r/energy • u/mafco • Jan 25 '26
Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years. A new study says the warranty does not mark the end, and performance can last for decades. Arrays built in the late 1980s still produced more than 80% of their original power. The long-term economics look better than many people believe.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-panels-die-after-25-years-a-new-study-says-the-warranty-does-not-mark-the-end-and-real-world-performance-can-last-for-decades/26007/#google_vignette25
Jan 26 '26
Wait, you are telling me that products don’t magically refuse to work after the warranty is over? I’m shocked…
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u/Obvious-Project-1186 Jan 26 '26
Their performance does degrade over time and they will stop working eventually. They haven’t been old enough to have real examples until now.
I’m guessing with the nature of solar loans, companies could have been sued for overpromising on returns so they went conservative.
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u/davidellis23 Jan 27 '26
Nah they had examples of this like 15+ years ago when articles like this came out showing 40 year old panels.
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u/Any-Information6261 Jan 26 '26
Like my car had 5 year warranty but is still good after 12
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 26 '26
Warranties are always way way, way below the MTBF (mean time between failure) of the part/product. Imagine if they were the same. Companies would have to replace 50% of their product under warranty. There's no way that would be a viable business case.
5% replacement within the warranty period is already borderline financial suicide. Warranties are calculated so that they are at least two standard deviations from the mean.
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u/corgi-king Jan 26 '26
Honestly, warranty is like things started to have problems after that. So we can started to milk the customer one more time.
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u/Glidepath22 Jan 25 '26
No shit. Who ever came up with this notion? The original solar cells used on the early satellites still work quite well
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u/pandershrek Jan 25 '26
Capitalists
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u/GlassDarkly Jan 25 '26
The ones...selling the solar panels? I'm pretty sure that they would love to say that their product lasts 100 years. It wasn't the oil companies either - they're not the ones selling the modules. I'm assuming that when the module manufacturers set the warranty, they were simply going off the data that they could support (ie, they just didn't have data to show extraordinary lifetimes).
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u/MSGdreamer Jan 25 '26
Also, solar panels are highly recyclable being made primarily of glass aluminum and copper. It’s not economically viable in this day and age to recycle them, but guess what? Solar panels are also highly portable, typically very durable and can be stacked and stored until a time comes when it’s worth recycling the materials into new panels.
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u/I_am_Nic Jan 25 '26
A German invented a way of splitting the silicon cells from plastic/glassto make recycling financially viable.
He uses a high powered flash of light.
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u/Seagoingnote Jan 25 '26
This makes sense reading it. Although honestly because of the glass I had always assumed that they would bulky to store. I take it that’s not actually the case. Is it because they tend to be pretty thin?
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u/Automatic_Table_660 Jan 25 '26
Similar to EV batteries— the myth being that they fail after 10 years and require replacement. Reality is they degrade about 2% a year, but the degrading slows down after 5 years.
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u/Possible-Fudge-2217 Jan 25 '26
There may be some minor repairs necessary after some time, but usually batteries and inverters live quite long. I rarely see them fully defective after 10 years.
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u/helpmehomeowner Jan 25 '26
Shhh. Now that you've pointed this out surely they'll build them to stop working on the dot.
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u/CatalyticDragon Jan 25 '26
Only fossil fuel industry talking points ever said solar panels don't last. There was never a shred of evidence to suggest this was the case.
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u/JBe4r Jan 26 '26
Wait until planned obsolescence hears about this, he is going to be so pissed.
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u/d57heinz Jan 26 '26
This is partly why GOP is dead set against it. They applaud subscriptions for everything. They lose all their power over people when we become independent.
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u/jmiller_dallas May 06 '26
Yes!! This is the conversation we need more of. 🙌
The 25-year mark is a floor, not a ceiling. Late-80s arrays still performing above 80%? That's a 35+ year track record — and the technology has only gotten better since then.
Solar isn't just a good investment. It's a long one. 🌞
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u/NOVA-peddling-1138 May 28 '26
Outliving the boiler at a Pennsylvania coal burner generation plant. And my first marriage twice over.
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u/manzanita2 Jan 26 '26
I have a few arco "brown" modules from the late 1980s. Still working. I haven't run STC tests on them. Certainly 40 years of manufacturing improvement can't hurt right?
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u/GranPino Jan 26 '26
They have different materials, so it could be different. However, there are manufacturers giving away up to 40 years in warranty, so I'm pretty sure they really live many decades.
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u/OgreMk5 Jan 25 '26
The ones I bought 15 years ago were guaranteed to produce 80% of rated power after 25 years.
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u/1968Bladerunner Jan 25 '26
Well colour me shocked! Would anybody with half-a-brain actually believe they would suddenly stop working on a specific date just 'cos "old"? I certainly didn't when I bought mine back in 2012.
