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Solar can never replace base load.

Yep.

So roughly 1.25% of annual generation will be this new large-scale solar.

Gonna eat the sun! Lord!

And people are buying them because they’re too broke to buy or repair a washing machine.

And there’s only one company making them until they create a profit margin large enough for amazon basics to start making their own.

Many products in the U.S. are made by American prisoners. U.S. has the largest prison population out of every country in the world, 2 million people as opposed to China's second-place 1.6 million people. But China has a much larger population, so the U.S. has a much higher percentage- an incarceration rate of 629 (also highest in the world), while China doesn't even crack the top 10. Source

Also worth reading: US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance

The rate of decline has slowed down a lot. They might get cheaper but there's a fundamental limit to how efficient they can be, and we're already reasonably close.

Still. Free, because it's already there and producing power, albeit at a lower rate, will always beat not free.

People are hurting so much financially they are washing clothes like the 1700’s, super uplifting!!

They tend to lose more in the first 5 years or so, and then the rate of decline flattens out somewhat.

But lots of variables are at play. The hotter the panels get the more they'll degrade, that's a big one. So panels in a field with good airflow around the mountings tend to stay cooler than panels mounted to rooftops with little to zero air flow behind them, and will degrade slower.

Manufacturers don't like losing money to warranty claims, so go take a look at almost any panel manufacturer and their power output guarantees. You'll see a quicker decline in the first few years then the rate of decline will shallow out a lot. And those guarantee figures are always going to be conservative in respect to what they actually expect to happen.

That was an amazing movie!

Ok, but that’s an incredibly granular and personal reason to post it here. “Petting kittens found to cure AIDS” is uplifting news because anybody reading it would see the positive angle. It’s cool that this gives you a good feeling but it doesn’t really fit the sub.

I don’t think calling washboards a happy relic from the past is very accurate. It’s a labor intensive tool.

29.1 Gigawatts! Great Scott! How could I have been so careless?! Tom how am I gonna generate that kind of power? It cant be done!

Marty: We'll use solar

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The right stuff.

Congratulations to all mid-year and upcoming graduates.

Not to mention, now I know where to find the world's largest washboard.

Very cool. I would love to see something like this in action in my community.

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I’ve always thought it was 1% per year loss of efficiency. I have a few panels on their third year and I feel like I’ve noticed a small drop off in performance.

Depends if you're okay letting your installation drop to 70% or possibly 60% of it's rated power. The panels don't just break after 25 years they just slowly lose power capacity.

I would hope that old solar farms just get new contracts with reduced terms, or new panels added to the existing set (space permitting) to top it back up to capacity.

That's something we'll have to look out for. If companies are throwing away 25-year-old solar panels, just because the power output dropped some, that's shitty and wasteful.

Profitable companies are sometimes shitty but rarely wasteful. So I have hope.

But won't it suck up all the sun? - som random american

Are they really good for 50 years?

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A washboard reminds me of being hella broke when my mom used to do a ton of painstakingly long washing by hand up until we finally got ourselves a washing machine.

I can see why it makes others happy, but not people like myself.