Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine.
Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500.
I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
Not a bad legacy for Robert Habeck (along with the wind reforms), the leader we needed but didn't deserve [1][2]. Interestingly he's recently dropped out of politics and taken a teaching role at UC Berkeley.
Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had. The plants barely added any value to the market. When Habeck became Minister, most Nuclear plants were already gone, and the last remaining were phasing out, lacking nuclear fuel and permits. Habeck even gave a permit for the last plants to run some more months, squeezing out even the last parts of fuel as much as they could, just so they could serve as an additional supply in a problematic winter, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end.
Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.
Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.
That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.
Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.
The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.
solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house
Well most of them were, but not all. Notably the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shutdown on 15. April 2023, while the last coalition was in power. At that time there was a big discussion whether the shutdown could be postponed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a measure to curb rising electricity costs in Germany, but ultimately it was decided to go through with the shutdown. It was a largely symbolic move, but carried a lot of emotional weight since it put last nail in the coffin for nuclear energy in Germany. Hence people now blaming the Ampel government (and Habeck in particular) even though it wasn’t their decision to shut down power plants in the first place (with people of the party who made the decision openly criticizing them as well). Just to add a bit of context as German…
The plan to shut down nuclear power plants was done under the premise of a stable supply of Russian gas. This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock (at that time nuclear power was even classified as sustainable by the EU btw.), he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable. In my opinion this was the worst political decision of German politics since WW2, unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Those 3 plants had been running on "deferred maintenance" as the plant shutdown was planned years ago. Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
This was one of the biggest factors in the shutdown. Even if the plants stayed open, multiple reactors needed maintenance (and thus shutdown of those rectors).
Remember, they kept the open even longer then the planned shutdown (what was already extended before).
And the issue with the prices was not nuclear. By the time those plants shutdown, market prices already stabilized to pre-war levels. I remember this clearly as my renewal of my electricity contract came up, and ironically, my electrical price was even 2 cent/kwh lower then my 2021 contract.
The biggest issue for the German industry was not nuclear energie, it was the gas. And not because of power generation but because gas is used in several chemical reactions, with basf moving their production to the US. And thus more costs because supply chain changes. The LNG that we import is more expensive then the ultra cheap Russian gas we got.
And THAT is a issue for the German industry. And even more so with the US pushing to be the sole EU supplier for LNG (aka to replace Russia and use their leverage on the EU).
Anyway, a lot of your opinion is based upon the wrong conclusion.
On top of that, NL govt is investing 10B EUR to prepare the construction of several new nuclear power plants, less than 300km from one of the abandoned German ones (Emsland).
In conclusion the nuclear exits of BE and DE are some of the most stupid and hypocritical decisions in EU energy policy. Both countries will continue to depend on nuclear energy (from FR and NL). The only difference is that it is now produced <200km outside of their borders, in neighbouring countries.
> the worst political decision of German politics since WW2
Except the shutdown had no negative effect. There was no supply shock and prices keep trending down since (Though that of course doesn't mean because of). Let's keep it real. I can probably name worse German political decisions from this week.
Absolutely no negative effect at all!... Only almost all EU countries had to rapidly set up benefit schemes because a large part of their population fell in to poverty, due to the insane energy bills!
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-closes-half-its-remaining-nucl...
* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
> This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock
There was nothing to mitigate. The nuclear plants deliver electricity, which was never a problem in Germany.
> he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable.
That's a lie. They even prolonged the usage for some months to appease the fearmongers. But without fuel, there was a limit on how they could run anyway.
> unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish. In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal, which is right now unhealthy and apparently more dangerous in terms of radiation than the average nuclear power plant.
> The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish.
Nobody believes that, WTF?
> In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal
Partly true, but not really. Coal is also used for other energy-forms than just electricity. Nuclear Plants cannot cover those areas. In the grand scale, it might have been better to first reduce coal-usage and transition to purely electric usage, while phasing out of nuclear slowly and use the save money for building up on renewables.
But that was never an option with all the sabotages from the fossil anyway. Nuclear in Germany was never a real option, it always has been fossil vs electric, with nuclear being a minor source for electricity, weaponized by the fossil lobby against the renewables.
Why do you think Germans voted against nuclear? It was because of fear of events like Chernobyl/Fukishima etc. Then 2022 was the final blow, with documents saying that nuclear reactors didn't produce much energy and needed maintenance anyways. Kind of like getting rid of working trains to ride bikes instead. Why not. It's healthier :)
In the meantime, the world laughs at us. Literally the whole world.
You keep on mentioning the lobby of fossils, which obviously had an impact.
However, with Merkel the change was happening. At exactly the speed it was needed: 5% every couple of years, or so.
Now the only lobby I see is the one of fear that there is no tomorrow. While the countries just next to us, without even bothering China all the time, don't give 2 cents about it.
They keep on buying gas, uranium and fossils.
We on the other hand can finally build 800W solar panels on the balconies without bureaucracy. Thank God.
EDIT: with Merkel, we reached an increase of 5% per year for energy generated with renewables. Which is and was really good.
I guess that depends on who you ask. There definitely is a lot of opposition to the Green Party, but that's hardly directed at Robert Habeck specifically.
The current state wrt to nuclear in Germany reflects a decades long consensus in Germany that spans the majority of the population, scientists, intellectuals, politicians and even energy companies.
Any opposition you do hear on this from within Germany is usually opportunistic. People are against the Greens so they just take the opposite position on their policy. A good example of this is Markus Söder (CSU) who flip flopped on this multiple times.
Realistically speaking there is no serious politician or party with a pro-nuclear position in Germany that has a plausible plan for leveraging nuclear power at meaningful scale in an economical way. Any such plan would realistically invite massive opposition because nobody wants nuclear facilities in their vicinity.
Sorry but Merkel reached almost 50% of energy production with renewables. Germany was already a leader in 2021-2022 with almost 45-50%.
The idea was to grow "sustainably", and in fact it was functioning.
Even the "original" GEG comes from Merkel who was slowly pushing for a change.
Then somehow someone decided they had to restrict and punish and this was our "undeserved" Habeck and friends.
There was no need at all to disrupt the country into what it has become today.
Literally everyone said that. Only the Scholz/Greens government didn't see that.
EDIT: in fact, if we just reverted the commits to pre-2022 we'd be already in a better situation. No new changes. Just start from what was working. And well, keep the new solar panel stuff for balconies. It seems a nice idea (which a lot of countries are doing anyways, so nothing so innovative here).
This is a bit strong, given that you still need to register with the Marktstammdatenregister and get a permit from your landlord (relevant bc homeownership rate < 50%).
I think the high electricity cost has as much to do with the relative success of this than the reduced friction.
On the technical side you are also limited to 800W max and if you want a battery things get complicated quickly. I will still get one probably but it is far from no bureaucracy at all and plug and play - at least not when you want a battery.
Marktstammdatenregister is online and very easy to do, Allowance from landlord is more of a formality now as they can't really deny it. Of course some try but the law is pretty clear here.
A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
Norway: yes, they are doing fine (80% EV, btw, so it seems you can actually use EVs in colder weather... I think the nordics are actually way ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to sustainable energy creation, with norway getting about 90% last year from Hydro - super impressive. https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Norway
France: I think they might turn around, because their low prices are tied to massive subsidies (that are scheduled to end in part end of 2025). And, France has the weather and sun to be even more successfull. That would however mean a decentralization of the power grid and probably storage solutions (batteries, hydro or h2), something thats complicated and not sexy to sell to the public - one of the reasons Germany is so far behind. Our grid is stuck in the past and enough company lobby politicians to keep it that way.
US: it is probably less of a pricing issue and more a topic of resiliance and stabilizing the power grid. It looks like rolling blackouts in the US get more, especially during the summer months (where solar could directly be used for the AC). https://urbanclimate.gatech.edu/current-projects/blackout-tr...
I think it would especially make sense to run your AC on if you have a flexible plan - i remember so many stories of people suddenly having to pay thousands during peak times in summer.
California, Texas and most of the rust belt does have enough solar to easily get by, especially if you add a battery backup.
Norway gets most of its wealth from fossil fuel. While it's not Saudi Arabia nor Venezuela, and they invested in long term sustainability, it's not fair to everyone else to say that they are at 80%EV because they are forward thinkers, but because they have the money to do that.
It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Australia started at a similar point with mineral wealth in the 90s and decided tax cuts for the middle class were a better idea (under Howard/Costello).
Yes, but you have to somehow insinuate that this is a bad thing without ever clearly stating a thesis of why it's a bad thing.
Otherwise people might think investing in green energy, EVs and heat pumps is a good idea with good return on investment and positive externalities and should be done by any competent government.
Any competent government with infinite money they can just dig out of the ground, and dump into the sky via its customers, a small, mostly-homogenous law-abiding population and military cover, at least until recently, mostly provided by the US taxpayer.
Yes, like any other argument about Norway, the situation must and shall be considered to be that they are smart and progressive and forward thinking, rather than rich. It's "not" that they have money to burn to do the new fancy thing. It must be forward-thinking policies!
There's a small amount of truth, I'll admit. I guess you can say that Norway's policies are easily a lot smarter than Saudi Arabia's policies. But what is always done is comparing Norway's policies to, say, Spain or France and declare Norway a progressive forward-thinking nation with great and working policies. In reality the opposite is true because France and Spain can't just fix big problems by showering them in money.
And it barely works out in Germany. I did the math for my small city flat with a small south facing balcony and got a realistic payback period of 6 years.
The issue is not solar per se, but that tiny installations are not very efficient. It'd make much more sense to bolster funding for building sized installations.
The other aspect of this is the reduction of demand on the grid - which potentially reduces infrastructure costs ( or reduces the rise ) and hence shows up in a reduction in electricity prices ( if not absolute, against where they would be ).
> A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Part of that is because our method of pricing is different than it is in the rest of the world.
It doesn't matter if you got a 3x50A or 3x200A three phase service, only during construction (because a 3x200A uplink will obviously be a decent bit pricier), the monthly fee is the same and very low (I think ~15€ a month). All other costs are rolled into the per-kWh price, making it appear much more expensive than in other countries. On top of that we have a ridiculous tax load because large industry is exempt from a lot of things and consumers gotta pick up the slack.
In contrast, Italians for example pay fees based on capacity which means a home there will usually have 3x10A uplink, something greatly troubling EV adoption and moving off of natural gas [1].
Additionally, Germany is one pricing zone whereas ENTSO-E, the European Commission and the Northern German population would rather like to have two or three pricing zones, given that there is a serious lack of North->South transmission capacity, but our "beloved" Bavarian prime minister Söder plus his green counterpart in BaWü Kretschmann both try to prevent that as much as possible because it would send prices in the south skyrocketing [2].
Yep in a lot of ways it's a failure of the electricity market.
It's absolutely bonkers how much I pay for electricity while I sit in the shadow of a giant onshore wind farm in Brandenburg. Transmission losses are nothing at this distance and the turbines cover the towns needs many times over.
But because of the lack of regional and dynamic pricing (and tax burden) we pay ridiculous rates.
I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
Maybe balcony solar is just a tax minimization play, in that the energy you get from panels isn't burdened by excessive network charges, consumer taxes etc.
> I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
That's actually happening already in some places - in Thüringen, nearby residents of a windmill get a share of the income [1], and the local municipality also gets a sizable amount... in small Mühlenfließ (Brandenburg) with less than 1000 souls living there, the 16 windmills provide 200.000€ a year in taxes, 10% of the municipal budget [2].
Unfortunately, you need politicians with a backbone to present such plans to their voters, and in rural areas many simply are afraid of far-right terrorism up to and including death threats [3], on top of "alternative" media and even supposedly democratic politicians riling people up against renewable power sources.
That is definitely a factor. But depending on your energy usage and how smart your home appliances are, you can save a lot more than 10%. I.e. if you run all your washing and most of the heating of the water tank during your own generation times you can potentially save quite a lot more than 10%.
Electricity costs 24c per kwh in France and I just checked and can get it for 23c. So it's not true any more. Once you factor in that one is financed by the state and the other is not, it was likely never true. Germany's expensive electricity is a myth.
Some people laugh at the 800W output.
However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less.
Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.
To be sure, when talking about solar panels, 800W is the nominal/nameplate capacity. That's how much it generates when conditions are perfect and the sun is shining straight down on them. Most of the time an 800W installation will produce rather less than that.
You'd need rather more panels (and/or some combination with batteries) to hit 900W output constantly. (on the other hand, do you need 900W constantly, or is that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
The awesome part is you can circumvent the 800W. First you can legally install 2000W solar panels, making 800W output much more likely. The 800W is only how much you can feed back into the grid. Second you can install one or more batteries and feed devices from them, further increasing the usable energy.
Yes, that is exactly what is happening. 2000W solar panels feed the battery, up to 800W are allowed to be fed back into the grid/house network. Keep in mind you could also plug a 3000W device directly into the battery, meaning you could power a lot more than that if it is not connected to the grid. If you have devices that need little power for a long duration or high power for a short duration they can be fed with 100% solar that way. Depending on your use case that can save further money.
Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all? I'd think it would be pretty hard to keep people from importing solar panels from Vietnam or Thailand—although of course you'd probably have to put it somewhere that surveillance drones could see it, if you want it to get any sun. (In that case, if you have a rooftop, maybe you could put it under a frosted-glass skylight.)
If anything, I'd expect the prices to be lower. Do you have a local Indonesian equivalent of eBay like we do here in Argentina? Or, just eBay?
I assume "electricity capacity of 900W" means that the wires from the transformer (and in the walls) are only rated for 4 amps at 230VAC. This means that you can't really run a 2000-watt air conditioner at all. Whereas, with an 800-watt solar panel charging a battery, you can run a 2000-watt air conditioner 40% of the time when the panel is in full sun. Washing machines and refrigerators are an even bigger difference, since they usually have huge peaks of current draw when they start up their motors, but relatively low average power. So the solar panels may actually be a much bigger boon than simply comparing 800 to 900 makes it sound like. A single car battery can typically source 6000 watts for brief periods of time.
https://www.tokopedia.com/ is the Indonesian Amazon. You can get everything it seems, also grid-tied inverters, but the prices are higher than in Europe from a quick check. Probably import taxes.
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
Legality can be a funny thing. Governments can make anything they want illegal. Here in Argentina it's illegal to import used capital equipment that hasn't been refurbished by the original manufacturer or to import maps that say that the Malvinas Islands aren't part of Argentina. In Thailand it's illegal to step on paper currency because the king's face is on it.
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
Heating is always the culprit (or cooling but that's less of an issue in our area).
But one thing to realize is that the industry was just lazy and none of this is actually "needs" a full electric line.
- You don't need actual heat for washing clothes if you using washing detergent. There are no real simple "machines" available as far as I know, except simple camping washing machines
- A rice cooker can work from as low as 250w. I have a "cooking" option in mine drawing 500w taking no longer than the usual 2000w plate (better isolation, optimized heat transfer, ...) to get water cooking.
- Heaters are difficult, I've tried a lot of electric options and they all draw a lot of power when you heat something like 20°C over the outside temperature. However ex. "Ecomat 2000" (small ceramic heater) can easily heat a average room at 450 watts.
One way to get warm and way lower wattage is heating blankets. From 50 - 100w usually on for 50% you get very far with little power.
Not sure if that helps anyone. But I spent a lot of time researching efficient caravan alternatives.
What do you mean by 'that price'? Are there heavy import tariffs or another artificial reason why you can't order from the same chinese manufacturers as germany does?
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
Some countries with state gas or utility monopoly will ensure legislation blocks solar power. Example Thailand has huge solar potential but cheap gas, so they block solar panel installations
Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.
Surely you can do what you want within your own home, so long as you don't hook it up to the grid?
I'm also not sure if this fits with the price restriction they mentioned. Prohibitions can't be bypassed by paying a higher price, unless it were to refer to bribes
The systems in the article are hooked up to the grid though.
They're hooked up in an extremely safe and responsible manner, but it's understandable that there are regulations about what can be hooked up, and simply not surprising that they haven't been updated to say "yeah, this is ok".
A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.
It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.
The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.
They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.
But in that case the regulations would only have to apply to plugging in something that doesn't do that. There shouldn't be any forms or approvals or fees for someone who buys a product that does.
I agree there shouldn't be, but I don't think it's surprising that in many places there are. It takes active work for the regulator to look at the product and say "this design is sound, we're sure it won't kill anyone".
Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.
Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.
Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.
Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.
The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
Most powerful draw is going to be on heating and cooling things which can also be done using gas. Is Indonesia using a lot of gas (or even wood) or they just not cooking?
Kerosene cookers are still very popular in Indonesia, or gas from portable bottles. I've not seen gas refrigerators, but maybe some people also have them.
The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.
1.) Russia is already sending drones to border countries.
2.) Russian politicians openly talk about such possibility.
3.) Russian interest in expansion is no secret.
War with Russia is a real possibility. Considering NATO is not reliable anymore (due USA being less then reliable partner) , considering China seem to low key support Russia, it is not even crazy from the Russian side.
On drones: there is no evidence of that. The supposed "drone ship" that was siezed by France turned out to be crewed by Chinese and had no drones or weapons on board. A Croatian citizen were arrested regarding the drone near Frankfurt airport. Three Germans were arrested regarding the drones near Oslo.
Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing? Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
Please show me where Russian politicians openly talk about flying drones around European airports? I've seen Putin and others ridicule the very notion - and it really is ridiculous. Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland, and which had literally been duct-taped together from the remains of Russian drones and placed for a photoshoot!
Well, for some context, most new NATO members were previously under communism regimes and soviet influence in the past. After getting their freedom, the next step was to make sure they are safe from Russia.
Senior population remembers soviet union with all its warts (rightfully so) but fail to account the structures that governed the union and whole topdown integration no longer exists there.
Meanwhile anyone born in the last 40 years was raised with inferiority complex due to being economically behind and treat every word from west as gospel.
> Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
A more fitting title would be "Germany's citizens outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels". The current phrasing makes it sound like it's somehow a thing done by the government, which is not the case. If anything the government is one of the many forces slowing down this progress. And yes, I am aware of things like grid security and stability being a concern. I am not complaining.
Given that these things are usually hindered by the government's bureaucracy, maybe the best title would be "Germany's government removes obstacles preventing residents from outfitting..."
Electricity is so expensive in Germany, that these things pay for themselves in a couple of years - you are theoretically right, but as things are, these make financial sense.
Unless it is related to weapons or the project that will ultimately benefit big corps, project will not work out using central government policy. With revolving doors and sophisticated lobbing, at this point government seems just like different side of the same coin as big corp.
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
There's nits on your nits: most residents (citizen or otherwise) don't own their properties; and while these things do work with houses, they are intended for apartments.
There's a funny comment downthread that says "It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward."
Everyone replying disagrees, but I think it's a perfect analogy: just like the backyard furnaces, these small-scale installations are inefficient, provide a negligible portion of total energy needs (<1% of total energy needs if everyone in Germany did it, from TFA), look ugly and - this is the most important - provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
Actually, it is pretty common for homeowners to first install a balcony solar power plant and eventually "upgrading" to a full-scale solar power installation on the roof. The first is very easy and cheap to do and can be done on a weekend, the latter is costly, requires dealing with bureaucracy and partially-sleazy system sellers, and thus requires overcoming way more substantial hurdles, for which one must muster the motivation first.
Balcony solar power plants are sort of a gateway drug into actual, practical participation in the renewable energy sector. They are easy to install, cheap, have a clear and fast way to profitability, and provide significant gamification value (people who buy these kits tend to start with constantly monitoring their energy generation and usage in apps afterwards). That "ice breaker" effect should not be underestimated. It can pave the way to way more substantial actions (or to the acceptance of actions taken by others) that people wouldn't have considered otherwise simply due to inertia of the status quo.
> look ugly
That is YOUR taste. I consider most balconies with solar panels to look futuristic and cool. Garden houses with solar panels on the roof also look way cooler and more modern than without them.
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household.
Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
Well, the person you are replying to is in a thread about Germany, mentions balcony solar and said "my little server turns it automatically on" (which is how you would construct that sentence in German instead of "turns it on automatically"), so my wild guess would be Germany. ;)
Germany has a pretty consistent climate. Doesn't really matter where you live. Of course, that's an oversimplification, but if you're new to Germany and wonder "oh, what's the weather going to be here?", the answer pretty much is "similar to the rest of the country".
You could then look at a map of France and think, ah, similarly sized country, probably also has a consistent climate, but that's not true. Southern France is very different from Northern France. But Germany's climate is pretty uniform.
Yes, there is a difference, you are right. I don't have hard numbers at the moment (typing from the phone) but from looking it up quickly, the sun's intensity varies from about 950 kWh/m² to about 1.200 kWh/m² between north and south Germany. So, what OP described will generally work in any part of Germany.
I hope the US can have more of this. I never thought solar on most resi roofs made any sense. The cost is high, lots of risk from leaks but building a patio with a pergola or other shaded structure? Sign me up. The Us should be fighting to lower the red tape to get these kind of systems in place.
It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
How fast has Germany's PV capacity expanded in recent years? In another subthread I wanted some estimate of how many hectares in Germany had PV on them, but the pages I visisted on the subject were outdated.
Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that.
Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator.
Overall, Germany is in a shit place for renewable energy
For many years I have been writing about how bad Germany is for solar panels because of, mostly, how far north it is. Specifically, the capacity factor for utility-scale solar in Germany has historically been about 10%, which is mostly because of the unfavorable latitude and cloudiness. You can see this quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali.... The capacity factor for utility-scale solar in China has actually also historically been about 10%, and I have no idea why that is. You are certainly correct that it ought to be much better, because China gets so much more sun. You can see that quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
However, Germany does not have a space problem. Germany is 357'114km² with "photovoltaic electricity potential" of about 3.0kWh/kWp/day according to Solargis (see above link), which would be a capacity factor of 12.5%. I'm not quite sure how they calculate that, but multiplying by the country's area, the solar constant of 1000W/m², and a fudge factor of 0.8, it works out to something on the order of 30–40 terawatts, electric. That's roughly 50% to 100% more than the entire world's marketed energy consumption, which is about 18 terawatts, about a third of it electric. Germany produced 488.5 TWh in 02024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany) which is 55.73GW.
Therefore, roughly 0.2% of Germany's land area would suffice to produce all of its current electrical consumption with solar energy, about 700km². This would also require something like 450 gigawatts (peak) of solar panels, which would cost about €45 billion at today's prices, roughly 4 days of Germany's GDP.
It is absolutely true that, if you put those same solar panels in the Mojave Desert, mounted with single-axis trackers, they would produce two or three times as much power. (California's average utility-scale solar capacity factor was over 29% last I checked.) So, yes, solar is much more expensive in Germany. But if you check out https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you will see that, in March 02023, solar modules cost three times as much as they do now. So solar generation in California then cost what solar generation in Germany costs now. (Except that, because of Biden's anti-renewable-energy tariffs, actual California prices were and are much higher than you would expect from Solarserver.)
Great idea! Want to learn more on the safety though...
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
Anti‑islanding detects the power frequency and constantly tries to shift it. If the grid is on, its frequency won't budge, so the anti‑islanding doesn't trip. If the grid is off, the frequency shifts and it shuts off. A second one would just make it shut off faster.
Curious: is anti-islanding an actual feature, or a necessary behavior of any power source that adds power to the grid? I can't imagine how a second power source would work at all if it weren't syncing to the main source's AC phase. So it seems that if you implement the syncing, you get anti-islanding for free (assuming you handle the case of a missing main source phase by not providing power at all).
This is a newbie question, and I look forward to learning how it's more complex than this.
If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes.
Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead.
Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-tied inverters: When there is nothing for them to sync to, they output nothing.
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase).
However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now).
Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 240V 40A clothes dryer. The island is definitely going to collapse at that point, and might do bad stuff on the way down.
Even in that weird non-existent corner case instance, it is a necessary function because a hypothetical microinverter is completely and utterly incapable of kickstarting a grid.
You could totally have half a dozen microinverters scattered around your household, connected to each other but temporarily not to the neighborhood distribution network.
From what I remember, it turned out that the electronics were sufficient. Though the chance of issues (e.g. in case of a software but) were/are increased.
Well, it turned out that the micro inverter in question did not contain the necessary physical relay to show conformity with the claimed norms on electric safety (related to disconnect from the grid in case of grid failure).
They only had a software implementation and were forced to send all customers in Germany a free relay dongle to ensure safety.
That they shut off is important for a more obvious reason: The microinverters plug into a normal outlet. So the flow of power is invented to the normal situation, here the prongs of the plug are energized.
The body that writes the electrical regulations of course wanted a mandatory special plug and socket that had to be installed by a licensed electrician, which mostly makes balcony solar financially a non starter. Finally they relented after much discussion.
Micro inverters pretty much all have automatic shutdowns in these situations. They can ‘boost’ the phase/voltage, but won’t replace it if it is missing.
> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation.
so about 5yrs ROI
And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidizing installation):
> Weyland spent around $530 for his 600-watt-capacity system. While he’s happy with how his south-facing panels perform during balmy weather, such days are rare in northern Germany. He estimates that he’ll save around $100 in annual electricity costs and recoup his investment in about five years.
The article mentions the main motivation in Germany is also climate change and a feeling of independence, not so much economics
It's nice that it is both. You do something good and also save money. Everyone with a plug at their balcony is throwing money away when not installing some panels, if there is no roof installation already ofc.
I was pricing out using bifacial panels for fencing. It seems like it would cost about twice the price of cedar, but last twice as long (50 years) and have less upkeep.
I started looking at that to boost my roof solar capacity. It looks like it’s permitted by code where I’m at and now the only thing I’m unsure about is vandalism since my property is against a busy street. Seems like a great idea though.
It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.
Around here I have a backyard washing machine, a backyard grill, a backyard clothesline, and my neighbors have backyard childcare, backyard parking, and a backyard motorcycle. And actually inside my house I have a flush toilet and an oven.
