So when we close in on the theoretical max, should prices drop more?

The practical limit given by Shockley and Quiesser for a single-junction solar cell under 1 sun illumination is 33% power conversion efficiency.

I don’t live alone either, and I don’t have an abnormal electricity use. Not sure what tech you’d have over me that would increase your consumption significantly.

Yeah but saying that "there's no elbow room in space" is such a weird way to word it to the point that it becomes misleading. There isn't, as far as I know, a misconception about the amount of room in space but comments like that are how those misconceptions are born.

> no elbow room in space

The other guy was probably talking about cost per unit of weight.

I'm not quite sure where you're getting that there's no elbow room in space.. the biggest reason they'd be used up there is because of the launch cost as well as ease of repair.

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Right now it’s about 10 years without subsidies and 5 years with in most places.

Obviously the exact economics depends on your location and your local price of energy. But my companies been installing systems for commercial and industrial, and the saving off of their power bills straight up pays for the system, and once it is paid of, it’s free energy for the life of the panels.

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There’s no reason to get rid of them though, they’ll lose some generation capacity over time, but for the vast majority of situations it’s easier to just add an additional panel to make up for those loses than to replace the entire system.

just go near the sun, get the energy and beam it with a laser to earth.

Warranty doesn’t cover physical damage, the warranties usually just guarantee that the cell will have more than 80% of its rated power generation after 20 years or they will replace it.

Most panels only lose about 1% efficiency a year, so it’s basically a meaningless gesture that looks good, unless you have a genuinely defective cell.

Material costs, eventually the amount of materials you need to add per extra % is more than just building a second panel at the same efficiency. So around 50% in order to get an extra 1% in efficiency, you need a panel with double the cells. So you might as well just build 2 50% efficiency panels rather than 1 51% one.

That’s basically why most panels are stuck around 23% right now, it’s more cost effective to just build 2 panels than to build a panel 1% more efficient.

Basically as technology advances it gets easier to improve the efficiency with less waste, but around 50% is when you can’t really make anything smaller to get those efficiency gains in a similar sized panel.

Solar panels, more specifically they are called Solar Shingles.

FAKE NEWS!!!

For single junction it's 68% and for infinite 86%. But that's under perfect conditions, so it's a little less than that.

What? Why wouldn't they keep it that long? I've never heard about anyone just ripping their shit out or disconnecting it if it isn't broken.

There’s no way to do this cheaply. It’s directly related.

What does the number of junctions matter as long as long as it can be manufactured cheaply?

Can you ELI5 why the difference is so large?

As opposed to 2 suns?

The energy grid is fundamentally a battery, it would be asinine to have distributed battery sources storing energy for individual units when literally everybody is connected by a giant battery. The fact that it's not super profitable to store energy isn't a failure of the energy system, but the economic system that the grid must adhere to.

Maybe it's more for if there's a strong hail storm and it wrecks them?

At least solar doesn't have as much maintenance cost as coal, I'd say.

For starters, you don't need to import the sun!

Wow, this news is NREL!