Pedro Prieto: many solar panels won’t last 25-30 years, EROI may be negative
Preface. Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall wrote the definitive book on the EROI of solar power, “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment” and has built many commercial facilities himself and witnessed the failure of solar panels long before the supposed 25-30 years they were guaranteed to last.
This is being seen in England where there’s been a loss of 25% of power in the UK due to imperfections known as hot spots on solar panels:Photovoltaics hot spots are areas of elevated temperature which can affect only part of the solar panel. They are a result of a localised decrease in efficiency and the main cause of accelerated PV ageing, often causing permanent damage to the solar panel’s lifetime performance. Dr. Dhimish discovered that of the 2580 panels he looked at, those that had hot spots generated a power output notably less than those that didn’t. He also discovered that location was a primary contributor in the distribution of hot spots (Solar power – largest study to date discovers 25% power loss across UK October 29, 2018 https://phys.org/news/2018-10-solar-power-largest-date-loss.html).
You may want to read my review of “Spain’s Solar Revolution” for background on what this post discusses, since what Pedro Prieto wrote assumes you’re familiar with the book.
Pedro writes:
“Our study concluded that, when analyzed what we called “extended boundaries energy inputs”, about 2/3 of the total energy inputs were other than those of the modules+inverters+metallic infrastructure to tilt and orient the modules.
So even if the cost of solar PV modules (including inverters and metallic infrastructure) were ZERO, our resulting EROI (2.4:1) would increase about just 1/3.
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