Your assertion seems to imply that if instead I had to wash and dry my laundry at a coin-operated laundromat, eat at a cafeteria table with all my neighbors, and piss in a portapotty down the street, and my neighbor's kids were taken away to live at a boarding school, while he had to ride the bus to work instead of driving, that would be evidence of successful policy!
We clearly have radically different definitions of success. Yours seems not to be well thought out.
The problem with backyard furnaces was that the steel they produced was not just expensive but also inferior. If you could plug in a Tabletop Minimill that produced ingots of specialty precision steel alloys to your order, ranging from maraging steel to tool steel to nitinol, and which was also cheap to operate, that would not be an economic policy failure. That would be an enormous success!
Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; my household water pressure tank is decentralized because of collective action failure, for example, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487610. Others don't. We have to analyze the particulars of each case. I've written at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051 a bit about the particulars of this case.
> Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; ... Others don't.
That's correct, yes. I too prefer a decentralized washing machine to coin-operated laundromats which are very common in France where I live nowadays.
However I still believe that electricity generation has more in common with steelmaking than with laundry. Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI, they're largely enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value. The long-term solution in my view is nuclear which coincidentally the French do rather well, it's not all laundromats.
> Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI
That is clearly wrong. Even the worst-case embodied energy assumptions for solar panels estimate the cost of producing a square meter of solar panel area at 2000 kWh (the best cases are around 300, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph... ). A square meter of solar panel area produces an average of 200 kWh of power per year in Germany (which is a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can almost double that value). This means that even in the worst case, the solar panel has amortized itself from the perspective of embodied energy after 10 years. On average it will be more like 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years.
This is a strange analogy. The policy saves people money on their power bill. The backyward furnaces are considered a disaster because, among other things, they produced low quality steel, and diverted labour from agriculture and other things, none of which is the case here - people pay for solar panels and install them once, and then achieve savings.
1) The biggest challenge to renewables seems to be not capacity, but storage: wind and solar can't be relied upon all of the time, and often provide peak power out of sync with peak demand. Within reason, hyper-local generation either removes the need for storage altogether (as generated electricity is immediately utilised by household appliances) or allows easy local storage to be added via a few KWh of battery in the basement.
2) Houses that can mostly power themselves also reduce demand on the electricity grid, assuming that large spikes can be avoided.
3) I like the future vision of all people and their dwellings being energy-independent, and this is the start of a path towards that.
4) Don't fall into the trap of only ever accepting an optimal solution. Local generation might be somewhat less efficient economically (although with private investment rather than governmental/corporate investment being used here, and with no apaprent shortages in solar panel supply, I'm not so sure about the comparison?) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't add some meaningful benefit, or that it shouldn't happen.
Would you also agree that production of usable energy makes most sense at scale?
With that I mean energy like heat and motion? Because so far it just hasn't been possible to generate electricity at home in a meaningful way. Unlike heat, which everyone largely generates at home.
I would argue that there has been a technological leap, where electricity generation has become possible at home now through a combination of lower prices, ease of installation and feasibility to tie in to the rest of the electrical grid. Banning this new possibility would be a shortcoming of the policy.
This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.
I do see it as the result of policy applied from the top, the policy that resulted in 2x household electricity prices compared to the US (which amounts to 3x difference if you adjust for median household income).
I replied in another thread but I still remember how in my childhood all the ordinary people had to grow potatoes. The state didn't order them to, it just created food shortages that's all. You can say it was voluntary, "not so much a policy applied from the top".
I don't think that this is comparable. People who struggle with their electricity bills can not afford balcony solar. It has a ROI of a few years with a (low) but comparably large one time upfront cost.
This is assuming people don’t want to go net zero, and people not understanding that going there requires change, which will be costly. I‘d argue there is a majority in Germany supporting the transition to green energy, accepting higher prices as a result.
Decentralisation is the way to go for energy. Instead of having huge powerplants and fat power lines having a large percentage of the needed energy produced locally is ideal.
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
I've got 6x 440W panels literally lying flat on the lawn. They produce at least enough (200W) to power all my computers, my Starlink, my fridge, and some LED lighting by about 2 hours after sunrise and until 2 hours before sunset, even if it is completely overcast and/or raining. When there isn't a cloud in the way they produce 2000W-2400W from 11 AM to 3 PM, usually enough (at this time of year, spring conditions) to fill my 6kWh battery by noon if I don't need to use it for heating (4kW output portable air conditioner, using 900W) in the morning, leaving the electricity free for cooling in the afternoon. Otherwise the battery fills in the afternoon. If I don't need heating at night then the battery powers everything from before sunset to after sunrise with typically 2-3 kWh left in the morning to make coffee and breakfast (I use about 1kWh in the kitchen per day) and run some heating until solar generation (and the direct sun heating) pick up.
The solar panels (JAM54D40-440/GB if anyone is interested) cost me the equivalent of US$390 plus tax for all six. The Pecron E3600LFP I use to control them (combined 3kWh battery, 2x 1200W MPPT controllers, 3600W inverter, AC charger) cost ~US$1500, and an extra 3kWh battery US$800. And $200 for 2x 30m 6mm^2 cables. That's it.
I just did this last month. Results so far indicate the panels will pay for themselves by March. I bought the battery unit primarily as a UPS because of the terrible electricity reliability where I'm living, and a $450 petrol generator to charge it in the event of the multi-day outages I get in big storms (most recently 40 hours in April). It was looking like having about an eight year payback period just via time-shifting night rate power to peak times, but adding the solar panels looks like reducing that to about three years.
Only if you have batteries in between because the sun isn’t shining 24/7 in Germany (and elsewhere).
The costs for batteries are as nearly always out of the debate when news papers/portals are glorifying this German balcony subsidy scheme (costs for the public due to power feed-in which isn’t mentioned at all in this article). In the grist article the battery issue is mentioned only in one sentence.
The power feed-in is from the perspective of the power grid operator company sometimes called as power backfeed secretly which needs extra infrastructure.
> [The solar panels are] connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home.
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Wow that is pretty good, lines up pretty nicely with the approx monetary break even as well. Impressive!
Wonder if there is anything that can be done to lengthen the life of the panel as much as possible. I've read elsewhere that solar panels have a theoretical lifespan of 25 years with the panels slowly degrading and not failing all at once. I dont know if these specific panels are different but I wonder if the panels are kept clean or something if that would maximize the lifespan?
Efficiency has improved somewhat, but also, the cost to manufacture PV is enormously lower than it was then, which means that it's using much less materials and energy to produce. Therefore the energy payback time should be much shorter.
How much shorter depends on the fraction of the energy cost in the first place then. Price is not even an upper bound for energy which is cheap in China, and also production is probably subsidised.
Intensive investigations of Chinese "subsidies" from the US Department of Commerce have come up with embarrassingly little.
The current €0.100/Wp price level (12¢/Wp) combined with the US$0.08/kWh given above does give us an upper bound of 1500 hours of full sun for the energy payback time. At a Californian 29% capacity factor, that's 7 months of operation.
But in fact not 100% of the cost of the solar module is the cost of energy; there are some labor and raw materials costs as well, as well as capital costs and, astoundingly, some profit. So 3 months is probably a better estimate.
Process energy will still be a lot cheaper than .08 US$/kWh in China. I doubt they process glass with electric ovens. OTOH that is primary energy then, which kind of supports your argument. Still other emissions in the silicon supply chain that cause global warming are also relevant. If I find the time, I‘ll look for recent LCA.
What is the real throughput of panels mounted vertically? I have put solar on my roof plus batteries and it reduced significantly my dependence on gas and cost of heating bills, but they're mounted on two sides so they see the sun from early-mid morning to mid afternoon, with peaks roughly mid day depending on season. I've always been skeptical about vertically mounted ones but people say they work, so not sure what to think.
Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.
> Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany.
Genuinely interested what you mean by this - could you expand, please?
(It seems like the success of this scheme would mean that there is a meaningful group of people who are willing to take such an approach in Germany, whether it is characterised as libertarian or otherwise?)
Balcony solar is limited to 700-800 watt for safety reasons. There's also a lobby to get ppl to need an electrician for installation, which is bullshit. Rising energy prices (I paid minimum 50 bucks/Month) and sneaky corporate tactics (they give you 12 ct/kwh then after like half a year make it 60 ct/kwh) makes ppl want more price independence, which is understandable
It's only bullshit if you're certain that the electrical installation passes muster. I've seen many installations that are downright dangerous, mostly in older homes and cheap apartments. There's a reason for the 800W limit, that's a little over 3A and shouldn't cause any fires in even the flimsiest of wiring. But erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea when it comes to electrical safety.
It's clear that hackernews is a DIY crowd and loves this idea. I'm pro letting people do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel good.
HOWEVER, I have to point out how incredibly silly this is. There is a reason why historically we have pooled our resources under the government to produce and manage energy infrastructure centrally.
Let's say these 500,000 individuals instead pooled their 1,000 euro (including installation & time) and funded one industrial-scale solar development.
You could generate a renewable 600MW+ (a 4X factor on what these randomly placed individual units will ever deliver in reality) for that money. And efficient centralized battery storage also becomes an option there.
Then your fellow citizens can spend time creating surplus value in the field they are actually experts in and also you don't have a 3rd world hellscape of outdated balcony solar units to look at out your window for the next 30 years.
That’s the thing about statistics - it is only somehow valid at some uncertain date. I know 3 not registered installations. One guy has big photovoltaic installation and installed balcony power plant to cover his special energy needs at sunrise. Another guy works from home and has two balcony power plants to cover his home office needs. Third guy didn’t like batshit crazy registration website and left the installation unregistered, but running.
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs”
That's a shame, and makes the whole thing feel performative, especially for a country that nixed nuclear.
Total energy need is not equal to total electricity need. And electricity is a lot more expensive then heating energy. So the cost savings can still be significant.
This would be very cute if it was some 3rd world island country grasping at the straws to improve their quality of life...doing this.
But you're fucking Germany bro....where's your massproduced precision reactors and turbines everywhere..the planet needs work...what the f.. are you guys even doing..a rising standard of living means 10-100x more energy you know that right?
This whole attitude feels like clapping for a new garden tomato in the middle of a famine... go put some fucking tractors on the field lol but like seriously though.
That's because they've been in an energy crisis for the last 50 years, so much advancement was by improvement of efficiency. Because of the dramatic cost reductions of photovoltaic modules, that energy crisis is over now.
This is cool. One annoying thing with much of San Francisco is that renting means you can't put things on the outside of the building usually (not a law just common lease language) but I have a little solar panel that I use to charge a phone that I can leave outside. This is wonderful. Power from the sun and no consumables!
A typical phone battery has a capacity of about 13.5 Wh. Assuming a converter efficiency of 90%, it takes 15 Wh (0.0015 kWh) to charge your phone from an outlet. Assuming an electricity cost of $0.39 per kWh in San Francisco, that's 0.58 cents ($0.0058) every time you charge your phone using the solar panel.
haha it's not the savings. It's the accessibility! This phone is out on a balcony by a herb garden. The big annoyance with electric devices is that they need to be connected to an outlet. PVs have saved this.
We have our blinds on PVs which is very convenient. No charging required and no wires required. Same thing applies here. The PVs allow battery recharge for places where power cables are inconvenient. The phone is a convenient tailscale device with a battery that can webcam!
Do tech bros have other interests than "Solar, renewables, EV, e-mobility, ..."?Most people worldwide have other pressing issues than aflluent-comfy-bubble-shit.
And btw fuck Habeck and his kind; his legacy is an economic downturn / economic incompetency. Along with Annalena as the worst foreign minister in German history.
Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical?
It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of scale? Why are individuals having to take responsibility for their own energy generation? Are we doing our own sewer and water supplies next?
Why not approach the problem from all sides? There are big renewable projects in Germany as well, of course, but they take time to build, the grid needs to be adapted to handle them and there are many, many people/organizations who oppose all big installations that "block their view of nature" or whatever, so the big projects take even longer. By the way, this (nasty neighbours) would be a big issue for Balkonkraftwerke as well if they had not added them to a list of privileged things you are allowed to equip your house with (without permission process).
Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this?
Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity.
Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil (and it's fresh!). Same principle. Slightly higher yield.
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not.
In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation.
Batteries are even more egregious than solar, why install batteries .one. .at. .a. .time. behind switchboxes where they can only be used individually rather than a suburban installation that allows them to be used in aggregate?
I can only imagine how badly the numbers stack up somewhere suboptimal for solar like a German balcony. What if everyone instead gave their 1000 euros to a state organization that built a big solar farm that everyone shared?
Oh wait - that's exactly how the state is meant to work!
The subsidy question is interesting, but in Germany these balcony panels are ~ €600 unsubsidized (depending on the exact kit; see my numbers elsewhere in this discussion) and still pay back in 5 years. The economics work with and/or without government help.
The fact the economics of DIY make sense, is the evidence of the market/state failure. (whether they really do make sense without fanciful efficiency calculations, I leave to you).
