New testing conducted at France's oldest PV system have shown that its solar modules can still provide performance values in line with what the manufacturers promised.
There's a typo in the title. If you go back to the original source (in french), they actually retain 79,5 % of their original efficiency, so even better than the article's title would have you believe.
Well, I DO know how the French count and compared to English it IS highly confusing. You can hardly convince me that saying "Four times twenty and ten" is as straight forward as saying "Nine tens".
And just to be clear: I'm not some Yankee or Brit with a superiority complex, no, I am German, and we have our own shitty version of this: Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in "Four hundreds and two tens and nine", we do "Four hundred and nine and two tens".
It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the "score", see for example Lincoln's Gettysburg Address "Fourscore and seven years ago..." means 87 years ago.
From 11 to 19 is always kind of weird in many languages. In Italian you go from essentially saying "one-ten" "two-ten"..."six-ten" to "ten-seven" "ten-eight" "ten-nine". Then it goes in like in English. Why? No reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the "score", see for example Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which famously starts with : "Fourscore and seven years ago...", meaning 87 years ago.
No you can't, because the source has written it in the usual hindu-arabic numerals as 79,5 and not as "soixante-dix-neuf virgule cinq", you don't need to pronounce the numerals to copy them.
Careful using the word efficiency there, as it has a different meaning when talking about solar panels - it indicates how much energy the panel can extract from the light hitting it. The best modern panels you can buy are below 25% efficient, and since these are from the 90s they were probably about half that when new.