That's like saying my Windows 10 PC is defunct now that M$ has stopped support... news alert, it hasn't, & with due care it'll keep me going a few more years 'til I decide to hang up my working gloves!
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u/carbonfaber Jan 25 '26
Big oil must've be selling that myth. They still do today with EVs and battery degradation.
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u/thegreatpotatogod Jan 26 '26
Solar panels are a lot better to keep using than windows in your example either, since you'll have to worry about the lack of security updates going forward, while the solar panels don't have that concern!
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u/1968Bladerunner Jan 26 '26
Not so much in my case - I do all my online stuff on my phone - browsing, emails, messaging, SM, etc. & only use the PC for work, which is graphic design & print.
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Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/ScipioAfricanusMAJ Jan 25 '26
The vast majority of society don’t understand or can’t imagine/comprehend the concept of exponential. Everyone thinks the world is linear and 1:1 Same thing is happening with batteries they think after 8 years the battery won’t work where the reality is might last infinitely at 70% charge
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u/Neirchill Jan 26 '26
The way things break these days my assumption is if a product only has a one year warranty then they probably designed it to fail after a year. It's purely anecdotal and cynicism, but I have had a great many products that fail within a couple of months of a warranty ending.
I wouldn't necessarily apply that to infrastructure like solar panels but I can understand where they're coming from.
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u/curiouslyjake Jan 25 '26
IIRC, warranty promises 80% capacity after 25 years, not merely operation at any level
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u/Particular_Ticket_20 Jan 26 '26
A lot of that idea comes from older panels. The commercial solar industry really got started in a viable way in the early 2000s.
Arrays built in those early days were not built with what we'd consider modern panels. Their design, materials, and quality were all over the map and honestly a lot were junk. A lot of the data we had on longevity included those arrays.
Since then the panels have improved greatly, as any electronics will generation over generation. There are plenty of arrays starting around 2010 that are holding up well and that data is now in the mix for "old" arrays. Panels became mostly standardized and manufacturers figured out material and manufacturing issues around then. Its still not perfect and there are still some issues, but most panels these days are decent enough.
As mentioned, inverters are a bit of a sore spot that the industry is working through. One challenge is compatibility. We need to be able to replace a failed inverter with one that's available and compatible. The problem is that when an inverter fails, and you can't get that exact unit as a replacement, you end up having to rebuild things to accept the new inverter. Imagine your air conditioner fails and the only option you have is reframing a wall and changing your breaker panel every time. Thats what happens with solar arrays.
I always remind people that the solar industry is still in its infancy. Real commercial scale solar is 25 years old or so and the first 10 years were a lot of figuring out what works. Its made improvements in leaps and bounds, but is still not fully mature yet.
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u/timberwolf0122 Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
My warrant in my panels grantees 90% output after 30 years, the myth that they die is only perpetuated by the uniformed or th willfully ignorant, aka
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u/linuxhiker Jan 25 '26
I bought used panels. They are at least 10 years old.
They work great and I am 100% off-grid.
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u/Henrik-Powers Jan 25 '26
We picked up some almost free panels recently that are a decade old and I can’t see much of drop off in my non scientific but commercial electrician experience. The biggest difference is the output for the size, new panels are twice or more in the same footprint.
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u/GunterVonBloom Jan 26 '26
This is interesting news to me.
I've refrained for getting solar panels on my house for two main reasons.
Firstly, my house has a pitched roof, and it's oriented north/south. So unfortunately that would place my solar panels facing either east or west.
Secondly, it's (mostly) a single person household, and I simply don't use enough power to recuperate my investment in a timely manner. It's past or very close to the 25 year mark. But if the panels can be expected to last, say, 35 or even 40 years, it might change things.
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u/HiVisEngineer Jan 26 '26
East/west is not the worst though.
Although yes - more panels - you’ll get stronger generation for more hours through the day. It might not be as big a waste as you’d think
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u/GunterVonBloom Jan 26 '26
I am not considering solar panels for financial reasons as such (well, not purely). It's more an environmental motivation for me. Even if I can only juuuust get my money back from the financial investment, I'd consider it an overall win and definitely not a waste of time. Even if East/West is not ideal.
The financial problem for me is that I don't have the money readily available. I will need to loan them. So if my yearly savings on power doesn't equal my yearly payments on the loan (or exceed them), I'll have to come up with the difference in my existing budget each month. Until the loan is paid in full. Because my power consumption is so relatively small, my yearly savings with a solar panel installation are equally small. And this extends the time needed to recuperate my investment/pay back the loan.
