In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.
replyIn 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.
replyWell it’s about 40 years since the US started getting stupid about foreign trade and things are not going so well here now. Send help.
replyYou have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?
replyCSIRO and the University of New South Wales are the source of today's cutting edge solar panel tech. It's just manufacturing went to China and that is the challenge. It'll be met when China becomes totally untenable as a trading partner.
replyThe alternative for most countries except a handful is that they continue to import oil from the two dozen-ish odd countries who export it.
replyThe policy relevant question then boils down to, in two decades how many countries will be producing enough solar panels to export it? How many will be friendly to my country?
what if you develop manufacturing capabilities during the 30 years lifespan of the panels?
replyGrid and energy producers will have nothing of that nonsense. If enough people do that, they will see their business crumble and because they are an "strategic sector" they have enough sway on most countries to pass laws that prevent that.
replyWhich quickly becomes politically untenable when a large part of the voters either have their own distributed renewables and storage or benefit from lower electricity prices.
replyHow many solar panels did you buy?
reply11, and I wish I'd bought 15
replyI bought 32 and wished I got another 6 for the south west aspect of the house ... but still, producing 11mWh a year in the UK on an east/west aspect, electricity bill for the year (even with all cars in the household being EV's) is negative. Battery makes the difference - load shifting is doing the heavy lifting in the winter.
replyI hope you’re generating more than 11 milliwatt-hours per year, guessing you meant MWh :)
reply32*250*1400=11,200,000 watt hours, which makes more sense ;)
Probably depends on what country they live in and whether their government is spending billions of their taxpayer dollars to simply not build renewable energy projects and invest additional billions on top of that in new oil, gas and coal instead.
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