Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense.

Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.

View on HN

There was a test on 30 year old panels and they only lost 20% capacity.

That is only marginally better in the scheme of things. They want to take farms for food out of commission in some places to replace with fragile and unreliable solar systems. Imagine installing this stuff on a large scale. If you plan to replace all the panels after 30 years and incur no losses from high winds, hail, vandals, etc., then you would need to overbuild the system by 20% at minimum. This is assuming modern panels are as durable as those old panels from the study too. 30 years ago, solar panels were built in the West and cost 10x as much as the ones we have now. So it seems reasonable to assume that brand new panels might not have the same characteristics, and be less durable. It would make a lot more sense to just put these panels on roofs and in parking lots where the real estate is already consumed, and the power can be a backup source instead of a grid-scale vulnerability.

That's a lot of guessing though, newer panels might as well be more durable and longer lasting. Even if you lose 20% in 20-30 years you don't need to replace the panel unless the cost of replacing them can be recouped within a reasonable amount of years. As long as there is more space for more panels you don't need to replace existing ones unless they stop working, so capacity just increases for decades until you reach some saturation point.

The real estate would be more valuable than the panels, presumably. So it's not like they can just keep expanding forever. As for the vulnerabilities, this is not based on guessing. We've produced solar panels in the West even recently. They are not competitive with China on cost. They are actually fragile. We are facing geopolitical challenges.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com