Comment by jeffbee
7 hours ago
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
Everything fails given a long enough time span.
For solar PV it is ~30 years.
While the cell may continue to generate power, it may have diminished so greatly as to no longer justify its physical footprint
Yes, and no.
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
Wouldn't it be more like 74% after 30 years?
2 replies →
That isn't even a very good rule. Look at the NREL panel aging data. Some of their panels are aging in reverse, producing more power after a accelerated aging treatment and years in the field.
None of the generation options have tightly controlled lifetimes. So that means you can always "put off" work to some extent and that hasn't changed between a Coal power plant and Solar farms. Similar to transport infrastructure, if you're a democracy your voters will be very angry if you "waste" money on maintenance and they'll also be very angry if you don't do the work and then bad things happen.
You can't really delay maintenance of steam turbines. You absolutely may delay maintenance of solar panels because they don't need any.