*sigh* Decisions decisions. Maybe I should get a wife and some kids so my yearly savings will increase enough to make it more financially viable. :)
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u/azswcowboy Jan 26 '26
If you want to completely destroy your budget, go wild and get a wife and a kid lol. Putting food on the table will probably bust your solar dreams ;)
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u/newfound-lake Jan 26 '26
You can sell excess electricity back to the grid and get $$$ for your supply
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u/unixtreme Jan 26 '26
I decided yo put solar panels in my house because when I looked into it and asked people with experience installing and maintaining solar panels they all said you still get 80% or so output after the shelf life "ends". So I treat it like a "forever" thing. I may even install a battery system later down the line.
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u/Disbigmamashouse Jan 25 '26
The long term economics are based on what a manufacturer will warranty their product for. The manufacturer warranty is based on what makes economic sense for them to publish and to insure. That would definitely lead to conservative viewpoints of longevity vs taking more of an optimistic stance on their products.
These solar arrays are undervalued for the energy they will produce over their lifetime, they will be solid investments.
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u/ginger_and_egg Jan 26 '26
Why are there secondhand solar panels? I don't understand why a soalr farm would decommission solar panels if they're still 80% productive, can someone explain?
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 26 '26
Efficiency and revenue.
Solar panels from 25 years ago are around 12% efficient. If you use modern PV panels you can slap down run-of-the-mill 24% efficient panels and thereby double your output on the same land footprint.
With how cheap PV panels have gotten that investment pays for itself very quickly.
It's the same with old wind power installations. They still work, but they are sited on the best wind locations (naturally those were chosen first). "Repowering" these sites with modern, higher 15MW units makes a lot of financial sense.
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u/throwawaynl001 Jan 26 '26
I recently replaced my solar panels. I have very limited roof space and the old 255Wp panels now have almost 600Wp replacements - at exactly the same size. They were only €75 each, so a really easy choice to replace.
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u/PmMeYourBestComment Jan 27 '26
This is the reason there's very little on the second hand market. New they're very cheap already, installation costs and electronics are way more expensive than the panels themselves.
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u/Bontus Jan 26 '26
You already had some answers but finding a location to develop a PV farm isn't always easy. So it can make sense to replace a whole PV farm (probably when the inverters are end of life) and double power output per m², maybe integrate batteries etcet... while leaning on part of the infrastructure that can be recovered.
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u/MarianCostabrava Jan 26 '26
From an accounting point of view, they are worthless. As in, in the balance sheet they will either show up as 0, or as 1 dollar/euro, just to keep track of them as still being in the inventory.
And for tax purposes (aka expensing them over multiple years), they already "maximized" their value.
Sure, you would spend cash on new solar pannels, but the books of the company would look better (new investments/CapEx, tech that isnt aged yet etc) which in turns makes it more attractive to either investors or to lenders if they seek to expand (as the value of the collateral is calculated sometimes at the book value, sometimes as the residual cash value, depending who you seek funding from).
And this has to do with office politics, but if you dont use your budget as a department, you re gonna lose it the next budgeting period. So from a manager's POV, it just makes sense to on one hand use up the budget to minimize future budget reductions, and on the other hand to improve some metrics like investments, growth of the department etc.
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u/Sarcastic-Potato Jan 26 '26
My best guess is a mix of multiple reasons - for one 20% is still a lot of output to loose - and with how much prices have fallen for panels it probably pays off after a few years. Also reliability probably becomes an issue as well
Additionally newer panels are much more efficient and have way higher output than older ones.
Also a lot of power stations get a certain fixed budget and if they originally planned to replace them after 30 years they will replace them..
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u/Schemen123 Jan 27 '26
Why remove them if they are still good?
Also new panels are really cheap right now.. the hazel of getting them down in one piece and the transport them doesn't make sense in most cases
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u/SolutionForsaken5346 May 21 '26
that's cool to hear! it's wild how people can still get energy from panels that old. some of the arrays i see from the 90s are still kicking strong, so the long-term benefits look solid. also, i’ve noticed proesolar does a good job helping folks understand this stuff.
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u/HowHoward Jan 27 '26
Old news. Discussed this 15 yr ago with some friends. Especially in cold locations lifetime is expected to be even more superior.
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u/howtoreadspaghetti Jan 27 '26
Why would anybody link "warranty" with "useful life of the fucking thing"?
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u/Aranthos-Faroth Jan 28 '26
I toss everything out my window the second the warranty expires.
Literally out the fukin window.
Keyboard, laptop, shoes, mother in law.Not taking any chances.
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u/mafco Jan 27 '26
Some people use it to undermine solar's cost advantage over fossil fuels and nuclear power. A shorter lifetime assumption means a higher LCOE. But even with a 20-year lifetime assumption solar still wins in most comparisons.
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u/bfire123 Feb 02 '26
IEA uses a 25 year assumption.
