LG NeON R Degradation Over 25 Years: What Owners Can Expect Now That LG Has Left Solar

LG announced its exit from the solar panel business in 2022, and that changes how a comparison like this should be written. You can no longer buy an LG NeON R — so the useful question isn’t “NeON R or something else?” It’s the question the many existing owners actually have: how will these panels age over 25 years, is the warranty still worth anything, and how do they stack up against what’s sold today?

I watch a 40-panel array on my own roof, and if that experience has taught me one thing about degradation it’s this: year-to-year weather swings are far bigger than any single year of aging, so you need both realistic expectations and several years of data before drawing conclusions. Here are the realistic numbers.

What LG’s Exit Actually Means for Your Panels

Three things, in order of importance:

1. The panels don’t care. A NeON R has no dependency on LG’s continued existence. It will keep producing on the same physics as the day it was installed.
2. Warranties survive, with friction. LG committed to honoring product and performance warranties on installed panels when it exited. That commitment is real, but claims on a discontinued product line move slower, and a failed panel will be settled with a payment or an available substitute rather than an identical replacement. Keep your invoice, warranty documents, and installer paperwork somewhere you can find them in 2040.
3. Replacements won’t match. If one panel fails, today’s replacement will be a different brand with different dimensions and electrical characteristics. On microinverter or optimizer systems that’s a minor issue; on plain string systems a mismatched panel needs more care to integrate.

Degradation, Briefly and Honestly

Panels lose a little capacity every year through slow, well-understood mechanisms: an initial light-induced dip in the first year, then gradual wear from thermal cycling, moisture ingress, microcracks, and encapsulant aging. The realistic rules of thumb:

• Quality crystalline panels: roughly 0.25–0.5% lost per year after the first-year dip.
• The NeON R sat at the aggressive end of its era’s warranties — on the order of 0.3% per year, ending near 90% of original output at year 25. Its N-type cell design also made it less prone to the first-year light-induced losses common in older P-type panels.
• Climate moves you within the range. Sustained heat, heavy thermal cycling, and coastal salt push panels toward the high end; mild climates toward the low end.

One trap to avoid: don’t confuse temporary losses with degradation. A hot afternoon suppresses output on that day (panels produce less when hot); dirty panels suppress output until it rains or you rinse them. Both recover. Degradation is the slow floor underneath, and it’s much smaller than either effect in any given month.

What That Looks Like Over 25 Years

Here’s a worked example — a system that produced 10,000 kWh in year one, aged at three rates spanning the quality-panel range. (Labeled example: your production will differ; the shape won’t.)

The takeaway most people find surprising: even at the pessimistic end, a quality panel still delivers close to 89% of its original output in year 25. The spread between premium and typical aging — roughly 550 kWh in year 25 for this example system — is real money over decades but modest in any single year. Degradation rate matters for 25-year ROI math; it is almost never the reason a system “seems weak” this month. That’s usually shade, soiling, an inverter fault, or weather.

How NeON R Owners Compare to Today’s Buyers

The interesting historical footnote: the panel industry caught up to LG. The NeON R’s N-type cell technology was a premium rarity in its day; N-type designs (TOPCon, heterojunction) now dominate new premium panels, and 25-year performance warranties in the 87–92%-remaining range have become mainstream rather than exceptional. Your NeON R is aging about as well as a good panel sold today — you’re not holding obsolete hardware, just orphaned hardware.

As for Tesla, the comparison this article originally drew is mostly apples-to-oranges: the Solar Roof is a building-integrated tile product bought as much for aesthetics and re-roofing as for energy economics, carrying its own 25-year power warranty. Its crystalline cells are subject to the same physics and the same broad degradation range discussed above; integrated tiles run warmer than rack-mounted panels with airflow behind them, which is a headwind worth asking about, but a rack-vs-tile decision should be made on cost per watt and roofing needs — not on decimal differences in degradation claims.

What to Actually Do as an Owner

1. Establish your baseline. Dig out your first full year of production (monitoring portal, or utility export data). That number is what all future comparisons stand on.
2. Compare annually, not monthly, and mentally weather-adjust: a cloudy spring will swamp a decade of degradation. Three-plus years of drift beyond about half a percent per year is worth investigating.
3. Rule out the impostors first. Sudden or step-change losses are never degradation — check for new shade, heavy soiling, a tripped breaker, or a failed panel/optimizer/microinverter before suspecting the panels.
4. File warranty paperwork now. Proof of purchase, warranty terms, installer records. LG claims are viable but favor the well-documented.
5. Don’t replace working panels. A NeON R fleet degrading on schedule will beat the economics of replacement for a long time; revisit only when panels fail outright or you’re re-roofing.

The honest bottom line for NeON R owners: you bought one of the better-aging panels of its generation from a company that then left the industry. The second fact matters far less than the first. Watch your annual numbers, keep the paperwork, and let the panels do what they were warranted to do — quietly lose a fraction of a percent a year while paying you back the whole time.