Who Will Maintain Your Solar Panels, Inverter, etc over the 30-year Lifespan?

2024-05-04 • SEND FEEDBACK |

Related: dumb energy, environmental destruction, Expose Somewhat To Right, Expose To The Right, follow the money, follow the self-interest

re: electric vehicle
re: climate science
re: follow the money

re: Electric Vehicles: a Multi-Pronged Menace with Few if any Benefits?

It took my neighbor ~6 months to get his solar system issues resolved—like pulling teeth. And that is with a 3-year-old newly-built house ($$$$$) by a very high-end installer. How many more times will it happen over the ~30 year lifespan? Many solar panel owners are going to have to pay out of pocket for fixing problems—and that means guys charging $200+ per hour here in this area. Kinda wrecks the whole ROI thing.

"I've Been Totally Ghosted": After Install, Solar Panels Become Maintenance Nightmare

2024-05-03

The green new deal and switch to "alternative' energy looks like it's going exactly as planned: costing the taxpayer trillions of dollars and generally pissing everybody off.

That was the case with a number of solar panel owners who are now finding it difficult to get their panels serviced, according to WBAL TV.

Solar panel installation is touted as offering benefits like reduced energy costs, environmental friendliness, and significant rebates. However, many homeowners have discovered a concerning issue within the industry: addressing technical problems can be exceedingly challenging -- if not outright impossible.

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WIND: if you create an industry driven by install-and-move-on, that’s what you get—installations. You do not get systems that function until end of life—you get problems and more problems that no one has an incentive to fix other than the homeowner left holding the bag.

IMO, the solar ROI calculations are a form of fraud—in the real world things never work out as forecasted, and there is no leveling-up for problems at 3/5/10/15/20/30 years out. Panels get dirty and damaged. Inverters fail. Roofs leak.Trees grow and block coverage. Parts of the system just break down (see my neighbor above). Power generation payments are reduced. And the grid is undermined by freeloading solar panel homes, which do not pay to maintain the grid. Ad nauseum.

Design is destiny. The destiny of solar design is destruction of the power infrastructur over time, as it forces out baseline load and disconnects economics from reality.

ROI analysis

I have done a solar panel ROI (return on investment) analysis 3 times in the past 10 years. Each time, I rejected the idea because the payback was too long and with too many unanswered questions, no bond for performance, far too many risks, etc.

Subsidy reductions — , the power generation solar subsidy payments have been hugely reduced: “utilities commission voted to reduce the daytime compensation for excess solar power by around 75% for new solar customers starting in April 2023”. Your ROI calculation is now a long-gone fantasy. Will existing solar installs be hit next? Hopefully, as they are a direct tax on everyone else.
Equipment problems — see above. These are guaranteed. See neighbor above.
Opportunity cost— what if that capital had been invested instead? Even a stable money market fund yields 5%, and that is not likely to go down much ever again, and might rise.
Roof leaks— even the best install is not going to go well vs that winter rain thing over 30 years. All those little posts on which the panels rest each with its own problems waiting to happen Oops—they couldn’t fix it for a month, and that tiny leak just damaged the attic insulation and ceiling too—add another $10K for repairs and mold remediation. If you think that’s pessimistic, you have not owned a home long enough.
When the roof needs to be replaced, add in $5K or so for solar panel removal/reinstall and reconnect. Is that in your ROI calculation?
Town/city permit fees — in my town these idiots put a stiff fee on all construction activities. Not included in ROI calculation.
Breaker box and wiring upgrades—in my case at least $5K.
Fast charger — at least $3K for a fast charger and required wiring. Oops, that breaker box has to be replaced to do that—permit requirement.
Hail that damages or destroys the panels. This only needs to happen once in 30 years (eg averaging every 15 years) to wreck the economics. Don’t forget the repair costs. What bout permanent environmental damage (glass shards and toxic metals) that go into the soil?
Toxic e-waste—solar panels are huge e-waste problem.
Quality of life degradation — too much of this crap buzzes. I can hear my neighbor’s charger up the street from 150 feet away. My immediate neighbor’s Tesla PowerWall inverter buzzes, but luckily I can’t hear it from my house. But what if it starts getting louder? Noise is a very real and very serious health hazard.

Pointless

Anyone who thinks any amount of solar is going to help climate change is fooling themselves. China now emits more CO2 than the rest of the world combined and is on a massive expansion of coal-burning plants.

The human toll is immense and cruel beyond belief. It’s not just lower quality of life, it is life itself: energy costs translate directly into human suffering.

The payback period for the energy consumed in mining, manufacturing, installing and maintaining solar is surely skewed with unrealistic bias. And it ignores the vast infrastructure required widescale solar adoption, which means massive batteries of some kind, which do not exist.

The AI revolution must have baseline power. That means nuclear, gas, coal. Solar has negative value in an era of compute farms because it ends up destroying baseline power.

What really irks me though is the as-far-as-the-eye-can see environmental devastation of massive solar farms, a grotesque abomination so that a few well-connected grifters make a lot of money. I see it more and more in my travels—vast fields of flowers and previously untouched land laid to waste for a toxic glass 'farm'. Green is the new brown... black, as in the black of death as just one example of 4200 Joshua trees aka 'nursery trees' being destroyed, each hundreds of years old with enormous quantities of carbon then released from the soil once killed. Maybe in 500 to 1000 years if the panels were removed you might see it again. If you live that long. The people who do this and approve it are environmental criminals committing crimes against humanity.