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.
What the hell is wrong with y’all?
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 “Fourscore and seven years ago…” means 87 years ago.
But Basque isnt an Indo-European language its a Paleo-European isolate. Cultural mixing not with standing.
And don’t even get started with Danish.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
The dude was saying people are angry at you because they don’t understand, not that you dont understand.
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”.
English is less consistent, going from nine-teen to twenty-one. German stays consistent with its lower two digits.
From 11 to 19 is always kind of weird in many languages. In Italian you go from essentially saying “one-ten” “two-ten”…“six-ten” to “ten-seven” “ten-eight” “ten-nine”. Then it goes in like in English. Why? No reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Soixante-quinze virgule neuf vs soixante-dix-neuf virgule cinq.
Easy peasy!
Edit: it wasn’t easy peasy.
Removed by mod
Ouch lol yeah thanks.
Removed by mod
I wish I could give fourtwentytennine upvotes to help
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.
As a frenchman who always found quatre-vingt weird but never bothered to find out why, thanks :)
Mais je t’en prie :)
In English is this why we say fifteen instead of tentyfive?
I’m four-twenties-ten-nine percent sure that French counting is not confusing
No you can’t, because the source has written it in the usual hindu-arabic numerals as 79,5 and not as “soixante-dix-neuf virgule cinq”, you don’t need to pronounce the numerals to copy them.
It’s still a good joke!
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
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’sUS’ 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
In Germany, we’ve got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
That requires some pretty tall stacking on that football field. Or I guess, you’re saying if you’d unpack it all and compress it?Also, we really should be getting the nuclear waste out of said location, since there’s a known risk of contamination. But even that challenge is too great for us, apparently.
Mainly, because we don’t have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage. It’s cool that Switzerland has figured it out. And that some hypothetical football field exists. But it doesn’t exist in Germany, and I’m pretty sure, Switzerland doesn’t want our nuclear waste either.we don’t have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage
I’m gonna hazard a guess that the “consideration” was not from actual scientists but rather activist homeowner groups in every potential site.
NIMBYism and nuclear, name a more iconic duo
I mean, can you blame them? Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard? Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
Having said that, I am not aware of the ‘scientists’ coming up with good suggestions either. Gorleben got hemmed and hawed around for the longest time, but its selection process was non-scientific from the start.
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years. And we don’t have a big desert or some other unpopulated area where you could chuck it without political opposition, when it’s not 110% safe to do so.
I mean, can you blame them?
Yes. I do it a lot.
Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard?
It’s not toxic, nor is it in their backyard.
Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
What issues?
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years.
I’m speaking strictly of the mass. Most the volume on those containers are likely structure to make sure there is no accidental leak, similar to Switzerland.
I also misremembered, it was all of US’ waste that could fit on a single football.
Unfortunately, there’s not much structure to these, no. It’s nuclear waste from the 60s and early 70s, when there were practically no safety laws in place yet. They just got dumped down there in steel barrels. In a salt mine, which now has water entering it. I’m hoping, the barrels got at least filled up with concrete, but I have no idea.
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.
That is a horribly naive underselling of what’s involved in storing nuclear waste. How do you transport it? What do you do in the event of an accident during transport? Where is it stored now? Is it somewhere we can get good transport in? How do you mark something “do not enter” for tens of thousands of years? Think of what languages existed during the Roman Empire, and then realize that we’ll have to store it for orders of magnitude longer than that.
Logistics, logistics, logistics. They are not easy for even the simplest projects.
We do have the recycling technology. It’s not a far off thing; been developed for decades. If there’s a good reason for a nuclear renaissance, it’s in using the waste we already have, and recycling it down to something that’s only dangerous for centuries, not millennia.
All of the infrastructure for transporting nuclear waste already exists for transporting the existing nuclear waste.
Realistically it’s the only viable long-term option it’s infinitely better than fossil fuels and Fusion power would be nice but doesn’t exist yet at least not outside of a lab and I don’t think even in the lab particularly efficient.
Realistically it’s the only viable long-term option
No, it isn’t. Solar+wind+storage will do fine.
Fusion power would be nice but doesn’t exist yet at least not outside of a lab and I don’t think even in the lab particularly efficient.
And the fact that you word things this way makes it pretty clear to me you have no idea what you’re talking about and haven’t actually researched anything about it.