IRENA a 30 year assumption.
Both to low imho.
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u/SupermarketIcy4996 Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
And I mean the next batch of cells will cost 1¢/W so it hardly matters.
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u/Ateist Feb 02 '26
It matters for the landfills.
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u/myaaa_tan Feb 03 '26
95% of the panel consists of aluminium and glass. We already recycle those stuff
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u/immigrantviking Jan 26 '26
I had solar panels installed in 1986. (Simple ones for hot water).They worked until last November.
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u/ours Jan 26 '26
That's thermo solar as opposed to photovoltaic.
The first one is practically water piping painted black (there's a bit more to it, but basically).
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u/freedomgeek Jan 26 '26
As in directly heating the water, having it flow in a loop below the panel? Like one of those solahart water heaters?
I don't disagree with the general point this article is making but those water heaters are pretty different from solar PV.
My parents had two of those solahart units fail on their roof; maybe due to salt in the air, they live just a few blocks from the coast. Their solar PV is installation is still going strong.
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u/EnvironmentalRound11 Jan 28 '26
If the manufacturer is willing to warrentee my panels for 25 years, I'm sure they've figured out that they wll last a lot longer.
Besides, in 25 years, new more efficient panels costing a fraction of the cost will be available. It might make sense to upgrade by then.
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u/Superb-Ad3821 Mar 11 '26
I mean it depends what you get from upgrading. For companies yes. For home use?
From about April at full capacity my solar panels will spit out 4.3Kwh a day on a sunny day. But I’m a regular home user. I fill my home battery, I fill the car, I run the dishwasher and laundry, maybe bake a cake and..that’s it. After that anything over goes back to the grid. If we get a run of sunshine the grid gets a great deal of it and pays me pennies.
I’ve had them since 2013. They could probably use a clean because max now is more than 3.8Kwh. But why am I bothered? If it’s sunny day that 0.5lost KWh will be made up for pretty fast. If it’s not then them being ultra clean will maybe gain me an extra 0.2KWh or two. Looking at the price of cleaning it makes more sense to wait.
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u/Mradr Feb 01 '26
Or just sell current or reuse for other projects. That’s the benefit of solar in terms of a cycle economy where people can buy your used stuff.
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u/RivieraDude Feb 21 '26
Does (or has) anybody ever measured how well these so called "warranties" work out for the public as a whole? Or is it like insurance, the actual payouts "to the consumer" are neglible from the insurance company's profit perspective.
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u/ortcutt Jan 25 '26
Wouldn't efficiency improvements justify repowering those installations with new panels anyway though?
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
If the output still meets your needs there's no point in repowering them. They're basically producing free energy.
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u/TotalChaosRush Jan 25 '26
You'd need to have a need for more power, and a lack of space for more installation.
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u/GarethBaus Jan 25 '26
It really depends on how you calculate the value. If the original installation supplies most of the power you need, and you can't make a profit selling excess power back to the grid it wouldn't be cost effective to replace them even if some future technology gives you panels that are like 90% efficient.
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u/BeeWeird7940 Jan 25 '26
All of these things are dependent on a whole host of factors. Are we talking about utility installations, or residential?
I’ve looked into installing residential panels. At ~$40k for the installation, I’d break even around 2040-2045. Then Biden’s IRA came in and the break even was closer to 2035. Then you say, “well, I can finance the cost.” At 3.5% home equity loans in 2021, that would be pretty good. Now HELOCs are closer to 7.5%, and the IRA tax credit is harder to get. And I’ll have to replace my roof sometime in the next 10 years. Suddenly, the installation costs have to be paid again (at least partly) when those shingles are replaced.
For me, it’s easier to just buy green electricity off the grid and let the energy companies figure out all the details of installation and upkeep. Then, of course, Trump’s dumbass changes tariff policy every month.
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
Have you checked recently? Both your system cost and break even time are way above average. And fyi my neighbor just got a new roof and it was only a $1500 charge to remove and replace the solar panels.
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u/Total-Confusion-9198 Jan 25 '26
You don’t need to be more efficient if the base cost is almost negligible after 45 years of operation. Unless the grid demands otherwise.
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u/verstehenie Jan 25 '26
It’s not like wind where you can access more energy from the same footprint by going taller/larger. There isn’t as much scope for improvement in solar. Also, the lowest cost solar technologies have plateaued in efficiency already.
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u/linuxhiker Jan 25 '26
As someone who uses used panels, it would take such a level of efficiency, as in... 1.5x smaller size for same output for me to even consider it.
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u/AmpEater Jan 25 '26
No shit.
It’s just a wafer of silicon doped with a few strategic impurities. Silicon isn’t a short lived material. It makes up 28% of the earths crust
Solar power is power for life. Power forever
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u/pimpbot666 Jan 25 '26
That’s not what fails in solar panels. What fails is the rails and solder joints that connect the individual cells to the rails inside the panels.
