good they can be resold and used by others where efficiency isn't the main concern, no need to trash them
I wonder if this type of economic calculus would mean a supply of inexpensive, second-hand panels might be available in the next few years.
They already are, at least for the smaller ones. You can go to your citie's parks and recreation department to get some. All those solar panels that power various signs and lights have been collected and replaced for years. I picked up a few years ago in Lexington, KY, for next to nothing, and they worked just fine for the lights that I wanted to power, despite only outputting less than 50% of their original power.
Not sure where you would find the full size ones like these pictured.
I doubt they put out much power at all compared to modern panels. Solar back then was a pipe dream, we didn't have the battery technology to store the energy and the panels had a lower voltage and could supply less current.
I have a 100w foldable panel for camping that at >= 20% efficiency is probably double what the 90s panels could do.
In the 90s, rooftop solar was around 10-15% efficient. Now rooftop panels are closer to 20%.
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.
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'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?
Title says 75.9, content says 79.5
Looks like there's a typo in the English title. The French one has 79.5%.
What's not included in the article is how much additional power might be produced by replacing them with newer systems.
Sure but you also haven’t lost any of the power that wasn’t generated by them being dead/broken
Also I don't think we've really run out of suitable space to install new panels. If that ever happens it might be worthwhile to replace them, but as you said we can otherwise just run them alongside new installations until they break or maintenance costs surpass their profits
What you are not considering is that silicon crystallisation and the PV panel manufacturing process in its entirety are very resource-intensive and energy-intensive. The longevity of solar panels is one of their core properties that contribute to their high degree of sustainability.
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.
