Carter Era Solar Panel Performance Amazes Owner

November 26th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

A story in Green building advisor sheds some light on how long the solar panels on your roof just might keep on pumping out power.

While most appliances only use energy, rather than make energy, and are not subject to the rigorous second-guessing of solar arrays (when was the last time you demanded a payback analysis on your car, your fridge or your giant plasma TV?) a solar array is just an appliance that supplies a personal power supply, after all. Like a car, a fridge, or a plasma TV, it provides you with a service.

So, will it outlast your car, fridge and plasma TV? Apparently: yes.

Green Building Advisor’s Green Building’s Martin Holladay tested the 30 year old solar panel that he originally purchased and installed in 1980. To mark the 30th anniversary, Holladay climbed on his roof and brought one of his panels down for testing. He was curious to see exactly how well it was working, compared with its original rating.

He connected it directly (with no intervening battery) to two different 12-volt loads to test it: a 35-watt incandescent light bulb, and a blower rated at 4.5 amps (about 54 watts). Result? “The old PV module passed with flying colors. It easily powered up the light bulb; my Fluke multimeter showed that under a full load of 2.015 amps, the module’s voltage was an impressive 14.93 volts” said Holladay.

The panel tested at an even better performance than when the panel was new. Read more…

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Tags: Arco Solar, GreenBuildingAdvisor, last, solar panel, SolarWorld

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

http://makesolarpanel.net/ Yan ka

Great content article, very impressive
vivzizi

Republicans killing jobs for decades…

“The original solar industry left the US when Republicans once again defunded the nascent renewable industry, and it was picked up by Germany and Japan.

Germany’s Siemens is now a world leader in both solar and wind, and just beat out GE”

of course silicon solar cells should never really deteriorate unless the wiring goes bad. the cells themselves are permanent sand and like the rock in your backyard will last for thousands of years.

Newer solar panels are made of less permanent things though so some lose generating capacity within years.
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  Newer solar panels are just as long lived, and made essentially the same way. Only thinfilm solar is made of different stuff.
sola

This is REALLY IMPRESSIVE.

Not many solar panels have actually reached their end of life, they are not old enough for that.