It makes sense for two reasons: firstly there's limited economies of scale in solar panels: they more or less make the same amount of energy per unit area and per dollar regardless of the size of the installation (rooftop is usually more expensive for installation but these systems have near zero installation cost). Secondly, because the generation is local you're not paying for any margin, co-ordination costs, or transmission costs. This secondary effect is already enough to offset the increased cost of rooftop installation in many cases.
(And maybe you can consider this a market failure, in that it doesn't fit some naïve idea of an efficient market, but you're always going to be paying for someone to make and take on the risk of the big, centralised version of things)
I think you need to make some better arguments to convince. Your argument only makes sense when wholesale cost of solar panels is significantly cheaper than retail. The better the economics of scale (i.e the smaller the difference between wholesale and retail) the more favourable "DYI" becomes, because the person had home does not need to cover the overheads that are necessary for large scale installations (financing, management, transmission, planning...). It's the same reason that hiring a vps to run all your compute is not necessarily cheaper than buying your own pc.
Where I live, in Argentina, every house has a water tank on the roof, which is filled from the water main through a float valve, like a toilet tank. Many houses need a pump to drive the water up to the water tank because the water main has such low pressure. This is somewhat expensive, and the pumps, float valves, and water tanks fail sometimes, which is inconvenient. And the tank is not really that high up, so the water pressure at the faucet is not that high, and it's somewhat variable, which is inconvenient when it changes the temperature of the shower.
Some other places I've lived, such as various places in the US, instead have a large shared water tank for an entire neighborhood, town, or even city—a so-called "water tower". If you've been to the US, you may have seen these. Making this work involves several expenses:
- Larger-diameter water mains to reduce head loss when water demand is high.
- Highly responsive repair crews to respond rapidly to water main breaks, because the higher-pressure water with a high flow capacity can be very destructive.
- The construction and maintenance of the large water tower, which is very dangerous if done badly.
- A high-powered pump to get water up the water tower in the first place.
However, these expenses turn out to be significantly smaller per person than the expenses of small per-house water tanks and water pumps. And they provide better service. (Also, because people are stupid, in the US they build many of their houses out of wood, so they need fire hydrants, which require the larger water mains anyway.)
So, the fact that people in my neighborhood Argentina are spending more to get worse water service is a failure of coordination.
Of course, people in the US can still put water tanks in their houses if they want to. In earthquake areas, it's even recommended to have a store of potable water that isn't dependent on the water main. But, because they have succeeded in collectively building excellent municipal water systems, they generally don't need to.
The claim that plantain is making is that people actually choosing balcony solar panels is a symptom of a similar failure of coordination. To me that seems plausible but not necessarily correct, for reasons I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
People are entitled to do as they want, even if it's not profitable. I am just pointing out that if the economics of this add up, people have been seriously let down by their governments.
According to the article, the economics of balcony solar pay off in less than ~5 years. That's really pretty good compared to approximately any other point in the history of solar power. The payoff is small, but the investment is also small.
Now, sure: That quick payoff is only possible because electricity in Germany is very expensive, but there's reasons for that, too: Unlike some nations, Germany isn't sitting on a ton of high-quality fossil fuels.
They do have lots of lignite, and they do mine it and use it, but lignite is so low-energy that transportation becomes a serious financial burden: A train full of lignite can cost more to move around than it can produce, Joule per Joule. They've solved some of that problem by putting power plants right next to the mines (which is smart: build transmission lines instead of rail lines!), but their domestic fossil fuel resources are not a matter of policy. They're limited to whatever they have in the ground.
And for reasons that must make sense to someone, they've completely phased out their domestic nuclear power. (I'm not interested in discussing whether that's good or bad, but it remains fact.)
As far as I can tell, electrical production and distribution in Germany is comprised of a mixture of private entities (eg, companies with profit motive) and public (government-operated) entities -- similar to how it is where I am here in the States, and also where you are in Australia.
And quite clearly: The private entities are obviously interested in maximizing their potential profit. They are, after all, principally in the business of making money.
It's easy to say that it's a governmental failure that ultimately allows balcony solar to have such a quick return... but private enterprise is also involved, so they get to share the blame as well.
If it is profitable to do solar power at utility scale, in Germany, then: Why isn't more of it being done? If the answer is "just rent a few thousand hectares at a few hundred euros per year and cover it all with solar," then why does the private sector not cash in on all the easy money of utility-scale solar power?
The fact that balcony solar has such short payback periods really emphasizes the scale of the failure. Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Balcony solar is a whole lot like Uber, a way to side step onerous regulators, landlords that won't permit/invest in rooftop installations, planning approvals, transmission bottlenecks (eg. SuedLink [1] being forced to use underground cables) etc. The German government tolerates it because it keeps voters happy and helps reduce dependence on foreign gas.
At the end of the day though balcony solar is better than nothing, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
> Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.
Exactly! Wind expansion has been going great as-well.
I guess the more fundamental question is why these expansions haven't led to savings for energy consumers and why the economics of these micro-systems are so attractive.
It may be actually better (in the welfare-economics sense) to build the micro-scale setups because the economies of scale may actually be inverted by cheap solar panels. See my analysis in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
That page, although it was written only four months ago, is citing LCOE figures from 02021, when mainstream solar panels cost €0.25 per peak watt. Now they cost €0.100 per peak watt—see https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Power electronics and batteries are also enormously cheaper now. Also, note that the LCOE numbers it cites are for the US, where most of the costs stem from the US government's anti-renewable-energy policies such as punitive tariffs, policies that are not in effect in Germany.
That page also undermines its credibility by citing the hypothesis that the low cost at the time (which it acknowledges was already down to 36% of the number in 02012) was because the "massive wave of imports" was "subsidized by China’s central bank"; if that were the case, you'd expect that once China owned the world's solar market, the prices would have gone back up to reflect the true costs of manufacturing the panels, so that China's central bank could stop hemorrhaging money in these subsidies. Instead, the prices have continued to drop. They've dropped as much in the four years since that report as they had in the nine years before it. And, if you read the Department of Commerce filings justifying the "anti-dumping" tariffs, you will find that the arguments being made about "subsidies" are transparently ridiculous; the supposed "subsidies" include the fact that Chinese panel manufacturers pay their workers less than Turkish electronic assembly workers, and the fact that they have good public infrastructure to use.
It also incorrectly claims that solar panels need to be replaced after 25–30 years (that's just the warranty period) and that doing so would add US$20–30/MWh to Lazard's US$36/MWh LCOE, which is an obviously an arithmetic error that's off by orders of magnitude.
But its central claim, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility-scale solar, is actually true. The reason for this is mostly that rooftop solar requires much more labor and enjoys poorer economies of scale. You have to pay someone to design custom racking for your particular roof and a custom inverter and battery storage system for your house, pay someone to climb up on your roof and possibly die, pay for permitting and inspection, etc. You can find a more detailed breakdown of "turnkey installed cost" in SEIA's Solar Market Insight Report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight....
However, all of these factors are completely the other way around for balcony power plants. You don't climb on the roof; you walk out onto the balcony. You don't design custom racking; you buy an off-the-shelf retail product. The same thing for battery storage, if you buy a system with battery backup. Instead of spending thousands of dollars, you just hang the solar panel off your balcony like a potted plant and plug the plug into the outlet. The engineering is being done at the factory for a mass-market product, not for your house or for a single utility-scale solar farm. So you're spending less in engineering and permitting and construction costs than a utility-scale solar farm would, not more.
There is one way in which balcony power plants are worse than rooftop solar: they are at terrible angles, so they don't get much sun. But that just means you get less power, maybe two or three times less than you'd get in an optimally-designed utility-scale plant. That matters much less now that solar modules are so cheap.
That seem to be the conclusion when you start with the assumption "vertical scaling is always the best option". When you don't start with that assumption, maybe you reach a different conclusion.
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
Because there is always a good amount of loss in transmissions.
For solar, the best thing for grid and consumers is to have it very very close to consumption.
Ideally, a home with a good capacity battery, coupled with solar panels, and a smart grid connected controller that charges the batteries based on grid conditions of demand and supply, would be a great system. Costly, but good for the grid.
The transmission losses are trivial. 5-10% max. It makes no sense to isolate batteries behind meters. Sharing batteries on a neighborhood or suburban level would make far more sense. We are meant to be a society, not libertarians living in proximity.
Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
Plus the time getting the material, driving to the hardware store another time to get something you forgot, doing the registration, plus the time needed for planning/ calculation of economical feasibility/ decision making. Even at a very moderate 50 € per hour rate (for the typical Gamer) the material cost is the smallest part of the project. Treat it as a hobby, but don’t tell me it is an investment.
You get everything you need shipped from Amazon. You open the box and install it. These things are designed to be set up by amateurs. It’s half a dozen screws per panel. To hardest part is lifting the panels outside the balcony.
As with many things, the hardware store is probably going to be rather expensive and transport is a hassle (most people do not have a car with enough space to transport solar panels). So you order this stuff from specialized companies who will deliver it to your doorstep in one more or less convenient shipment. Same for pretty much any bigger, more expensive things needed when building or extending a house. Hardware stores are convenient if you quickly need something but that's mostly it, IMO.
Founder, CEO, serial entrepreneurs, who have pivoted from micro-services to blockchain to ai bill their time out to themselves at $100,000 per hour. ROI - its all in the grindset.
'Industrial scale' projects are also happening and they are quite easy to find on Google Maps, for instance around Berlin there are some pretty big areas covered in solar panels:
(interestingly most of those seem to be located in former East Germany - probably because land ownership isn't fragmented as much as in former West Germany due to the forced farmland sequestration after WW2).
The cost of solar power is close to independent of scale, so the benefit of doing those industrial scale plants is often smaller than the one for repurposing some bit of underused land.
This is exactly right. Germany has failed to provide low cost electricity at scale and has now incentivised placing panels everywhere, even on those beautiful balconies we once invested in. It is not surprising that you are being downvoted by the solar stasi.
It's mainly corruption, ignorance and incompetence. Germany has a strong fossil-lobby, because of industries and ancient home-tech. Around 15 Years ago, Germany had a strong solar-industry too, until the government basically buried it and sold it out to China, because of "failures" happening. Till today, there are forces trying to feed on nuclear-power and cheap Russian gas, while simultaneously sabotaging all renewables and electrification. It's so bad, they are willing to destroy whole industries for this BS.
Solar power is fundamentally different from traditional power plants because it's modular. Since the panel is the basic unit, a network of rooftop systems is as effective as a single large installation. A rooftop installation makes perfect sense.
Paying contractors to climb on rooftops one at a time and cable up a million distinct houses is clearly not comparable to an industrial installation. Similarly the generation from a balcony on a bad angle, and from walking around Germany, typically shaded, makes no sense.
So by bringing up shading and suboptimal angle you're already admitting that for an unshaded balcony these things make sense? The overhead of hanging one of these over the rail of your balcony is pretty minimal, compared to industrial scale installations. There is plenty of overhead with finance, management, billing, land use, and utility profits. That's why it makes sense.
You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
Power consumption in the EU has flatlined and is even falling. New HV transmission lines are not needed - put the solar farms next to some of the shut down nuclear plants (as we now do with big batteries in Australia and decrepit coal plants).
For context, a hectare (10000 m²) directly facing the sun receives 10 megawatts of sunlight at 1kW/m². The city of Kiel is at 54°19' north, so at the equinox a hectare near it receives about cos(54°19') ≈ 58% of that: 5.8 megawatts. If you were to cover the whole field with horizontal solar panels with a mainstream 22% efficiency, the peak electrical power generated that day would be 1.28 megawatts. But you'd need 2.20 peak megawatts of solar modules to do it, because the modules are rated based on directly facing the sun and getting 1kW/m² of sunlight, which they could never do in this situation. According to the prices on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... those modules are currently 0.100€/Wp, so that's 280 kiloeuros of solar panels. This is about an order of magnitude more expensive than the land under them.
The average produced would only be on the order of 100–200kW, because Germany's capacity factor is for shit. Kiel is in an especially terrible place, with only about 2.7kWh/m² per day on average, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
In real life people tilt the panels in a solar farm toward the sun and leave space between rows of panels so they don't shade each other even in the winter. That is because, even at today's historically record low prices, the panels cost enormously more than the land they're sitting on, so it makes sense to economize a bit on panels even at the cost of needing more land.
This isn't a government failure. The government is correctly pricing the true cost of industrial land use: the loss of farmland and natural space.
Rooftop solar is cost-effective because it cleverly avoids that cost by using land that's already developed. It's not winning because of bureaucracy, but because it's using a limited resource in a smarter way.
That could start happening if Germany's electrical energy consumption were to grow 100× or so, yeah. That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but no, cheaper forms of energy tend to lead to more energy usage, and solar energy is cheaper, so we might see a lot more energy usage. But we're talking about problems we'll have in 20 years after we've solved global warming.
It happens already. Lease for green land (probably wrong terminus) and arable land went up by more than 30% in ten years [1]. PV is arguably a very small factor of influence yet. But the pressure is real.
