Old panels are continuously being replaced with new panels. This is happening now with a few year old panels. So many free old panels available, because new ones are producing 590W/panel. Over 25 years, there will be a lot more advances, panels that will be printed by textiles, or painted on surfaces, or grown by bacteria.
Very much depends on the rating. A residential panel is something like 65”x40”. A commercial sized panel is something like 80”x40”. The cell size is relatively constant, but the bigger panels are 6x12 cells instead of 6x10. Newer panels have more efficient cells, and so higher power.
Panel manufacturers can also do odder sizes as required. Example: q-cell does a 94x51” panel. This is 6x22 cells, but different sized cells as well.
Most panels are 6x, because that results in an open circuit voltage of just shy of 50V, which is convenient for code compliance.
China will replace Oil (+Fossil fuel) based ecosystems and applications of energy. Think about all the Oil wealth, but add on energy storage, an unsolved problem of mankind, and all the applications of energy production+storage. We already see this dominance in EVs. Soon, everything else will be replaced. We live in interesting times!
Pension funds should have a rule -- invest in technologies, industries and companies that create a deflation (by technology, scale, efficiency, etc). This will create better outcomes for pensioners. If they invested in cheaper housing, healthcare, pensioners can live without the constant fear of running out of money. The absolute first thing to invest in is clean energy which can be super cheap to zero to actually making money by supplying power back to the grid. Once energy is solved, it solves an entire spectrum of problems.
Increasing the money(number), while making everything else costly (a lot more costlier in reality because of fictional inflation number) is not only hard to achieve, but even if achieved, doesn't mean much. ".S. Dollar itself has lost roughly 98% of its purchasing power over the long term" -- random Warren Buffett quote.
> For example, EU pension funds allocate just 0.02% of total assets to VC, compared with almost 2% for US pension funds. And this percentage is applied to a much larger asset base: over 140% of GDP in the United States compared with around 30% in the EU.
> In Europe, approximately €11.5 trillion is held in cash and deposits. This is one-third of households’ total financial assets. In the United States, the figure is around only one-tenth.
> comparative advantage tells you that some human labor will remain valuable in some configuration, but nothing about the wages, number of jobs, or the distribution of gains. You can have comparative advantage and still have massive displacement, wage collapse, and concentration of returns to capital. A world where humans retain “comparative advantage” in a handful of residual tasks at a fraction of the current wages is technically consistent with Oks’ framework, but obviously is worth worrying about and is certainly not fine.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!