Decades, IIRC, not years.

Yes, total independence is unrealistic and will be until we have von Neumann universal constructors, but we are starting to get to the point where big footprint homes could reasonably be energy-independent for normal daily use.

Depends how you sliced it.

If every house had solar panels, there's going to be a rolling requirement for on going maintenance.

Let's say, for argument sake, solar panels and inverts are approximately as reliable and long lasting as air conditioners, we'll still need a whole new fairly large industry.

Seems doable, but we'd need to deal with recycling all the parts, still doable, but there's nothing self sufficient about any of that.

Indeed, but that is why I said “decades”.

I am responsible for maintaining eight 150 Ah 120v dc battery banks. The sites also have diesel generators so the batteries really only get used for the 10 seconds it take the diesel to start, maybe 4 or 5 times a year. The batteries are indoors. So far cells start to go after 5-7 years and then I have to replace the whole bank.

Even 1 decade is optimistic life from current technology batteries that I am being sold from industrial battery sales channels.

be careful claiming that solar PV systems last decades. Many recent builds have components that fail including the panels, junction boxes, the panel-to-panel connectors and the inverters themselves.

Solar isn't as reliable as the solar industry would have you believe. Worst part, a single component failure often takes large sections of the system offline. With domestic systems, that's the entire system.

I’ve heard of issues with contactors failing in cold temperatures and dust or dirt (it is the desert, sand gets everywhere) causing fibre connections to stop working, ruin fans, cause overheating, outages, millions of dollars lost.

"evry couple of years" .. umm nope. Try every 10-20 years for the inverter and every 20-30 years for the panels. Roof-top solar in Australia is cheap and almost ubiquitous.

Every couple years is probably more accurate. Hardware fails all the time, especially at scale. Hard drives fail all the time, solar equipment isn't magically different. Once a full neighborhood has solar, someone will have a defective panel, a defective inverter, an improper install that needs to be redone, storm damage, panels that need cleaning, panels that get damaged from cleaning, or a building gets renovated/replaced/destroyed.

A 5 kW inverter at a house is different from a 500 kW inverter in the desert

And the batteries?

this is far from the truth. NREL have great reports and ongoing research into how often solar panels fail. You are correct in that it isn't every couple of years but it is not as long as 20 years. The number of solar PV panels that have been around that long, let alone survived that long is small.

In other news, the solar cells installed on the White House by Carter apparently still provided energy ten years ago [1], and those who were not broken deliberately likely still do today.

I am all for nuclear - but let's keep the discussion honest.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...

Those are not solar cells, those are water heaters.

In the interest of being honest.

No wonder they still work, those are literally water pipes embedded in a roof panel. No inverter, no battery, nothing. The only thing they have in common with solar cells people install today is the fact that they are powered by sun.

Worth noting that people do still install those today in addition to PV panels. PV panels seem to get 20-30 years of use, which isn’t bad at all. And I believe they usually still work after that time, just with reduced efficiency.

There's also some cool combo rooftop solar panels/water heaters. [1] By cooling the panels themselves they increase their efficiency by up to 15% (so an increase from ~20% to ~23% total efficiency) - while also heating water for the home.

[1] https://dualsun.com/en/product/hybrid-panel-spring/

It is my understanding that residential solar water heating is moving to PV + heat pump water heaters.