That page doesn't say anything about PV. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... says that 17 million hectares are used for agriculture in Germany, 48000 hectares are used for golf courses, and (as of 02021) 32000 hectares were used for photovoltaics, which would be 0.2% of the agricultural area. I'm having a hard time finding current figures, but I doubt photovoltaics are more than 2% of the agricultural area yet. I don't think that's why land prices have risen 30%.
Thanks for looking up the numbers, and it wasn’t my intention to exaggerate the influence of PV. I just wanted to point out there is a lot of pressure and it may be a sensible policy to use up rooftops first instead of arable land (even though the influence of PV on land lease rates might be negligible today).
Most people in Germany don't live big and don't have any intentions of doing so. No AC and people have real concerns about the environment and our impact on it.
Obviously it won't happen anywhere from air conditioning. But, for example, atmospheric carbon capture (putting the CO₂ back in the ground) could use a lot of energy.
Most likely, though, it will be things we can't even imagine today.
Imagine that you're in 01980 trying to predict how people will use personal computers in 02000. Would you predict the World-Wide Web, Usenet erotica newsgroups, virtual reality, banner ads, Geocities, MUDs, and spam?
Or, in 01903 trying to predict how people will use flying machines or automobiles in 01923. Would you predict metal airplanes, women getting pilots' licenses, dogfights between forward-firing fighter planes, transatlantic airline flights, strategic bombing from the air, helium airships, and French airmail service to Morocco? Or, would you predict Henry Ford would be making two million Fords a year?
Things change. The last time we had a new cheaper source of energy like this was 250 years ago.
No regard for aesthetics of buildings for pitiful power generation. The German state has completely failed to provide users with cheap electricity and it continues to miss-step with incentivising this nonsense. Shame on them.
I'm in Germany and keep seeing these, I always wonder what a 400w poorly oriented panel getting like 3 hours of sun a day is good for. If they weren't basically free thanks to tax reduction and other tricks I assume no one would get them
> installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give savings of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill, but there are lots of variables that come with that claim. It depends on which direction the balcony faces and whether the panels are shaded part of the day.
My german electricity bill is around 1200 euros a year. Sign me up for a one-time purchase of 426€ to save ~360€ every year if I had optimal conditions -- call it 50% effective and it's still earned back in under 3 years. The thing lasts, what, a decade? More?
Yeah so depends on your cost per kWh, and usage time versus production time. My 800W of balcony panels can theoretically produce 3-4 kWh per day (they peak at about 550w of actual production), but they generally produce a lot less than that. This is because my usage during production time is both less than that and also very spiky (my power usage is often 0w or 100-200w base load, with 2kw spikes as the compressor in the refrigerator kicks on, or some other device kicks on). So the savings for me isn't 3 years payoff, it's probably more like 6. But yes, these panels will product for 25-30 years. So yeah, they can pay for themselves very quickly depending on your usage patterns.
I'm in the US, and over here we also have some other complicating factors (here we have 2 sets of breakers that are 180 degrees out of phase and so the solar panels can only feed into one half of the breakers without extra complications. I only sort of understand this, someone else can explain better), so solar panels plugged into the balcony that don't backfeed straight to the grid can only cover a subset of the usage. In Germany you have 240v power so I would assume you would hit payoff very quickly.
Have to also consider the opportunity cost of that upfront cash. Those numbers sound worth anyway, but the 5 year break-even mentioned in the article is more questionable, and that's with subsidies.
(I'm too late and can't edit anymore, but I just noticed upon re-rereading that it says "couple of 300W panels" in the quote and not just "a 300W panel". My math (though done with a 450W panel for an example sales price) is likely off in the wrong direction. Sorry about that.)
"Poorly oriented panel" can equally well be described as "generates most of its power in the evening, when you have gotten home from work and want to use electricity".
It's better to get power at a useful time, even if that means the panel only generates half as much as it could, because storage costs far more than panels.
A 400W half decently oriented panel (i.e. south facing balcony, 60 degree angle) is sufficient to run your AC to cool your 50sqrm apartment during summer for free.
In the summer the optimal angle where I live (35.5º S) is 12º. Panels lying flat on the lawn are losing only 2% from that. Just now, near the equinox, panels lying flat on the lawn lose around 18% at noon.
I'll find a way to prop them up at 50º for winter when the time comes for that (April or May), though that's for sunny conditions. In our typical overcast in winter flat on the ground is probably still fine to catch the most diffuse light. I'll experiment when the time comes.
Right. I mentioned the suboptimal 60 degrees because many people hang it from the balcony (90 degrees) and the tilt it a bit, but usually not too much. From what I've seen 60 degrees seems like a good average number.
Yeah, in northern Germany vertical and 60º are pretty much equally good/bad in winter (75º would be ideal), but 60º will be getting 70% more power in summer than vertical, and is near ideal in spring/autumn.
That's mostly true, but you're mistaken about the reason they're basically free: it's because the costs of manufacturing them have been dropping dramatically for 20 years, thanks to (in large part Chinese) manufacturing innovations, not because of things like tax reduction.
Solar is cheap, non-peak-efficiency installs get to be the priority once you get the first 40% or so of production in solar.
This kind of thing just knocks the edges off of production and transmission costs. You get to the point where you're not trying to squeeze peak efficiency any more and you're just trying to fill in spaces wherever works reasonably well.
Maybe these can pull 700 watts on a sunny day? And you’d need a battery to store it. Would likely make 50 cents a day or less in electricity, on perfect days. The cost for a battery, panels, and install would be ~1000 euro (or more if it’s a bureaucratic mess).
I just did some modelling with the help of claude (which can write 200LOC+ numpy code faster than I can)
300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.
I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.
But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.
Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
I built one in Utah which is the only part of the US where it's currently legal, so I can give you the numbers.
- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ each for $670 total
- 1x EcoFlow Stream Microinverter for $257.
- Various cables, MC4 crimping kit, etc.. about $150
Grand total was $1077, I set them in direct sun on my patio and have generated 6-8kWh per day. At Utah energy prices (0.12 where I live), they will pay off in about 4 years. Somewhere like California with 4x the energy prices as here, it would probably pay for itself in <1 year.
My 1kW southern facing setup produces a little less than three kWh a day, about 1000kWh a year. A have a battery too so I manage to use most of that energy myself.
I use a battery -- 6kWh, 3600W inverter, with 6x 440W panels -- and don't feed power into the house wiring, but simply power the appliances in the same room as the equipment: Starlink, Mac Mini with 32" monitor, 16" i9-13900HX laptop, half a dozen small SBCs (5-15W each), fridge, espresso machine, air fryer, microwave, toaster, kettle, 4kW (output, 900W electricity) portable air conditioner, dehumidifier (250W). some LED lighting.
At the moment (spring) in half-decent weather all the above stuff is 100% off-grid. I'm still using grid power for hot water heating, dish washer, clothes washer -- all of which I do for free in my daily "Free Hour of Power" -- and for intermittent incidentals such as the water pump (e.g. runs for 15 seconds when I flush the toilet) and lighting in usually non-occupied rooms such as toilet, bathroom, and bedroom -- which together means I'm paying around 10c-20c per day over and above the fixed daily charge.
Rephrasing that to be more understandable because I didn't get this as it was: "Making sure no one buys expensive electricity from coal or gas plants when the grid is full of cheap renewable energy and almost-free stored energy."
I'm frankly still not sure what you're trying to say even if I understand the sentence now, e.g.: what free storage?! Isn't germany's projected storage capacity by 2050 somewhere between negligible and tiny?
That's like saying the cost of taking an additional bite from your food is very low once you have already bought it, if I'm understanding the continued use of marginal correctly in context?
When I buy food, the marginal cost of a bite from the food is very close to the average cost of a bite, because if I eat 5% more food this week, I have to buy 5% more food next week.
Contrast this with the case of listening to music on my stereo: if I listen to 5% more music on the stereo, I don't have to buy 5% more music, and I don't have to replace the stereo 5% sooner. The marginal cost is near zero: just the small amount of electricity the stereo uses, plus a tiny amount of wear and tear. Maybe I only listen to music three hours a week and the stereo cost me $313 and lasts for 20 years, so the average cost per hour is $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.
Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller.
These storage systems are generally warrantied as 5000-10000 cycles with 85% capacity remaining in 20 years time.
Guaranteed money today is better than saving a few cycles to maybe make money in 20 years time. Now also factor in discounting the risk etc. and the calculation is given.
But the business case is of course calculated on having the entire construction cost be amortized with profit over a chosen period. With some days making more money than other.
What batteries do are extending the time renewables flood the grid with cheap electricity and thus force nuclear reactors to throttle down, gas peakers to shut down etc.
Or these thermal plants can bid negative ensuring they don’t have to turn off while hurrying on their own demise.
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason
But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.
> 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant.
See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid):
While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine.
But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
No, their market is not dependent on it. Generation of power from stored thermal energy is significantly different from directly using solar: it is completely dispatchable. As such, it serves a role even in a situation where most solar energy (or most solar + wind) is used directly. It enables solar to be used in places, like at high latitudes, where it is otherwise strongly disadvantaged by seasonality (something batteries cannot fix).
Long term storage of this kind reduces the overall cost of providing steady solar/wind output in Europe by half.
They are also addressing markets where the need is for heat. If you are going to make heat from the solar energy, storing it as heat is much cheaper than storing it beforehand as electrical energy and then converting it to heat later.
It costs the state nothing to remove regulations preventing the installations and people who buy one see ROI of 15-20%. It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
> It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
On the side of the grid, balcony solar means grid maintenance is supported by less revenue (your utility bill pays for the grid, balcony solar expenses don't).
On the side of the producer, it means manageable production means are only amortized when balcony solar isn't producing (this isn't a small factor in a grid where electricity costs frequently reach zero). That increases the cost of electricity when the sun doesn't shine. Another aspect of this is that
These factors mean that balcony solar would be unprofitable if power was metered depending on real whole-system costs (e.g. market prices and/or a subscription for the grid). That it is profitable for some actors now just means that the cost system isn't aligned with the billing system. This isn't bad per se (people prefer to have predictable, stable energy costs), but can't be sustained in a system where this imbalance can be arbitraged.
> One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
Easy: The most expensive energy prices in the world.
The infrastructure investments needed to handle renewables are massive and are effectively passed down the consumer, who to be fair is ideologically on board with this.
thus the downvotes on your post (predictably since Berlin timezone coming live) and this balcony thingy as a crumbs-off-the-table for the non-roof-havers
It's fitting that solar installations are also very popular in third world countries where the government can't provide reliable / affordable power to their citizens. Godspeed, Germany.
Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine.
Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500.
I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
Not a bad legacy for Robert Habeck (along with the wind reforms), the leader we needed but didn't deserve [1][2]. Interestingly he's recently dropped out of politics and taken a teaching role at UC Berkeley.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwVR5JF8Ok
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxnnVPO9GFU
I'm not German nor do I live there, but I would have thought the legacy of Habeck would be more negative due to his opposition to nuclear.
Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had. The plants barely added any value to the market. When Habeck became Minister, most Nuclear plants were already gone, and the last remaining were phasing out, lacking nuclear fuel and permits. Habeck even gave a permit for the last plants to run some more months, squeezing out even the last parts of fuel as much as they could, just so they could serve as an additional supply in a problematic winter, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end.
Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.
Renewables have huge hidden costs as well.
Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.
That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.
Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.
The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.
solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house
Germany's nuclear power plants were shut down by the governments before him. What do you think he should have done differently?
Well most of them were, but not all. Notably the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shutdown on 15. April 2023, while the last coalition was in power. At that time there was a big discussion whether the shutdown could be postponed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a measure to curb rising electricity costs in Germany, but ultimately it was decided to go through with the shutdown. It was a largely symbolic move, but carried a lot of emotional weight since it put last nail in the coffin for nuclear energy in Germany. Hence people now blaming the Ampel government (and Habeck in particular) even though it wasn’t their decision to shut down power plants in the first place (with people of the party who made the decision openly criticizing them as well). Just to add a bit of context as German…
The plan to shut down nuclear power plants was done under the premise of a stable supply of Russian gas. This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock (at that time nuclear power was even classified as sustainable by the EU btw.), he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable. In my opinion this was the worst political decision of German politics since WW2, unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Those 3 plants had been running on "deferred maintenance" as the plant shutdown was planned years ago. Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
This was one of the biggest factors in the shutdown. Even if the plants stayed open, multiple reactors needed maintenance (and thus shutdown of those rectors).
Remember, they kept the open even longer then the planned shutdown (what was already extended before).
And the issue with the prices was not nuclear. By the time those plants shutdown, market prices already stabilized to pre-war levels. I remember this clearly as my renewal of my electricity contract came up, and ironically, my electrical price was even 2 cent/kwh lower then my 2021 contract.
The biggest issue for the German industry was not nuclear energie, it was the gas. And not because of power generation but because gas is used in several chemical reactions, with basf moving their production to the US. And thus more costs because supply chain changes. The LNG that we import is more expensive then the ultra cheap Russian gas we got.
And THAT is a issue for the German industry. And even more so with the US pushing to be the sole EU supplier for LNG (aka to replace Russia and use their leverage on the EU).
Anyway, a lot of your opinion is based upon the wrong conclusion.
