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Comment by collinmcnulty | Hacker News Reader

I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.

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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.

In 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.

Well 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.

It would be great if they performed that badly. If my panels drop below 87.5% in 30 years they get replaced under warranty for a second 30 years of use. These are even the cheap panels. Amazing how much better the tech is now.

You have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO

CSIRO 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.

what if you develop manufacturing capabilities during the 30 years lifespan of the panels?

We're well into that 30 years. You'd have to start doing so sincerely and i don't see nor expect it.

The alternative for most countries except a handful is that they continue to import oil from the two dozen-ish odd countries who export it.

The 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?

Grid 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.

Which 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.

How many solar panels did you buy?

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.

11, and I wish I'd bought 15

I 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.

I hope you’re generating more than 11 milliwatt-hours per year, guessing you meant MWh :)

32*250*1400=11,200,000 watt hours, which makes more sense ;)

haha, yes, was typing too fast! MWh indeed.

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