Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Curious about solar power?
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Old 01-07-2021, 12:38 PM
Win1894 Win1894 is offline
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Don't do it. Total waste of time and money. There are many things the promoters of solar heat don't tell you:
1. Payback is never what they say it is
2. Rarely generate the amount of electricity thay say.
3. They lose (degrade) about 1 to 2% of their already low erfficiency every year - That's just the physics of the photovoltaic cell.
4. You lose cells and panels more often than they tell you.
5. Unless your roof is brand new, you will have to remove the panels to reroof, and these panels are subject to wind, hail, and hurricane damage.
6. Virtually all the panels are made in China, the nation whose government brought Covid19 to the rest of the world.
7. What are you going to do with the panels when they stop working after their useful life of 20 to 25 years? There are virtually no recycling centers to recover the rare-earth metals used to produce photovoltaic cells - very environmentally unfriendly in that regard. Also consider the strip mining used to harvest the rare-earth metals used in their construction.
8. And the last dirty little secret - Feel a panel in broad daylight. They are very hot! They directly heat the atmosphere adding to global warming.
Conclusion: Free energy from the sun sound like a great thing. As a physicist with experience in this area I can assure you that it isn't. It's a variable and diffuse energy source. No matter how you look at it, solar panels are a bad investment.