Meanwhile, Dutch coal and gas plants are running overtime for electricity exports. Obviously to compensate for the German and Belgian nuclear exits. (see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/5y/monthly)
On top of that, NL govt is investing 10B EUR to prepare the construction of several new nuclear power plants, less than 300km from one of the abandoned German ones (Emsland). In conclusion the nuclear exits of BE and DE are some of the most stupid and hypocritical decisions in EU energy policy. Both countries will continue to depend on nuclear energy (from FR and NL). The only difference is that it is now produced <200km outside of their borders, in neighbouring countries.
> the worst political decision of German politics since WW2
Except the shutdown had no negative effect. There was no supply shock and prices keep trending down since (Though that of course doesn't mean because of). Let's keep it real. I can probably name worse German political decisions from this week.
Absolutely no negative effect at all!... Only almost all EU countries had to rapidly set up benefit schemes because a large part of their population fell in to poverty, due to the insane energy bills! https://www.dw.com/en/germany-closes-half-its-remaining-nucl...
"Except the shutdown had no negative effect."
Three things here:
* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
> This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock
There was nothing to mitigate. The nuclear plants deliver electricity, which was never a problem in Germany.
> he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable.
That's a lie. They even prolonged the usage for some months to appease the fearmongers. But without fuel, there was a limit on how they could run anyway.
> unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Ah, you're from the conspiracy-bubble...
The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish. In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal, which is right now unhealthy and apparently more dangerous in terms of radiation than the average nuclear power plant.
Awesome, I can even breathe it from here.
I feel much healthier now, thanks!
> The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish.
Nobody believes that, WTF?
> In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal
Partly true, but not really. Coal is also used for other energy-forms than just electricity. Nuclear Plants cannot cover those areas. In the grand scale, it might have been better to first reduce coal-usage and transition to purely electric usage, while phasing out of nuclear slowly and use the save money for building up on renewables.
But that was never an option with all the sabotages from the fossil anyway. Nuclear in Germany was never a real option, it always has been fossil vs electric, with nuclear being a minor source for electricity, weaponized by the fossil lobby against the renewables.
>Nobody believes that, WTF?
Why do you think Germans voted against nuclear? It was because of fear of events like Chernobyl/Fukishima etc. Then 2022 was the final blow, with documents saying that nuclear reactors didn't produce much energy and needed maintenance anyways. Kind of like getting rid of working trains to ride bikes instead. Why not. It's healthier :)
In the meantime, the world laughs at us. Literally the whole world.
You keep on mentioning the lobby of fossils, which obviously had an impact.
However, with Merkel the change was happening. At exactly the speed it was needed: 5% every couple of years, or so.
Now the only lobby I see is the one of fear that there is no tomorrow. While the countries just next to us, without even bothering China all the time, don't give 2 cents about it.
They keep on buying gas, uranium and fossils.
We on the other hand can finally build 800W solar panels on the balconies without bureaucracy. Thank God.
EDIT: with Merkel, we reached an increase of 5% per year for energy generated with renewables. Which is and was really good.
I guess that depends on who you ask. There definitely is a lot of opposition to the Green Party, but that's hardly directed at Robert Habeck specifically.
The current state wrt to nuclear in Germany reflects a decades long consensus in Germany that spans the majority of the population, scientists, intellectuals, politicians and even energy companies.
Any opposition you do hear on this from within Germany is usually opportunistic. People are against the Greens so they just take the opposite position on their policy. A good example of this is Markus Söder (CSU) who flip flopped on this multiple times.
Realistically speaking there is no serious politician or party with a pro-nuclear position in Germany that has a plausible plan for leveraging nuclear power at meaningful scale in an economical way. Any such plan would realistically invite massive opposition because nobody wants nuclear facilities in their vicinity.
His legacy is more negative due to his well documented opposition to economic competence.
Mind sharing that documentation or spelling out what you mean by that or are you not going to consider different views on that anyways?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5-cWq1Lr4
https://youtu.be/-XItDbFSYBE
But to be fair ... it's a general problem with Die Grünen.
https://youtu.be/DbzRY9VF2zE?t=724
Reality is just a nuisance.
Most Germans would view that as a positive thing. Pushing for nuclear power at this point would be utterly stupid.
It is very negative amongst large parts of the population, but he also has a very vocal fanbase.
According to his Instagram, he is currently working in Copenhagen: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOFwjUfDXdp/
Thanks for the update! I wonder if he changed his mind on the Berkeley offer [1]. Part time role though so maybe he just hasn't relocated.
1. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/habeck-gastdoz...
The leader we didn't deserve?
Sorry but Merkel reached almost 50% of energy production with renewables. Germany was already a leader in 2021-2022 with almost 45-50%.
The idea was to grow "sustainably", and in fact it was functioning.
Even the "original" GEG comes from Merkel who was slowly pushing for a change.
Then somehow someone decided they had to restrict and punish and this was our "undeserved" Habeck and friends.
There was no need at all to disrupt the country into what it has become today.
Literally everyone said that. Only the Scholz/Greens government didn't see that.
EDIT: in fact, if we just reverted the commits to pre-2022 we'd be already in a better situation. No new changes. Just start from what was working. And well, keep the new solar panel stuff for balconies. It seems a nice idea (which a lot of countries are doing anyways, so nothing so innovative here).
"removing all the bureaucracy here"
This is a bit strong, given that you still need to register with the Marktstammdatenregister and get a permit from your landlord (relevant bc homeownership rate < 50%).
I think the high electricity cost has as much to do with the relative success of this than the reduced friction.
On the technical side you are also limited to 800W max and if you want a battery things get complicated quickly. I will still get one probably but it is far from no bureaucracy at all and plug and play - at least not when you want a battery.
Marktstammdatenregister is online and very easy to do, Allowance from landlord is more of a formality now as they can't really deny it. Of course some try but the law is pretty clear here.
So all we needed from the Greens was 1 law to simplify the installation of (small) solar panels.
We got the full package and started the deindustrializion instead.
Seems like a good deal :)
A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
Some good points, i have a few thoughts to add.
Norway: yes, they are doing fine (80% EV, btw, so it seems you can actually use EVs in colder weather... I think the nordics are actually way ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to sustainable energy creation, with norway getting about 90% last year from Hydro - super impressive. https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Norway
France: I think they might turn around, because their low prices are tied to massive subsidies (that are scheduled to end in part end of 2025). And, France has the weather and sun to be even more successfull. That would however mean a decentralization of the power grid and probably storage solutions (batteries, hydro or h2), something thats complicated and not sexy to sell to the public - one of the reasons Germany is so far behind. Our grid is stuck in the past and enough company lobby politicians to keep it that way.
US: it is probably less of a pricing issue and more a topic of resiliance and stabilizing the power grid. It looks like rolling blackouts in the US get more, especially during the summer months (where solar could directly be used for the AC). https://urbanclimate.gatech.edu/current-projects/blackout-tr...
I think it would especially make sense to run your AC on if you have a flexible plan - i remember so many stories of people suddenly having to pay thousands during peak times in summer.
California, Texas and most of the rust belt does have enough solar to easily get by, especially if you add a battery backup.
Norway: 5.50 million people. Finland: 5.6 million people Sweden: 10.57 million people.
All these 3 together have slightly more population than NRW in Germany, and they have way more money.
So: almost same population, way more money and way more resources to generate energy (unless we want to consider Coal again... then we'd win).
The sooner we stop considering the Nordics as the model example the better it is for all of us in EU.
They are great countries, but very specific.
Norway gets most of its wealth from fossil fuel. While it's not Saudi Arabia nor Venezuela, and they invested in long term sustainability, it's not fair to everyone else to say that they are at 80%EV because they are forward thinkers, but because they have the money to do that.
It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Australia started at a similar point with mineral wealth in the 90s and decided tax cuts for the middle class were a better idea (under Howard/Costello).
> It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Such a proposal can be adopted much more easily if the population is rather small and homogenous.
100 % agree. They somehow figured out early that its better to sell to the others and stay renewable themselves.
Yes, but you have to somehow insinuate that this is a bad thing without ever clearly stating a thesis of why it's a bad thing.
Otherwise people might think investing in green energy, EVs and heat pumps is a good idea with good return on investment and positive externalities and should be done by any competent government.
Any competent government with infinite money they can just dig out of the ground, and dump into the sky via its customers, a small, mostly-homogenous law-abiding population and military cover, at least until recently, mostly provided by the US taxpayer.
Easy.
Yes, like any other argument about Norway, the situation must and shall be considered to be that they are smart and progressive and forward thinking, rather than rich. It's "not" that they have money to burn to do the new fancy thing. It must be forward-thinking policies!
There's a small amount of truth, I'll admit. I guess you can say that Norway's policies are easily a lot smarter than Saudi Arabia's policies. But what is always done is comparing Norway's policies to, say, Spain or France and declare Norway a progressive forward-thinking nation with great and working policies. In reality the opposite is true because France and Spain can't just fix big problems by showering them in money.
If you break even in Germany in 3 years, you'll break even in France in 4. Maybe faster, given the differences in climate.
And it barely works out in Germany. I did the math for my small city flat with a small south facing balcony and got a realistic payback period of 6 years.
The issue is not solar per se, but that tiny installations are not very efficient. It'd make much more sense to bolster funding for building sized installations.
The other aspect of this is the reduction of demand on the grid - which potentially reduces infrastructure costs ( or reduces the rise ) and hence shows up in a reduction in electricity prices ( if not absolute, against where they would be ).
I think you should be better off.
I did a small installation at my parents house with two panels at south-southwest-orientation with a 600 W inverter for around 800 Euro.
Turns out those two panels have created over 1.1 MWh since the late summer of 2023. With cost dropping heavily, your ROI should be much sooner.
A building sized thing has much higher installation costs. And you can't DIY it, it's not just plug and play.
That is true and it is where the regulation and bureaucracy comes in. I vouch for making building installations low friction and better subsidized.
Security will make this never as simple as balcony plug and play but there is a lot of room for improvement.
> A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Part of that is because our method of pricing is different than it is in the rest of the world.
It doesn't matter if you got a 3x50A or 3x200A three phase service, only during construction (because a 3x200A uplink will obviously be a decent bit pricier), the monthly fee is the same and very low (I think ~15€ a month). All other costs are rolled into the per-kWh price, making it appear much more expensive than in other countries. On top of that we have a ridiculous tax load because large industry is exempt from a lot of things and consumers gotta pick up the slack.
In contrast, Italians for example pay fees based on capacity which means a home there will usually have 3x10A uplink, something greatly troubling EV adoption and moving off of natural gas [1].
Additionally, Germany is one pricing zone whereas ENTSO-E, the European Commission and the Northern German population would rather like to have two or three pricing zones, given that there is a serious lack of North->South transmission capacity, but our "beloved" Bavarian prime minister Söder plus his green counterpart in BaWü Kretschmann both try to prevent that as much as possible because it would send prices in the south skyrocketing [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1ksqrq1/t...
[2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/energiepoli...
Yep in a lot of ways it's a failure of the electricity market.
It's absolutely bonkers how much I pay for electricity while I sit in the shadow of a giant onshore wind farm in Brandenburg. Transmission losses are nothing at this distance and the turbines cover the towns needs many times over.
But because of the lack of regional and dynamic pricing (and tax burden) we pay ridiculous rates.
I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
Maybe balcony solar is just a tax minimization play, in that the energy you get from panels isn't burdened by excessive network charges, consumer taxes etc.
> I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
That's actually happening already in some places - in Thüringen, nearby residents of a windmill get a share of the income [1], and the local municipality also gets a sizable amount... in small Mühlenfließ (Brandenburg) with less than 1000 souls living there, the 16 windmills provide 200.000€ a year in taxes, 10% of the municipal budget [2].
Unfortunately, you need politicians with a backbone to present such plans to their voters, and in rural areas many simply are afraid of far-right terrorism up to and including death threats [3], on top of "alternative" media and even supposedly democratic politicians riling people up against renewable power sources.
[1] https://www.gruene-thl.de/klima-energie/buergerinnen-und-kom...
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/windkraft-g...
[3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/region-muenchen-windrae...
That is definitely a factor. But depending on your energy usage and how smart your home appliances are, you can save a lot more than 10%. I.e. if you run all your washing and most of the heating of the water tank during your own generation times you can potentially save quite a lot more than 10%.
In the US the price varies a lot by state [1].
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
Electricity costs 24c per kwh in France and I just checked and can get it for 23c. So it's not true any more. Once you factor in that one is financed by the state and the other is not, it was likely never true. Germany's expensive electricity is a myth.
Some people laugh at the 800W output. However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less.
Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.
To be sure, when talking about solar panels, 800W is the nominal/nameplate capacity. That's how much it generates when conditions are perfect and the sun is shining straight down on them. Most of the time an 800W installation will produce rather less than that.
You'd need rather more panels (and/or some combination with batteries) to hit 900W output constantly. (on the other hand, do you need 900W constantly, or is that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
panels up to 2000W is legal, the 800w limit is actual net input, you can even battery in-between (or use it directly)
Nominal capacity is not the maximum, there are plenty of zones where panels perform way above for most of the day.
