Yes, 92% production warranty at the end 25 years. Which is the longest product warranty of anything sold. At 92%, they could last a few more decades.
Newer panels are offering 40 year warranty.
40-year warranty covers the panel and its performance. And in the unlikely case you’ll ever need it, we make the return process simple and easy. With a historical return rate of only 1 in 20,000 panels under warranty: https://www.maxeon.com/maxeon-solar-panels
Great application of cross continental research by Blomberg. A typical Nigerian family of 3 (already atypical) is probably not spending one parents entire salary on electricity.
I am very happy to see Nigeria establishing such a sensible tradition.
solar and batteries will outlast a generator, and have significantly higher uptime, also quality of life around a generator is reduced, along withtime to start/stop and get the fuel, which requires fuel to get, so any reasonable comparrison would need to get hard numbers on all of the costs.
I live off grid, and can proffer this, that solar is slightly more boreing than watching paint dry, as the paint does change it's coulor ever so slightly.
Sodium batteries are going into giga scale production now and will offer significantly better economics ,for small business and farms solar is the thing that will smooth out economic shocks and give the versatility to adapt
The cost of solar is 1X - 20X depending on location. US has the highest costs, followed by maybe Western Europe.
The panels are dirt-cheap[1] straight from China, but your friendly govt adds tariffs.
The balance of the system is super costly in some locations, ridiculously cheap in other locations.
In Pakistan, they are laying out the panels on the roof without any structure.
In most of the third world, homes are concrete built, they already have structural elements and it isn't a big deal to add panels. It is a massive project in US, because of shingled roof. Labor is also available, available immediately, and permitting is either easy or not necessary.
I'd assume the cheapest total install cost would be (cheapest to costliest): China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, middle-east,, Africa, South East Asia, Central America, Mexico, India, South America, Australia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Canada, and finally US.
I'm ignoring the cost of land which varies a lot in each country. We also don't need land, just add vertical solar on every structure, fence and wall.
[1]or as cheap as plywood which a HN comment pointed out
For off grid residential (which will be ~1 billion people), I wonder if it can be a lot cheaper to go all DC, avoid inverters, losses converting DC<->AC<->DC.
The real issues with a full DC system is finding compatible electronics to meet your wants.
Want to play a video game? Gotta either convert your DC to AC so the AC to DC converter can swap it to the right voltage. Either that or you need a DC DC buck/boost converter that you can trust to not trip out and fry your system.
The systems exist for local full DC power, but they are likely more expensive, designed for vehicle/RV use (and thus smaller than the typical home use item of the same variety) and more difficult to repair because they are made smaller.
Not saying you can't do that, only that there are plenty of tradeoffs to take into consideration due to the differences in scale of devices built for AC vs devices built for DC.
Fully agree, but I would think this a bit less of a concern with a less developed market, due to just having fewer devices. Network effects aren't going to be as strong.
Like I'm at the point I have no idea how many USB chargers I have. They're everywhere. But I would bet the average Nigerian household is a lot closer to knowing.
Plus in general once you convert (or don't have) high power draw devices (eg do electric clothes dryers or automated dishwashers even exist in this context?), you can get by with a much much smaller inverter to use the handful of low-draw things you have left and just pay the efficiency tax when you're actually using one. You probably don't even need a true sine wave to drive most of the rando adapters we're talking about.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 6.3 ms ] threadNewer panels are offering 40 year warranty.
40-year warranty covers the panel and its performance. And in the unlikely case you’ll ever need it, we make the return process simple and easy. With a historical return rate of only 1 in 20,000 panels under warranty: https://www.maxeon.com/maxeon-solar-panels
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-take-off-in-afr...
I dont know what the $4500 includes, but you can fairly easily get 1kw of solar and 5kWh battery and inverter for 1k USD.
The panels are dirt-cheap[1] straight from China, but your friendly govt adds tariffs.
The balance of the system is super costly in some locations, ridiculously cheap in other locations.
In Pakistan, they are laying out the panels on the roof without any structure.
In most of the third world, homes are concrete built, they already have structural elements and it isn't a big deal to add panels. It is a massive project in US, because of shingled roof. Labor is also available, available immediately, and permitting is either easy or not necessary.
I'd assume the cheapest total install cost would be (cheapest to costliest): China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, middle-east,, Africa, South East Asia, Central America, Mexico, India, South America, Australia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Canada, and finally US.
I'm ignoring the cost of land which varies a lot in each country. We also don't need land, just add vertical solar on every structure, fence and wall.
[1]or as cheap as plywood which a HN comment pointed out
Looks like it is possible: https://solarpoweredge.com/2026/05/10/pure-dc-off-grid-solar...
Want to play a video game? Gotta either convert your DC to AC so the AC to DC converter can swap it to the right voltage. Either that or you need a DC DC buck/boost converter that you can trust to not trip out and fry your system.
The systems exist for local full DC power, but they are likely more expensive, designed for vehicle/RV use (and thus smaller than the typical home use item of the same variety) and more difficult to repair because they are made smaller.
Not saying you can't do that, only that there are plenty of tradeoffs to take into consideration due to the differences in scale of devices built for AC vs devices built for DC.
Like I'm at the point I have no idea how many USB chargers I have. They're everywhere. But I would bet the average Nigerian household is a lot closer to knowing.
Plus in general once you convert (or don't have) high power draw devices (eg do electric clothes dryers or automated dishwashers even exist in this context?), you can get by with a much much smaller inverter to use the handful of low-draw things you have left and just pay the efficiency tax when you're actually using one. You probably don't even need a true sine wave to drive most of the rando adapters we're talking about.