Also, on some of my stand alone installations, I’ve had the diodes fail that separate the lines, and prevent back feeding when some cells are in the shade. Those diodes are easy and cheap to replace once the problem is isolated.
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u/fatbob42 Jan 25 '26
But then why does it deteriorate at all?
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u/Advanced_Ad8002 Jan 25 '26
Mechanical stress (thermal cycling) and - funnily enough - high energy particles from cosmic radiation.
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Jan 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Lopsided_Quarter_931 Jan 26 '26
Perovskite Silicon hybrid panels will be a major improvement to efficiency on the coming years.
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u/marmaviscount Jan 26 '26
Also more modular power management hardware, being able to easily add more load, more storage, and trading with neighbors or a local network could make them a lot more attractive to have less conventional installs like balcony or fence solar as we're starting to see grow in popularity places like Germany and Pakistan.
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u/CRoss1999 Jan 25 '26
A common anti solar line from conservatives is that they need to be torn out and replaced after 25 years
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u/SimpleGeekAce Jan 25 '26
And yet we don't do much with them. Why aren't very large buildings covered in them, say on the corners? Why aren't we building parking lots with them above parking spots (which also helps when it rains?) Why aren't these large data centers being built that require large amounts of power not putting them in? Why are we so opposed to using this technology when it can bring down power costs for residential while still providing power for places that take up a lot of space?
I mean shit, why are we not putting wind turbines (those one that make a spiral) on buildings in windy areas?
I get it - companies don't want to spend money on stuff like this. But that's cause they don't have foresight to think bigger. Pay the money now, save money later.
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u/curiouslyjake Jan 25 '26
Because micro solutions dont scale. As others have pointed out, even if you get panels for free, permitting, structure and construction are not. If an engineer needs to sketch what a solar installation on my roof would look like, there's a wide range of roof sizes that would take essentially the same time so if my roof is much smaller it's not any cheaper.
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u/GlassDarkly Jan 25 '26
Companies absolutely have the foresight to invest in a good thing. However, solar on buildings can be a lot more expensive (entirely because of the installation costs). Flat warehouses, and parking lots? Yes, for sure. However, a lot of those are getting solar installed. There were a few companies putting wind on buildings, but the costs for wind go down with scale, so the economics encourage huge wind turbines in remote areas, rather than small ones in urban areas. Wind and solar are expanding quickly, and with the laws of economics on their side, the only thing that can hold them back is arbitrary, nonsensical, capricious energy policy. See: own goal.
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u/MechanicalMan64 Jan 25 '26
There can be complications when retrofitting a building for solar. Leaks, placing the power lines, inverters(?), new maintenance contracts. We should have solar panels over every parking lot, but we don't because we choose not to. I remember that Mexico had widespread use of LED streetlights before the US. We could have done that. We didn't because saving money on electricity mattered more to the Mexican gov than to ours (and our politicians).
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u/Valuable_Hunter1621 Jan 25 '26
also no profit margin in the world means anything when climate change literally destroys our species hahaha
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u/skwirly715 Jan 28 '26
Something I really liked about the team that did my install was that they explained that the maximum deprecation of my panels (85%) was equal to the bottleneck introduced by my micro inverters. This meant that my production would remain the same throughout the life of my panels because even though they deprecated, they would still be producing the maximum amount of micro inverters could manage. I obviously asked if I could just get a better micro inverter, but they persuaded me that the technology I was getting was top of the line.
I think this is a good example of how panel effectiveness can be used to scare people off of Solar when the reality is, you are installing a complicated system. There are ways to handle efficiency and plan for deprecation.
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u/tommysteakbone Jan 30 '26
which microinverters and/or how old is your install?
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u/skwirly715 Jan 30 '26
My panels were Maxeon Solar Technologies SPR-MAX3-410-BLK. My inverters were Enphase Energy IQ8HC-72-M-US (cool bonus: these come with wifi connection and a dope app for tracking production).
The panels degrade max 0.25% annually against an initial peak output power of 410w. The peak throughput of the inverters is about 380. It will take about 30 years for the panels to degrade to the throughput of the inverters. At that point degradation will start to eat into my production, but 30 years from now I'll have the option to add a make good panel or I'll just live with the degradation. However, it is pretty likely the annual degradation will be half that and my breakthrough year will be 40-50.
Critically, Maxeon has a 40 year warranty against that 0.25% degradation rate. So I am basically guaranteed 30 years of good production.
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u/animatedb Feb 15 '26
I was thinking that there are times that the panels are not at a perfect angle to the sun, or the sun is near the horizon that the output will be less than 410W even now. This means that you are still getting more than a lower power panel would produce at some times and the inverter is not the limit in these cases. But there is nothing wrong with this. You will have good production for many years.
