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Wednesday's Energy Absurdity: Solar Farms Are Prematurely Ageing, and You'll Never Guess What is Being Blamed [UPDATED]

David Blackmon
Feb 21, 2024

The wind industry has taken a beating, both from a public relations and financial standpoint, in recent years as the claimed 25-year life spans of its turbines has in reality come in at just 7-10 years before having to be replaced. A similar issue has plagued the enormous blades the turbines turn.


This has had the impact of significantly increasing the operating costs of the wind farms, as well as creating a mushrooming waste disposal issue that neither the industry nor state regulators were prepared to deal with. As a result, we’ve ended up being bombarded with photos of massive wind graveyards popping up all over the place, like the two gigantic on the outskirts of Sweetwater, Texas, one of which is pictured here.


More recently, news has begun to pop up that operators and manufacturers in the solar industry are now seeing premature ageing of their solar inverters and panels. Utility Dive reported in October that first- and second-generation solar farms in the US are running into a bit of a “midlife crisis.”

Here’s an excerpt from that story:

Many older inverters haven’t lived up to their expected lifespans, with most beginning to fail around the 10-15 year mark, according to Levent Gun, CEO of Ampt, a solar power conversion product manufacturer. To make matters more challenging, most of the manufacturers of these inverters — the companies that were supposed to maintain them and guarantee their performance over time — have gone out of business, Gun said.

“These projects were designed for 20-25 year lifespans, and it’s a well known fact that the first and second generation inverters have a 15-year average lifespan,” said Daniel Liu, who heads research on asset performance benchmarking, cost analysis and valuations at Wood Mackenzie. Like it or not, he said, “the market is going to have to repair a lot of inverters over the next ten years.”

According to projections by Wood Mackenzie, some 23 GW of U.S. solar — residential, commercial and utility-scale — will approach that 15 year benchmark in the next five years. And given the complexity of switching out inverters on some of these early solar installations, some solar equipment dealers recommend knocking out a host of potential upgrades all at once: replacing old panels and wiring with new equipment to maximize efficiencies, or even installing batteries for a solar+storage facility while you’re at it.

[End]

Note the entirely predictable key point of this story, which is that “most of the manufacturers of these inverters — the companies that were supposed to maintain them and guarantee their performance over time — have gone out of business.”

Oh. Sounds a lot like the Wind and EV bus industries, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. Again, this is an entirely predictable outcome that the industry should have foreseen and developed plans around, given that most of the companies in this industry are startups that have been heavily-subsidized by the government. That means that so many of them were started without first obtaining the critical mass of private capital investment needed to sustain them over the longer term.

Thus, we see the exact same storyline progression running across all three of the rent-seeking industries that were hand-picked by grifting globalist elites as the designated “solutions” to the imagined climate “crisis.”

But this solar-specific tale of woe gets even better. On Monday, MSN ran with a story out of Australia that claims that solar panels in wind farms Down Under are ageing prematurely due to…wait for it…THE SUN!

I swear I am not making that up - who could?

Here’s an excerpt from this gem:

Climate change is leaving an indelible mark on the solar energy landscape in Australia, with new research revealing that the country’s solar panels are degrading at faster rates due to increasing temperatures and humidity. This trend has raised concerns about the longevity of photovoltaic (PV) modules and the potential rise in energy costs.

“Large scale commercial PV modules have a typical lifespan of about 20 to 25 years, although they naturally degrade or lose their efficiency over time,” explains Shukla Poddar, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UNSW School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering. However, these degradation rates are being exacerbated by climate change, a phenomenon that calls for an urgent reassessment of Australia’s solar infrastructure and energy economics.

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So, the moral of this story, I suppose, is as follows: Solar arrays do a great job of generating electricity from the rays of the Sun, but only so long as the Sun behaves itself and doesn’t shine too brightly.

What in the hell do you even do with that?

[Update: As Dan Kish correctly notes in the comments sections, for the wind and solar developers, the US investment credit that was expanded in the IRA starts all over again when they prematurely refurbish their facilities regardless of how long before the 25-year lifespan that might be. The makers of the equipment do not enjoy that luxury, though. I should have mentioned this in the original story, but got in a hurry and left it out.]

That is all.

https://blackmon.substack.com/p/wednesdays-energy-absurdity-solar?publication_id=712558&post_id=141891418&isFreemail=true&r=rd9j8