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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: Less regulations in Australia lead to solar systems being 1/3 the price of US solar systems. However, US solar systems tend to perform for 20+ years, whereas a significant number of Australian systems have "sharply" degraded performance after 5 years.

Checking the articles sources, apparently lots of installed panels in Australia stop working after ~5 years and the remaining functional panels decline in performance 12%.

This is an interesting trade off. Would I prefer a solar system that is 1/3 the cost but 1/4 the life in the US? I don't know. I think the average time spend in one home is around 7 years (don't quote me, I could be very wrong here), so it seems like each homeowner could install their own system and be fine. Cheaper systems also mean that more people could install them.

Not a policy expert, don't trust my thoughts.

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On one hand I agree, on another, I worry about the amount of waste that this creates. We are trading pollution from other centralized energy sources for millions of homes with N solar panels which will have to possibly be removed and replaced in 5-7 years. It’s the same as the waste that is created by purchasing appliances these days that basically are unrepairable and thrown away and replaced.

Given a 7 year life, you are effectively creating 4x the waste as a quality system. Multiply that by millions of homes and I don’t see how the trade off is worth it.

> Would I prefer a solar system that is 1/3 the cost but 1/4 the life in the US? I don't know.

Hmmm.

If we assume that solar panels are rapidly advancing, then probably?

The reason 'move fast and break things' works for computers, is that computers are gonna be upgraded in 2 years anyway and we are going to rewrite everything in 5 to 10 years with whatever new programming language becomes popular then.

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If solar panels are going such a revolution, then yeah, shorter lifespan and short term decisions dominate.

Isn't the whole point of solar that it's "clean" and "renewable"? If we are wasting panels every 5 years that doesn't sound clean or renewable to me.

It depends on the embodied carbon of the panels and the time for it to be less than the local power plant.

(There's also the actual wasted panels, and raw materials, but let's face it, that's rounding error vs five years of household waste. Also, the replacement will probably be better on those fronts.)

Improperly installed solar can be quite dangerous to both the homeowner and grid workers.

If it's not grid-tie, I say have at it. Require by law that the property specify that the work was not done by a professional if it's ever sold and the only people exposed to that risk are mostly the people who made the bad decisions.

If it's grid-tied (or accidentally grid-tied) not having a properly installed and configured transfer switch could quite literally mean (and has meant, plenty of times) killing a maintenance worker.

If that's even a possibility it's not responsible to allow DIY work in this area.

Does this basically mean that the only real piece of equipment that needs to be rock solid is the transfer switch, and not necessarily the whole system consisting of panels, batteries and inverters (for grid tied systems)?

You could mislabel lines that stay live after grid disconnect as though they were on the grid side of the cutoff switch.

Making truely idiot-proof high voltage wiring is difficult. However, that's what inspectors are for (in theory).

Also, solar panels are heavy and pointy and often stored on roofs where the wind can grab them. Again, inspectors should check this.

For safety, yes. For performance, no. Cheap Chinese inverters can create all sorts of nasty effects on the local distribution segment, but IMO performance requirements should be up to local distribution utilities when they allow the interconnect, not a matter of national concern.

> If that's even a possibility it's not responsible to allow DIY work in this area.

At least in the US, in most states, you're entirely allowed to do your own electrical work on your primary residence, and it has to meet the same standards, same inspections, same permits, etc, as any other install.

As far as grid tie and rapid shutdown, the only thing that really matters there is the inverter. If they're a UL listed inverter, they'll shut down properly when the grid drops, at least on the backfeed ports (some have automatic transfer switches and such built in to continue powering the house grid down).

Also, can you cite evidence of a DIY install actually killing ("plenty of times") a lineworker? The techniques I've seen for line work involve "dead shorting the phases and neutral all together before doing anything," which makes the grid segment quite impossible to energize for invasive work, even if someone somewhere else screws up. And I've seen some reports of generator based backfeeding injuring or killing lineworkers (who generally were half a dozen safety protocol violations in at the time), but I've not seen any related to solar - because grid tie inverters simply don't work that way for any I've found.

I did a brief search and found a case of a line worker dying due to someone backfeeding a gas generators after a hurricane:(https://www.oshrc.gov/assets/1/6/06-0166.pdf)

Clearly this could happen with a dumb diy solar install, but also the case text shows that the company knew this was a possibility and enumerates several ways this accident could have been avoided.

I've seen that one before, and... as I mentioned, quite a few safety protocol violations in, bad things happened. They didn't force the line dead by grounding it on both ends, they didn't test to see if it was actually energized, and they didn't use the proper equipment or procedures to work on it as though it were energized. You can get away with that for a while, but at some point, that's going to bite you, and given power line voltages, bite hard.

But I've yet to see "plenty" of deaths attributed to DIY solar. A downed grid segment looks like a dead short to an inverter, and anything even faintly UL listed (even with a "UL Listed" sharpie marking on the box) shouldn't be feeding into a totally dead grid segment at all. Most of the grid tie inverters lack the ability to create a waveform in the first place - they can only feed into an existing waveform.

While it does happen (shorter lifespans) you have a lot of choices in Australia too when getting solar installed in terms of the panels and the inverter used, many of them around the same price ($5k AUD for 6.6kwh panels + 5kw inverter) batteries vary wildly depending on brand.

Some simple research of the options ahead of agreeing to anything can lead to much better results.

Yeah the difference is enormous. My US-manufactured panels are warrantied to lose no more than 0.5% power output per year for 30 years.

>US solar systems tend to perform for 20+ years

Do you have concrete data for this or are you going off manufacturer claims? To the best of my knowledge - and i work in the industry - the vast majority of rooftop or domestic PV installations are under ten years old. Some of the oldest ones that were mass-installed are in Germany.

I highly doubt PV panels will last 20+ years under most environmental conditions.

Also, before you compare PV lifetimes between the USA and australia, bear in mind that the great majority of Australian installations are very close to salt water. That plays havoc with anything installed outdoors, particularly metals and glass.

Just going off what the article stated. They did not cite that claim.

Ah, fair enough.

These articles tend to be generous with interpretations of their poorly cited sources. Still, without knowing where the early PV systems are in the US, it's a difficult claim to back up. There is also survivorship bias and the fact that quality control on small batches of any product is usually better than on mass market stuff.

After the section you referred to, the article goes on to claim that poor regulatory oversight is responsible for the short lifespan of Australian PV systems... again, a questionable claim.

My solar panels are actually warrantied by the manufacturer for 30 years, and there are old panels out there in the world that are 20+ years old.

Accelerated aging works well.

Any competent, reputable company providing 30 year warranties in marine environments is going to stick test panels in a temperature-cycling salt mist chamber for an appropriate amount of time.

it works well, on paper and for metals. PV panels are glass sandwiches so moisture ingress and damage is inherently slow, something accelerated ageing can't capture well.

From first hand experience, the warranties on PV panels aren't all they are made out to be. For one, manufacturing runs of many panel models last months. after, while the warranty will be honoured, you won't be receiving identical panels either electrically or cosmetically. Worse still is when the equivalent offered has different dimensions.

The warranty itself is good but doesn't account for practical considerations especially when you are working with a component that's part of a larger whole.

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