Oh. Oh. It appears that those solar cells on which we bet the atmosphere... [View all]

[NNadir]

...don't last very long.

Solar Industry Anxious Over Defective Panels

This comes from that right wing publication The New York times

LOS ANGELES — The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail.
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Coatings that protect the panels disintegrated while other defects caused two fires that took the system offline for two years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues.

It was not an isolated incident. Worldwide, testing labs, developers, financiers and insurers are reporting similar problems and say the $77 billion solar industry is facing a quality crisis just as solar panels are on the verge of widespread adoption...

...But a review of 30,000 installations in Europe by the German solar monitoring firm Meteocontrol found 80 percent were underperforming. Testing of six manufacturers’ solar panels at two Spanish power plants by Enertis Solar in 2010 found defect rates as high as 34.5 percent...

Um...the failed solar cells have all become electronic waste, and nobody knows what to do with electronic waste.

I'm sure that the 60 years of mindless cheering for solar energy, along with the hundreds of billions of dollars, euros, yen and yuan thrown at it over that period while maligning the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy has paid off. I mean just because a 77 billion dollar industry can't produce half an exajoule of the 520 exajoules humanity consumes each year doesn't mean that we should lose faith.

Our faith based approach for solar energy is surely paying off.

All week long the figures at Mauna Loa have reported values over 400 ppm, but for the last two days the readings have been 399.99 ppm and 399.60 ppm. Finally the grand experiment of betting the future of humanity on wonderful "free" solar energy is paying off.

Heckuva job anti-nukes. You must all be very, very, very, very, very, very proud.