A new study shows that, contrary to widespread belief within the solar power industry, new kinds of solar cells and panels don’t necessarily have to last for 25 to 30 years in order to be economically viable in today’s market.
Rather, solar panels with initial lifetimes of as little as 10 years can sometimes make economic sense, even for grid-scale installations — thus potentially opening the door to promising new solar photovoltaic technologies that have been considered insufficiently durable for widespread use.
The new findings are described in a paper in the journal Joule, by Joel Jean, a former MIT postdoc and CEO of startup company Swift Solar; Vladimir Bulović, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT.nano; and Michael Woodhouse of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado.
“When you talk to people in the solar field, they say any new solar panel has to last 25 years,” Jean says. “If someone comes up with a new technology with a 10-year lifetime, no one is going to look at it. That’s considered common knowledge in the field, and it’s kind of crippling.”
Jean adds that “that’s a huge barrier, because you can’t prove a 25-year lifetime in a year or two, or even 10.” That presumption, he says, has left many promising new technologies stuck on the sidelines, as conventional crystalline silicon technologies overwhelmingly dominate the commercial solar marketplace. But, the researchers found, that does not need to be the case.