if u buy solar panels and never take em out of the box for like thirty years will they still work good thirty years after you bought them
Most panels have a 20year warranty once on the roof (exposed to the sun). They will be fine
Batteries can only be recharged so many times and as for panels going bad, only the weather will help break the metal down by rusting it away.
I'm answering for conventional silicon solar panels, the only kind I really know. The panels are basically semiconductor, wire, glass, and aluminum housing. The last three, everyone knows have long lifetimes if not exposed to the elements. As for the semiconductor part, the degradation is generally due to exposure to the sun. And even so, some solar panels from the 70's are still working today. Usually, what does them in is failure of a connection due to vibration, degradation of the plastic due to heat, sun, or water exposure, or accidents. The question of how useful the panels would be after 30 years is different, though. I have Germanium transistors from 50 years ago - they're still good, but their specs are really lame by modern standards. And suppose you had a PC from 25 years ago. Original cost, $4000, no hard disk, only runs DOS off a 5 /4 floppy disk. It works great, but except as a curiosity, is it useful? The batteries that most people use to store solar energy are lead-acid. The technology has not changed much in 30 years. If you had such batteries in storage, that had *never* been activated (that it, they were dry, no acid had been added yet), I would not be surprised if they would be fine after that period of time. If the batteries were activated, no, they would not keep. But maybe battery breakthroughs are coming with other chemistries, so those batteries would seem clunky and useless 30 years from now.