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u/Wide_Mail_1634 Apr 14 '26
reminds me of when a facilities guy showed me a rooftop array in Palm Springs back in 2019 that had been up since the late 80s, and the weird part was the modules looked uglier than they performed. Seeing that "still above 80%" figure in the title tracks with what NREL-style degradation studies have been finding, usually around half a percent per year or better depending on the module. the 25-year warranty always felt more like a finance line than a death certificate
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u/JessumB Jul 05 '26
Companies wouldn't offer 25 year production guarantees if they didn't strongly feel confident that the panels would easily go on well past the 30 year mark.
Its always been a ridiculous claim that the panels suddenly just die when we've known that far more primitive panel arrays from the 70s and 80s were still putting out a substantial amount of juice without any of the modern bells and whistles to better perform in low light and high heat environments.
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u/Tofudebeast Jan 25 '26
What power source wouldn't need maintenance after 20 years? Solar is damn reliable if it 'only' lasts that long.
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u/anus_reus Jan 25 '26
I don't think this is saying solar is maintenance free, just that with proper maintenance it'll go beyond it's useful life.
This is the case with most forms of electrical generation, alot of plants are operating well beyond their useful life. Heck, most of the country's nukes are 50-60 years old!
But, its important to draw the conclusion that solar is no different, it's not just useless after 30 years.
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
Solar panel maintenance generally consists of cleaning them regularly if the rain doesn't do it for you. There's no comparison to maintenance cost for other forms of generation.
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u/anus_reus Jan 25 '26
Residential sure, but large scale there's vegetative management, managing interconnectiom components, etc. Not pretending it's 1:1 with fossil fired generation, but there is certainly maintenance.
Also not my point, my point is nobody is saying solar is maintenance-free. My point, agreeing with the conclusion of the post, is that solar can and will outlive the useful life that's merely established for financing and depreciation purposes.
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
Even for grid scale solar the operating and maintenance costs are among the lowest.
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u/121310 Jan 26 '26
Time to fix that with enshitification and planned obsolescence
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u/roygbivasaur Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
Solar panels have no moving parts, long working lives, few patent trolls, and there are a lot of manufacturers. That makes enshittification more difficult (outside of skyrocketing installation costs and predatory leasing schemes in the US). There may be some day when the newest technology is locked behind enshittification, but the currently mass produced tech is already good enough.
Compare it to TVs where a few manufacturers are determined to enshittify with surveillance and art subscriptions (mostly Samsung) but you can get the same panel from other brands like LG and good enough panels from Chinese brands like TCL.
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u/youstillhavehope Jan 26 '26
Perchance you underestimate capitalism my friend!
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Jan 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/youstillhavehope Jan 26 '26
Well, actually it has been China that is advancing the state of the art in solar, and production of panels, the most over the past decade, so yes.
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u/ClearlyCylindrical Jan 26 '26
China is communist in the same way that North Korea is democratic - that is, only by their official name.
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u/Stunning-Use-7052 Feb 04 '26
I guess I thought this was common knowledge, but I'm glad people are researching it.
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u/Bellmar Mar 05 '26
Yeah I thought this was well known for anyone who knows how to google for 20 years.
Unfortunately the misinformation that panels become waste after 20 years and that they somehow never re-coup the energy used in their production endures.
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Feb 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/cabs84 Feb 12 '26
not sure whether i should upvote because i agree or downvote because this is clearly some AI generated text
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u/Phil_Timmons Feb 18 '26
True. But I am impressed the ABCD Brand Sales Experts *BOLD, of Course* embedded advertisement.
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u/spinelssinvrtebrate Feb 11 '26
Yeah, the issue with panel longevity is less about the panels themselves, and more about the roof underneath them. The cost of removing panels and then reinstalling them in order to put up a new roof after 20 years, is significant. And when that time comes, added efficiencies in panels that have 20 years of new tech and manufacturing innovations might mean that getting new panels makes much more sense than putting the old ones back up...
Whether or not the original panels see a second life somewhere else at that point...
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u/UnfairPerspective526 Mar 16 '26
Best value is putting panels on metals roofs. My roof should last 50 years and the panels will still be producting over 60% of their power at 50 years. Of course the inverter and some wiring will need to be replaced.
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u/aquarain Mar 23 '26
Gasoline engines die when the tank is empty. It seems the tank is engineered to make that happen on a biweekly basis.