Germany is definitely not one of those zones
> Some people laugh at the 800W output
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
Your watts can go much farther than you think.
The awesome part is you can circumvent the 800W. First you can legally install 2000W solar panels, making 800W output much more likely. The 800W is only how much you can feed back into the grid. Second you can install one or more batteries and feed devices from them, further increasing the usable energy.
Can we generate 2 kw, charge batteries and ensure only 800 is fed back at any time?
Yes, that is exactly what is happening. 2000W solar panels feed the battery, up to 800W are allowed to be fed back into the grid/house network. Keep in mind you could also plug a 3000W device directly into the battery, meaning you could power a lot more than that if it is not connected to the grid. If you have devices that need little power for a long duration or high power for a short duration they can be fed with 100% solar that way. Depending on your use case that can save further money.
yes
Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all? I'd think it would be pretty hard to keep people from importing solar panels from Vietnam or Thailand—although of course you'd probably have to put it somewhere that surveillance drones could see it, if you want it to get any sun. (In that case, if you have a rooftop, maybe you could put it under a frosted-glass skylight.)
If anything, I'd expect the prices to be lower. Do you have a local Indonesian equivalent of eBay like we do here in Argentina? Or, just eBay?
I assume "electricity capacity of 900W" means that the wires from the transformer (and in the walls) are only rated for 4 amps at 230VAC. This means that you can't really run a 2000-watt air conditioner at all. Whereas, with an 800-watt solar panel charging a battery, you can run a 2000-watt air conditioner 40% of the time when the panel is in full sun. Washing machines and refrigerators are an even bigger difference, since they usually have huge peaks of current draw when they start up their motors, but relatively low average power. So the solar panels may actually be a much bigger boon than simply comparing 800 to 900 makes it sound like. A single car battery can typically source 6000 watts for brief periods of time.
https://www.tokopedia.com/ is the Indonesian Amazon. You can get everything it seems, also grid-tied inverters, but the prices are higher than in Europe from a quick check. Probably import taxes.
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
Indonesia gets a great deal more sunlight than Germany, almost twice as much: https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
Legality can be a funny thing. Governments can make anything they want illegal. Here in Argentina it's illegal to import used capital equipment that hasn't been refurbished by the original manufacturer or to import maps that say that the Malvinas Islands aren't part of Argentina. In Thailand it's illegal to step on paper currency because the king's face is on it.
What are your most high powered appliances there?
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
Heating is always the culprit (or cooling but that's less of an issue in our area).
But one thing to realize is that the industry was just lazy and none of this is actually "needs" a full electric line.
- You don't need actual heat for washing clothes if you using washing detergent. There are no real simple "machines" available as far as I know, except simple camping washing machines
- A rice cooker can work from as low as 250w. I have a "cooking" option in mine drawing 500w taking no longer than the usual 2000w plate (better isolation, optimized heat transfer, ...) to get water cooking.
- Heaters are difficult, I've tried a lot of electric options and they all draw a lot of power when you heat something like 20°C over the outside temperature. However ex. "Ecomat 2000" (small ceramic heater) can easily heat a average room at 450 watts.
One way to get warm and way lower wattage is heating blankets. From 50 - 100w usually on for 50% you get very far with little power.
Not sure if that helps anyone. But I spent a lot of time researching efficient caravan alternatives.
Ergo. 800 watts can be a lot.
What do you mean by 'that price'? Are there heavy import tariffs or another artificial reason why you can't order from the same chinese manufacturers as germany does?
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
Some countries with state gas or utility monopoly will ensure legislation blocks solar power. Example Thailand has huge solar potential but cheap gas, so they block solar panel installations
Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.
Surely you can do what you want within your own home, so long as you don't hook it up to the grid?
I'm also not sure if this fits with the price restriction they mentioned. Prohibitions can't be bypassed by paying a higher price, unless it were to refer to bribes
The systems in the article are hooked up to the grid though.
They're hooked up in an extremely safe and responsible manner, but it's understandable that there are regulations about what can be hooked up, and simply not surprising that they haven't been updated to say "yeah, this is ok".
A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.
It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.
The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.
They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.
But in that case the regulations would only have to apply to plugging in something that doesn't do that. There shouldn't be any forms or approvals or fees for someone who buys a product that does.
I agree there shouldn't be, but I don't think it's surprising that in many places there are. It takes active work for the regulator to look at the product and say "this design is sound, we're sure it won't kill anyone".
It takes active work to do that but not to manually approve zillions of individual installations?
The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.
Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.
Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.
Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.
"Need."
If you want the rules that exist and the rules that ought to exist to get closer together, do you not need to reckon what they ought to be?
Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.
Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.
The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.
They're actually actively subsidized in Germany to make them artificially cheap.
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
By definition, only the end customer pays VAT. But also on grid power in Germany. So no subsidy here.
That's sort of my point. You are essentially getting to parity to a grid operator, who does not pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
This is a good point.
Yes true, vat exception is an advantage.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
Thank you very much! Yes, it's more than a book, it's a whole intellectual movement, although maybe not a very lively one anymore.
Most powerful draw is going to be on heating and cooling things which can also be done using gas. Is Indonesia using a lot of gas (or even wood) or they just not cooking?
Kerosene cookers are still very popular in Indonesia, or gas from portable bottles. I've not seen gas refrigerators, but maybe some people also have them.
Germany is using gas or oil for heating too. Heat pumps are gaining popularity, but most heating is still fossil fuels.
The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.
Russia gas is suicide. Especially considering that Russia plans war against the Europe and even already started act on those plans.
This is satire... right?
They're really pushing it hard in the media here
It's being pushed hard in the UK too. Some of what the tabloids spout is just totally unhinged.
It's got to the point where the media/gov could claim Russians eat babies, and many would believe it.
1.) Russia is already sending drones to border countries.
2.) Russian politicians openly talk about such possibility.
3.) Russian interest in expansion is no secret.
War with Russia is a real possibility. Considering NATO is not reliable anymore (due USA being less then reliable partner) , considering China seem to low key support Russia, it is not even crazy from the Russian side.
On drones: there is no evidence of that. The supposed "drone ship" that was siezed by France turned out to be crewed by Chinese and had no drones or weapons on board. A Croatian citizen were arrested regarding the drone near Frankfurt airport. Three Germans were arrested regarding the drones near Oslo.
Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing? Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
Please show me where Russian politicians openly talk about flying drones around European airports? I've seen Putin and others ridicule the very notion - and it really is ridiculous. Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland, and which had literally been duct-taped together from the remains of Russian drones and placed for a photoshoot!
Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia, and then please do tell about Russia's supposed expansion plans: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:History_of_NATO_enla...
War with Russia is only a real possibility because the US and EU want it.
Well, for some context, most new NATO members were previously under communism regimes and soviet influence in the past. After getting their freedom, the next step was to make sure they are safe from Russia.
Thats why we are perfect soil for this FUD.
Senior population remembers soviet union with all its warts (rightfully so) but fail to account the structures that governed the union and whole topdown integration no longer exists there.
Meanwhile anyone born in the last 40 years was raised with inferiority complex due to being economically behind and treat every word from west as gospel.
>War with Russia is a real possibility
No it is not because of 3 reasons:
1. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO 2. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO 3. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO
War with russia is mostly hawks' and chicken littles' of the media wet dreams.
> Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
A more fitting title would be "Germany's citizens outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels". The current phrasing makes it sound like it's somehow a thing done by the government, which is not the case. If anything the government is one of the many forces slowing down this progress. And yes, I am aware of things like grid security and stability being a concern. I am not complaining.
Given that these things are usually hindered by the government's bureaucracy, maybe the best title would be "Germany's government removes obstacles preventing residents from outfitting..."
Insisting that every improvement must be framed as something bad about government is how USA government became downright horrible.
That title reads like a good thing about the government, not a bad thing.
Electricity is so expensive in Germany, that these things pay for themselves in a couple of years - you are theoretically right, but as things are, these make financial sense.
Unless it is related to weapons or the project that will ultimately benefit big corps, project will not work out using central government policy. With revolving doors and sophisticated lobbing, at this point government seems just like different side of the same coin as big corp.
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
In my city, you could get financial support if you installed a "Balkonkraftwerk".
Nitpick: Not every house owner is a citizen though.
There's nits on your nits: most residents (citizen or otherwise) don't own their properties; and while these things do work with houses, they are intended for apartments.
For this you do not need to own the property / house / flat, though.
There's a funny comment downthread that says "It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward."
Everyone replying disagrees, but I think it's a perfect analogy: just like the backyard furnaces, these small-scale installations are inefficient, provide a negligible portion of total energy needs (<1% of total energy needs if everyone in Germany did it, from TFA), look ugly and - this is the most important - provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
Actually, it is pretty common for homeowners to first install a balcony solar power plant and eventually "upgrading" to a full-scale solar power installation on the roof. The first is very easy and cheap to do and can be done on a weekend, the latter is costly, requires dealing with bureaucracy and partially-sleazy system sellers, and thus requires overcoming way more substantial hurdles, for which one must muster the motivation first.
Balcony solar power plants are sort of a gateway drug into actual, practical participation in the renewable energy sector. They are easy to install, cheap, have a clear and fast way to profitability, and provide significant gamification value (people who buy these kits tend to start with constantly monitoring their energy generation and usage in apps afterwards). That "ice breaker" effect should not be underestimated. It can pave the way to way more substantial actions (or to the acceptance of actions taken by others) that people wouldn't have considered otherwise simply due to inertia of the status quo.
> look ugly
That is YOUR taste. I consider most balconies with solar panels to look futuristic and cool. Garden houses with solar panels on the roof also look way cooler and more modern than without them.
1% of Germany's power needs sound like an awful lot to me.
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household. Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
Yes, but where do you live?
Well, the person you are replying to is in a thread about Germany, mentions balcony solar and said "my little server turns it automatically on" (which is how you would construct that sentence in German instead of "turns it on automatically"), so my wild guess would be Germany. ;)
Germany isn't that big, but the difference between Freiburg and Hamburg is very significant in this case I believe
Germany has a pretty consistent climate. Doesn't really matter where you live. Of course, that's an oversimplification, but if you're new to Germany and wonder "oh, what's the weather going to be here?", the answer pretty much is "similar to the rest of the country".
You could then look at a map of France and think, ah, similarly sized country, probably also has a consistent climate, but that's not true. Southern France is very different from Northern France. But Germany's climate is pretty uniform.
Yes, there is a difference, you are right. I don't have hard numbers at the moment (typing from the phone) but from looking it up quickly, the sun's intensity varies from about 950 kWh/m² to about 1.200 kWh/m² between north and south Germany. So, what OP described will generally work in any part of Germany.
Point taken! Scanning comments rapidly to move on to actually doing some work today - has its drawbacks.
I hope the US can have more of this. I never thought solar on most resi roofs made any sense. The cost is high, lots of risk from leaks but building a patio with a pergola or other shaded structure? Sign me up. The Us should be fighting to lower the red tape to get these kind of systems in place.
Meanwhile China projected to add ~300GW of solar capacity in 2025. Germany renewables capacity for 2023 was 165GW.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
China is also 30 times larger in area than germany.
It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!
Inner Mongolia is so far from populated areas that China build 2000 km electric power lines, as long as a car drive from Munich to Sicily.
The Messina Strait Bridge doesn't actually exist. Perhaps you are driving a hovercraft.
Ferries don't exist.
I imagined them.
Yes, but until recently, Germany produced more electricity than China did.
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
How fast has Germany's PV capacity expanded in recent years? In another subthread I wanted some estimate of how many hectares in Germany had PV on them, but the pages I visisted on the subject were outdated.
You're not getting his point.
Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that.
Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator.
Overall, Germany is in a shit place for renewable energy
Germany uses millions of hectares to grow biofuels. They would be better used for solar panels, but NIMBYs prefer endless monoculture.
Pretty bad place for fossil fuel extraction, too.
For many years I have been writing about how bad Germany is for solar panels because of, mostly, how far north it is. Specifically, the capacity factor for utility-scale solar in Germany has historically been about 10%, which is mostly because of the unfavorable latitude and cloudiness. You can see this quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali.... The capacity factor for utility-scale solar in China has actually also historically been about 10%, and I have no idea why that is. You are certainly correct that it ought to be much better, because China gets so much more sun. You can see that quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
However, Germany does not have a space problem. Germany is 357'114km² with "photovoltaic electricity potential" of about 3.0kWh/kWp/day according to Solargis (see above link), which would be a capacity factor of 12.5%. I'm not quite sure how they calculate that, but multiplying by the country's area, the solar constant of 1000W/m², and a fudge factor of 0.8, it works out to something on the order of 30–40 terawatts, electric. That's roughly 50% to 100% more than the entire world's marketed energy consumption, which is about 18 terawatts, about a third of it electric. Germany produced 488.5 TWh in 02024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany) which is 55.73GW.
Therefore, roughly 0.2% of Germany's land area would suffice to produce all of its current electrical consumption with solar energy, about 700km². This would also require something like 450 gigawatts (peak) of solar panels, which would cost about €45 billion at today's prices, roughly 4 days of Germany's GDP.