Solar and wind are just different ways of capturing energy from a fusion reaction (Sol), but down the line after much of the energy is diffused. If we can replicate that reaction here, every cent and second spent on solar panels is the equivalent of buying watered down drinks at a bar instead of drinking straight from the still. Until we can replicate fusion, fission is still far better than any fossil fuel and more stable than water/wind. The problems are people, not the rocks that heat up
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.
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’
This this this, so much this. Yes, they can be safe. That safety comes with heavy regulation. That makes them incredibly expensive, and once you get there, it’s just not worthwhile anymore.
Imagine where we’d be if leftists embraced nuclear power instead of killing it off everywhere they could.
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Hydroelectric plants, batteries, generation on site, wave power, geothermal, … There are lots of ways to reduce the need of non renewable energy.
We’ve basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.
It’s actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don’t need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.
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’d like to specifically blame the vocal greens and not left or center left people in general.
Removed by mod
Me too. Fuck the Greens. Joke political party in so many ways. Even if I lived under a system where First Past the Post voting wasn’t the norm, I’d be looking for parties other than the Greens.
Compromised political party.
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.
Similar holds for EV or phone batteries. They usually don’t suddenly die, but lose more and more health over time. Realistically, you have to set a threshold, where you call it no longer useful.
If the life expectancy was 80%, then we’ve passed it and they are due for replacement. If it was 70% the they still have years of useful life.
It’s probably one of those two. For phones, I replace batteries when health drops to 80%, because I spend too much of my life online. Also, I’m probably giving my phone to my kid about then, so they deserve a fresh battery. I have kept phone batteries down to about 70% life, but then it usually doesn’t last the day and I’m carrying portable chargers everywhere
I haven’t had an EV long enough but I believe the typical battery warranty is defined like that: not just that it’ll work for 10 years, but that it will still be at least 70% health after ten years
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.
But that’s the problem. Early adopters are starting to see the performance drops and are just replacing their equipment, and we don’t have a proper reuse pathway for a lot of it. We should prepare a plan for panel (and battery) repurposing to keep plastic and metals out of landfills. Recycling alone isn’t enough.
Again, not a reason not to produce or adopt solar power and electric cars, but it is a legitimate second-level concern.
That’s the tricky part with dismissing these concerns outright. Conservatives are not arguing in good faith, and take a kernel of truth surrounded by a mountain of bullshit. We don’t want to overcorrect and ignore the problems, because that just fuels the bullshit arguments.
Sounds like a problem that a good capitalist could solve. Take old panels for next to nothing, sell them for reduced price to used market customers.
Is there a problem with the market being flooded with cheap not very good solar panels? Every single panel I looked at to put on my roof have all been of the highest quality I’ve not seen anyone try and hawk anything substandard.
Unless of course they’re lying about what panels they’re using but realistically I can’t see that lasting for very long.
Yes, we do have that problem, but it’s not the panels anyone puts on a roof. It’s the cheap plastic shit manufacturers put on disposable consumer devices like pathway lighting or portable chargers.
I wouldn’t put that cheap shit on my roof, but as solar adoption increases, capitalists are gonna capitalize.
I still plan on retiring my solar panels once I retire, or later
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.
… 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%.
Some are 25% now, and don’t even break the bank. You can get modules that store the power and feed it back into your house for use later. I kinda want to get some to offset heating and cooling costs.
https://us.ecoflow.com/products/175w-rigid-solar-panel?variant=41362064179273
A major source of calculator power!
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.
/s or bot or completely degenerate
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 😄
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
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?
To give you an idea, my 12-panel PV system installed in 2011 has put out 3.5 MWh per year at its peak and now produces between 3.1 and 3.3 MWh yearly, depending on the weather.
Newer panels are generally much more efficient and produce more electricity compared to old panels.
The 80% after 25 years might be their warranty, my panels have a similar warranty on them. If they start producing less than 80% of their original output before 25 years, the manufacturer will replace them (or something like that).
Yes, I’m looking at the paperwork and I’m realizing that you’re right, 80% at 25 is the warranty guarantee, so I’m guessing they’re confident it’ll typically be much better than 80 at 25
Probably like tire warranties: prorated for expected life, and not including installation cost
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.
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
Jesus Christ. Look, back in the Stone Age when I went to school the coolest calculator was the TI-36 Solar. It was already that mundane.
Naturally, I used a non-solar Casio, because I wasn’t one of the cool nerds.
And then there are the calculators with fake solar cell windows
deleted by creator
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.
