The Oil Drum

48 comments on The word is slowly spreading that we have have a problem

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SW on November 29, 2005 - 9:39am

$14,000 may seem like a lot of money for a power system. It is the price of a cheap car. It will last for twenty years. If you live where you have the resource to take advantage of, its a viable option now and will become even more attractive as time goes on. Is it a magic bullet that is going to solve our problem? Of course not. But it should be deployed wherever practical. Every home that goes solar is one less home that will have to be serviced by coal or nuclear somewhere down the road.

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Engineer-Poet on November 29, 2005 - 9:20pm

Warranties on panels are running 25 years, and that's just a guarantee that they'll retain a certain percentage (80%?) of rated power after that time. They'll probably produce useful output for much, much longer.

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GreyZone on December 1, 2005 - 2:52pm

I wish I still had the link but I believe that the very first solar cells are still producing power at about 50% of original capacity more than 50 years later. It would be interesting to plot loss of rated power over time and see if it's linear or a curve. If on a curve, those things might produce 30%-50% of original rated power for a century or more, but I don't know anywhere to find such data.