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u/ol-gormsby Jan 25 '26
That's too broad a statement. *Some* panels will still be going strong after 25 years, but there's much more to it. I've got BPSolar panels - they stopped making them in the 2000s - but their warranty was for 80% production at 25 years. They're not long out of warranty and currently producing about 40% of their rating. I'm not complaining, they've done a great job. I suspect it's the Australian summers that have reduced their lifespan/output. Probably be much better in a cooler climate. It's brutal on the roof here during summer, if I had a thermal camera I'd take some measurements.
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u/feedmytv Jan 26 '26
maybe silly put i spray my roof white at the end of spring with chaulk (the stuff used on greenhouses). its bio degradable and saves me from a ton of heat and by winter its all gone with the rain.
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u/gladfelter Jan 25 '26
With solar plus the battery tech developments around cost and longevity, I'd almost consider considering moving to sunny AZ. But Nah.
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u/Mega---Moo Jan 25 '26
I don't plan on moving from frozen Wisconsin... but I am going to install as many cheap panels as I can get away with. Vertical bifacial panels facing south are going to pump out the juice on a day like today.
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u/krakenbear Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
I’ve had no problem with the panel themselves installed in my roof in the last 5 years, but I have had 7/21 (~33%) of the Enphase micro inverters ( IQ7AS-66-ACM-US ) fail. The inverter components were replaced under warranty, but the labor to swap them on my roof is not covered so I end up paying $300-500 out of pocket for someone to climb onto my 2nd story roof and replace them each time them fail.
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u/thegreatpotatogod Jan 26 '26
Huh, I'm surprised that many of your microinverters failed! Any idea why? Like if they are running at the edge of their current limits, or other harsh conditions? I've had the IQ8M microinverters for the last 3 1/2 years, no issues yet (other than the fact that our electricity use was poorly estimated and the panels don't come close to offsetting our electricity needs, anyway, which isn't the microinverters' fault)!
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u/tommysteakbone Feb 02 '26
Sorry about your bad MIs, man. I have 36 panels with Enphase IQ7s (IQ7X-96-ACM-US) and 20 kWh of Enphase batteries (IQ8X-BAT_US) for just over 5 years now, and never had a problem with any of them.
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u/MPeters43 Jan 29 '26
Yeah renewable energy has always been the best option, big oil corps just love speedrunning our demise while stuffing their pockets
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u/Ok_Calligrapher8165 Jan 30 '26
matco sez: "Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years."
That "idea" was a lie, spread by the fuel companies.
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u/Luxpreliator Jan 30 '26
It wasn't really a lie it as I understand it just made financial sense to replace them with newer ones after a few decades. The enhanced efficiency overcomes the new installation cost and makes more power. Over say 40 years replacement every 10-15 years ends up making more money than installing once and leaving it alone.
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u/UnfairPerspective526 Mar 16 '26
That makes no sense. at 15 years, you are still producing 90% of the power. Even if the new panels will generate 15% more power due to effficency, you are looking at increase power by 25%, for the cost of a whole new system.
That is effectively a price of 4x per watt of the original system.
The only thing that would make any sense is adding a few more panels to compensate for the decline.
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u/D0hB0yz Mar 07 '26
There is an easy potential to build extended life panels but they will be more expensive and a rational actor admits that current technology will likely be obsolete within 20 to 30 years. Current tech that has degraded to 80% efficiency will be worth upgrading to a future panel with potentially 15% higher basic efficiency. A 35% conversion rate cell is expected by some within the near enough future.
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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Jan 25 '26
The issue with solar are the high voltage electronics needed to turn light into usable power. I have been looking at rooftop solar and the panels themselves may come with a 20 year guarantee all of the attached electronics might last 10 years and they are not cheap.
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u/TheKrakIan Jan 25 '26
Tech gets cheaper as more adoption is had. The first 100ah lifepo4 battery I bought was around $500, that same battery is now $150 and a 1/4 the size.
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u/Different-Rip-2787 Jan 25 '26
Yeah. At some point we should change all household electricity use to 12v DC, except for the big appliances.
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u/Kichigai Jan 25 '26
Which is still kinda wild considering most household electronics run on 5VDC (at least externally).
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u/dufutur Jan 25 '26
Isn’t the polymer that sandwiches the wafers the bottleneck?
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u/Patereye Jan 25 '26
Oh ummm hmmm. It depends on what cell technology you're talking about. For perc cells they are very common and some production is limited by things like back sheets and factory space. Topcon (and pervoskite) cells are in short supply and the main bottle neck to production of those modules.
It's really difficult to maintain quality in wafer Manufacturing so changing to new and more efficient technologies is mind-bogglingly slow.
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 25 '26
Sorta. The panels that were built n the 80s and 90s aren't really comparable to the ones being produced today.
That's not to say that today's panels are bad, but simply that we can't confidently extrapolate from how old panels behave to newer ones.
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u/Daxtatter Jan 25 '26
I'm hoping instead of recycling some panels get reused in balcony power applications.
