alt Hacker NewsMy completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
Replies
Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics.
Well, that will certainly be an issue for nuclear power capacity in the future.
Much easier to do upgrades piecemeal though with solar and wind.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
You just replace it with more solar panels like what is so complicated about this? Also, this stuff is growing every year. It’s all staggered.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).