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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is.

Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.

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I roll my eyes at these "artificial leaf" claims for just the reason you've identified.

Solar panels have a limited lifespan, decrease in efficiency over time, and also get ruined when things like hail happens. This doesn't mean PVs are a bad idea, but it's not accurate to say they have little to no maintenance.

Aside from the hail, none of those are maintenance requirements. I've done 0 maintenance on my panels over their lifespan.

'Replace every 15-20 years' is not maintenance. Neither is replacement in the case of catastrophic weather events that'll have you replacing all your windows as well. The only 'maintenance' solar panels benefit from (which is still entirely optional) is occasional cleaning.

To be fair your windows are less likely to take the full brunt of an extra large hailstone since they're usually mounted vertically.

Sure but how do these artificial leaves fare when analyzed with the same criteria? Presumably worse, given that solar panels are (roughly speaking) nothing more than a few sheets of material laminated between glass panels.

Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.

If you ignore the nice "Artistic depiction of an artificial tree" it looks like this will also be "few sheets of material laminated between glass panels", but I'm worry it will also need plumbing for the water and output gas.

20 year solar panels just loose 5-10% capacity and degradation slows over time the reason most people replace them today is 20 year old panels were 200w where as today panels are 5-600w.

Sadly our solar panels don't self heal or come with 100(0) years warranty.

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