this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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I can actually see this for most solar panels. A few of them are going to fail catastrophically, but if it's a giant piece of silicon, of course it's basically going to be fine.
I'm responsible for a device that is installed in 1996, and people have said that I should replace the solar panel but I don't see why I would -- it's been producing a small amount of power non-stop for every summer, why would I want to replace something that is doing exactly what I needed to? You're just producing waste that is still fully functional. As a society we do that way too much as it is.
Well yes and no. It's a giant piece of silicon, but it's also exposed to high energy rays all the time. Panels can suffer from water ingress and then crack when it freezes. They are exposed to all sorts of animals, both big and small that can cause damage. Have their top surfaces get more opaque due to normal erosion. Experience huge swings in temperature every day. Those things can either outright break the panel, or slowly make it less efficient. UV rays alone cause a degradation of around 1% every year. However modern more efficient compact panels suffer more from this than the older kind. So old panels might still be going strong, but give a modern panel the same amount of ageing and it might do a lot worse.