The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

This is your Achilles’ heel. For the purposes of making comparisons, you regard technology as static. Even worse, you assume the performance of devices built 15-20 years ago reflect the performance of similar devices manufactured now and there’s no acknowledgement that they’ll be even better in the future.

I work in the industry that makes the machinery to produce printable electronics and SolarPV, using modern techniques, not even the cutting edge stuff makes it to 10 years with better than 10% failure rate.

The best available technology costs more than a OLED TV per square meter, a typical 6kW system installation using those panels would cost AUD$60K, which is why they are available to the general public and the panel is usually reserved for applications like space where longevity limits mission length. But even it fails down here on the surface, as it cannot be made 100% perfect as the surface has micropores that allow oxygen in, this causes the layers to oxidise and harden as which time they develop micro-stress fracturing from thermal cycling.

Oddly, arguing that SolarPV and WInd will advance seems to reinforce the argument for nuclear, because most of the examples of non-external failure are for technologies that are 70 years old! So thanks for the boost, nuclear has advanced so so much in just the last 20 years it's almost unrecognisable from nuclear of even the 60s or 70s let alone the 40s and 50s designs!