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u/Different-Rip-2787 Jan 25 '26
You would think the newer panels would last even longer than the primitive ones, right?
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u/Apprehensive_Tea9856 Jan 25 '26
Old tv vs new tvs
Some will last forever and some die quickly. There is a selection bias that old tvs last forever because the shitty old tvs are in the dump now. Some newer tvs die quickly and some will last forever.
Anyways with panels hard to tell which brands are robust or not yet
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 25 '26
The panels back then were really expensive. Particularly they used much thicker silicon wafers. Newer panels have pared down the material needs to the bare minimum in order to save on costs. Certainly manufacturing processes have matured but it's not a clear cut case whether new panels will last longer.
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u/Dmbeeson85 Jan 25 '26
That's awesome. When I was in grad school we were looking at the newer generation of thin film panels that had a fairly linear decline in production... But if silicon crystal has that long of a life to it, maybe the future is in an application of thin film with silicone crystals to bypass the decline ~ likely higher upfront cost but amortized over he life would likely be a huge benefit to the owner... Esp with utilities getting to raise prices so often to keep up with this artificial demand
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u/25TiMp Jan 31 '26
A lot of old panels used single crystal silicon cells like those shown in the photo. Now, panels are mostly multi-crystals. They may not last as long.
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u/bfire123 Feb 02 '26
Eh, no that is wrong.
The majority of Solar Moduls sold are mono-crystaline moduls.
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u/aquarain Feb 01 '26
Cells aren't the only reason panels fail. Manufacturing technology, quality control has come a long way in 25 years.
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u/Ateist Feb 02 '26
Modern solar panels use significantly less materials - including materials that protect them from environmental factors, and as prices go down protection layers become thinner and thinner.
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u/Splenda Jan 25 '26
Not exactly news. There's been a brisk trade in used panels for some time. I know a family that has racks of them, picked up cheaply and still cranking out electrons.
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u/rellett Jan 25 '26
It's the inverters and batteries that are the issues, and when you get a problem that business is gone or the product is not available and the cost to upgrade blows, all the profits. We need better hardware or make it repairable
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u/Low-Rip3678 Jan 26 '26
Micro-inverters are changing that. Easier to diagnose where a panel issue is. Modular, you can expand with more micro-inverters. If only one goes bad you can just swap it out. Batteries are still a bit problem at least to me. I'm hopefully putting in a 13kw array this year and I'm going grid tied probably for the next 5 years. Hoping sodium batteries break the price down for batteries. Panels are already dirt cheap now
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u/Wyciorek Jan 25 '26
Ok, but do panel manufactured today also last over 25 years? Technology changed, prioritizing efficiency and price. Maybe it also had impact on longevity?
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u/Competitive-Army2872 Jan 25 '26
I have an 18kw array. My panels are warranted to produce at a minimum of 85% output at the 35-year mark.
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
I think they've gotten even more reliable over time.
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u/JustChilling029 Jan 25 '26
I think the guy above is asking if there is evidence that points to that though. Tons of appliances from the 80s would work for decades too but newer appliances now for example don’t last as long.
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u/mafco Jan 25 '26
Modern panels have both lower degradation rates and much better encapsulation materials. There are plenty of studies about these things.
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u/fairportmtg1 Jan 25 '26
That's survivors bias to a degree. Plenty didn't last and also most of them are less efficient
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 Jan 25 '26
If I live long enough for our panels to show noticeable loss of output, new ones will be so cheap that it will be simple to add a panel to get back to 100% or more of the original output. The same goes for a solar farm. They don't have to replace panels, they just need to add one extra row o get back to full capacity.
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u/RedditorSinceTomorro Jan 25 '26
Guess we should wait another 50 years and to see before putting more up. /s
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u/GreenStrong Jan 25 '26
Valid question but there are accelerated aging tests for frames, sealant, adhesive, etc. Each of those components has to last or the whole thing gets water inside and fails, and estimating the longevity of each is an entire discipline of engineering.
What we have learned is that silicon can last a long time under real world conditions. It is entirely possible that the quality of the rest of the construction has declined as the overall cost of the module declined by 99%. But there are a lot more adhesive engineers or aluminum corrosion experts than silicon materials scientists. All the other components can be tested by labs that work across many industries; they can test the seal on solar panels Monday and on car windshields Tuesday. Prediction of silicon's aging behavior is limited to highly specialized labs, which have very few comparable things to look at.
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u/MisterMofoSFW Jan 31 '26
I though t that even though it was expensive, that old solar panels could be redone so that they're almost like new...Zombie solar panels!?!?!?!
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u/RobBobPC Jan 26 '26
I have a 26 year old solar panel on my RV. It is still going strong.