It is absolutely true that, if you put those same solar panels in the Mojave Desert, mounted with single-axis trackers, they would produce two or three times as much power. (California's average utility-scale solar capacity factor was over 29% last I checked.) So, yes, solar is much more expensive in Germany. But if you check out https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you will see that, in March 02023, solar modules cost three times as much as they do now. So solar generation in California then cost what solar generation in Germany costs now. (Except that, because of Biden's anti-renewable-energy tariffs, actual California prices were and are much higher than you would expect from Solarserver.)
To put the 700 km² in context, that's approximately 30% more than what is currently (not historically) used for lignite mining in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-three-li...
Great idea! Want to learn more on the safety though...
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
Anti‑islanding detects the power frequency and constantly tries to shift it. If the grid is on, its frequency won't budge, so the anti‑islanding doesn't trip. If the grid is off, the frequency shifts and it shuts off. A second one would just make it shut off faster.
Curious: is anti-islanding an actual feature, or a necessary behavior of any power source that adds power to the grid? I can't imagine how a second power source would work at all if it weren't syncing to the main source's AC phase. So it seems that if you implement the syncing, you get anti-islanding for free (assuming you handle the case of a missing main source phase by not providing power at all).
This is a newbie question, and I look forward to learning how it's more complex than this.
If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes.
Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead.
Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-tied inverters: When there is nothing for them to sync to, they output nothing.
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase).
However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now).
Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 240V 40A clothes dryer. The island is definitely going to collapse at that point, and might do bad stuff on the way down.
Even in that weird non-existent corner case instance, it is a necessary function because a hypothetical microinverter is completely and utterly incapable of kickstarting a grid.
You could totally have half a dozen microinverters scattered around your household, connected to each other but temporarily not to the neighborhood distribution network.
I could have that; many homes in the world do have that. And when the grid dies, the microinverters all die with it.
Possibly you have misunderstood.
Can you elaborate? Which part is it that you think I may have misunderstood?
What problem (or solution) is the concern, here?
> Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on?
Yes. This is Germany we are talking here. I doubt any other country has higher (and more annoying) safety standards.
Well of course but the manufacturers of the micro inverters sure try to cheat:
https://www.heise.de/news/RelayGate-Deye-Solar-Microinverter...
From what I remember, it turned out that the electronics were sufficient. Though the chance of issues (e.g. in case of a software but) were/are increased.
Well, it turned out that the micro inverter in question did not contain the necessary physical relay to show conformity with the claimed norms on electric safety (related to disconnect from the grid in case of grid failure).
They only had a software implementation and were forced to send all customers in Germany a free relay dongle to ensure safety.
It's called "NA Schutz"[1] and is required for all german micro-inverters by VDE-AR-N-4105:2018. Which in turn is national law following EU directive.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netz-_und_Anlagenschutz
That they shut off is important for a more obvious reason: The microinverters plug into a normal outlet. So the flow of power is invented to the normal situation, here the prongs of the plug are energized. The body that writes the electrical regulations of course wanted a mandatory special plug and socket that had to be installed by a licensed electrician, which mostly makes balcony solar financially a non starter. Finally they relented after much discussion.
> What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something?
Well, I hope that any competent electrician will measure if there's still any voltage on the circuits after pulling the breakers.
Micro inverters pretty much all have automatic shutdowns in these situations. They can ‘boost’ the phase/voltage, but won’t replace it if it is missing.
These microinverters do not output anything if they do not detect the grid.
AP News had a great article about this. We really need more states to adopt this beyond Utah.
https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy...
> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation.
so about 5yrs ROI
And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidizing installation):
> Weyland spent around $530 for his 600-watt-capacity system. While he’s happy with how his south-facing panels perform during balmy weather, such days are rare in northern Germany. He estimates that he’ll save around $100 in annual electricity costs and recoup his investment in about five years.
The article mentions the main motivation in Germany is also climate change and a feeling of independence, not so much economics
It's nice that it is both. You do something good and also save money. Everyone with a plug at their balcony is throwing money away when not installing some panels, if there is no roof installation already ofc.
That's way overpriced. An 800W solar system is easily under US$1000 now.
200-300 EUR without installation is the current best price in Europe + shipping:
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmsesbk&xf=1601_780.50*1200~1603_2&...
In the US? Where do you buy it from, and are we talking about a system that feeds power back onto the grid?
I was pricing out using bifacial panels for fencing. It seems like it would cost about twice the price of cedar, but last twice as long (50 years) and have less upkeep.
I started looking at that to boost my roof solar capacity. It looks like it’s permitted by code where I’m at and now the only thing I’m unsure about is vandalism since my property is against a busy street. Seems like a great idea though.
It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.
Around here I have a backyard washing machine, a backyard grill, a backyard clothesline, and my neighbors have backyard childcare, backyard parking, and a backyard motorcycle. And actually inside my house I have a flush toilet and an oven.
Your assertion seems to imply that if instead I had to wash and dry my laundry at a coin-operated laundromat, eat at a cafeteria table with all my neighbors, and piss in a portapotty down the street, and my neighbor's kids were taken away to live at a boarding school, while he had to ride the bus to work instead of driving, that would be evidence of successful policy!
We clearly have radically different definitions of success. Yours seems not to be well thought out.
The problem with backyard furnaces was that the steel they produced was not just expensive but also inferior. If you could plug in a Tabletop Minimill that produced ingots of specialty precision steel alloys to your order, ranging from maraging steel to tool steel to nitinol, and which was also cheap to operate, that would not be an economic policy failure. That would be an enormous success!
Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; my household water pressure tank is decentralized because of collective action failure, for example, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487610. Others don't. We have to analyze the particulars of each case. I've written at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051 a bit about the particulars of this case.
> Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; ... Others don't.
That's correct, yes. I too prefer a decentralized washing machine to coin-operated laundromats which are very common in France where I live nowadays.
However I still believe that electricity generation has more in common with steelmaking than with laundry. Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI, they're largely enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value. The long-term solution in my view is nuclear which coincidentally the French do rather well, it's not all laundromats.
> Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI
That is clearly wrong. Even the worst-case embodied energy assumptions for solar panels estimate the cost of producing a square meter of solar panel area at 2000 kWh (the best cases are around 300, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph... ). A square meter of solar panel area produces an average of 200 kWh of power per year in Germany (which is a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can almost double that value). This means that even in the worst case, the solar panel has amortized itself from the perspective of embodied energy after 10 years. On average it will be more like 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years.
This is a strange analogy. The policy saves people money on their power bill. The backyward furnaces are considered a disaster because, among other things, they produced low quality steel, and diverted labour from agriculture and other things, none of which is the case here - people pay for solar panels and install them once, and then achieve savings.
Hard disagree here.
1) The biggest challenge to renewables seems to be not capacity, but storage: wind and solar can't be relied upon all of the time, and often provide peak power out of sync with peak demand. Within reason, hyper-local generation either removes the need for storage altogether (as generated electricity is immediately utilised by household appliances) or allows easy local storage to be added via a few KWh of battery in the basement.
2) Houses that can mostly power themselves also reduce demand on the electricity grid, assuming that large spikes can be avoided.
3) I like the future vision of all people and their dwellings being energy-independent, and this is the start of a path towards that.
4) Don't fall into the trap of only ever accepting an optimal solution. Local generation might be somewhat less efficient economically (although with private investment rather than governmental/corporate investment being used here, and with no apaprent shortages in solar panel supply, I'm not so sure about the comparison?) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't add some meaningful benefit, or that it shouldn't happen.
Would you also agree that production of usable energy makes most sense at scale?
With that I mean energy like heat and motion? Because so far it just hasn't been possible to generate electricity at home in a meaningful way. Unlike heat, which everyone largely generates at home.
I would argue that there has been a technological leap, where electricity generation has become possible at home now through a combination of lower prices, ease of installation and feasibility to tie in to the rest of the electrical grid. Banning this new possibility would be a shortcoming of the policy.
What a strange take.
This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.
I do see it as the result of policy applied from the top, the policy that resulted in 2x household electricity prices compared to the US (which amounts to 3x difference if you adjust for median household income).
I replied in another thread but I still remember how in my childhood all the ordinary people had to grow potatoes. The state didn't order them to, it just created food shortages that's all. You can say it was voluntary, "not so much a policy applied from the top".
Coincidentally, CO2 emissions per capita in the US are also about 2 times that of Germany.
I don't think that this is comparable. People who struggle with their electricity bills can not afford balcony solar. It has a ROI of a few years with a (low) but comparably large one time upfront cost.
With potatoes you only really pay with your time.
This is assuming people don’t want to go net zero, and people not understanding that going there requires change, which will be costly. I‘d argue there is a majority in Germany supporting the transition to green energy, accepting higher prices as a result.
Yeah no. It would be if everyone had a steam turbine hooked up to their fireplace.
This is the next step to people realising that building the walls of buildings from PV panels makes sense.
And it can look good and match whitewashed or earthy buildings https://solarix-solar.com/en/solar-panels-on-the-facade
Decentralisation is the way to go for energy. Instead of having huge powerplants and fat power lines having a large percentage of the needed energy produced locally is ideal.
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
> German regulations limit balcony solar systems to 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop.
That gotta be a big laptop!
Yeah, crazy.
I've got 6x 440W panels literally lying flat on the lawn. They produce at least enough (200W) to power all my computers, my Starlink, my fridge, and some LED lighting by about 2 hours after sunrise and until 2 hours before sunset, even if it is completely overcast and/or raining. When there isn't a cloud in the way they produce 2000W-2400W from 11 AM to 3 PM, usually enough (at this time of year, spring conditions) to fill my 6kWh battery by noon if I don't need to use it for heating (4kW output portable air conditioner, using 900W) in the morning, leaving the electricity free for cooling in the afternoon. Otherwise the battery fills in the afternoon. If I don't need heating at night then the battery powers everything from before sunset to after sunrise with typically 2-3 kWh left in the morning to make coffee and breakfast (I use about 1kWh in the kitchen per day) and run some heating until solar generation (and the direct sun heating) pick up.
The solar panels (JAM54D40-440/GB if anyone is interested) cost me the equivalent of US$390 plus tax for all six. The Pecron E3600LFP I use to control them (combined 3kWh battery, 2x 1200W MPPT controllers, 3600W inverter, AC charger) cost ~US$1500, and an extra 3kWh battery US$800. And $200 for 2x 30m 6mm^2 cables. That's it.
I just did this last month. Results so far indicate the panels will pay for themselves by March. I bought the battery unit primarily as a UPS because of the terrible electricity reliability where I'm living, and a $450 petrol generator to charge it in the event of the multi-day outages I get in big storms (most recently 40 hours in April). It was looking like having about an eight year payback period just via time-shifting night rate power to peak times, but adding the solar panels looks like reducing that to about three years.
I'm at 35.5º S.
Only if you have batteries in between because the sun isn’t shining 24/7 in Germany (and elsewhere). The costs for batteries are as nearly always out of the debate when news papers/portals are glorifying this German balcony subsidy scheme (costs for the public due to power feed-in which isn’t mentioned at all in this article). In the grist article the battery issue is mentioned only in one sentence. The power feed-in is from the perspective of the power grid operator company sometimes called as power backfeed secretly which needs extra infrastructure.
> > That gotta be a big laptop!
> Only if you have batteries in between because
Your laptop doesn't have a battery?
Also a very big small fridge.
Better be safe for future AI GPUs
800 W. In a laptop. The heat output of a hot air gun or two.
> [The solar panels are] connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home.
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
The microinverter gets the timing signal from the grid and certified microinverters kill the power if they lose mains power.
You are also only allowed to install a couple hundred watts yourself like this, anything above 800 Wp still requires a professional.
Maybe a most important benefit is it makes people MORE aware of their actual daily electricity consumption ...?
Has anyone done any studies on the co2 emission of manufacturing one panel like this? Curious how long it will take to offset.
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Wow that is pretty good, lines up pretty nicely with the approx monetary break even as well. Impressive!
Wonder if there is anything that can be done to lengthen the life of the panel as much as possible. I've read elsewhere that solar panels have a theoretical lifespan of 25 years with the panels slowly degrading and not failing all at once. I dont know if these specific panels are different but I wonder if the panels are kept clean or something if that would maximize the lifespan?
> If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Very important point that is often ignored.
Yes there are many studies that did life cycle assessment of them. This is a good source [1] that analyze about 400 of these life cycle assessments.
[1] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf
That is more than ten years old, efficiency of PV is much better today, which probably brings emissions down a bit.
Efficiency has improved somewhat, but also, the cost to manufacture PV is enormously lower than it was then, which means that it's using much less materials and energy to produce. Therefore the energy payback time should be much shorter.
How much shorter depends on the fraction of the energy cost in the first place then. Price is not even an upper bound for energy which is cheap in China, and also production is probably subsidised.
It wouldn't be an upper bound if energy were free, but it isn't. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e... lists China as US$0.08/kWh, but that's the residential price; industry pays a bit more. But it's a countrywide average.
Intensive investigations of Chinese "subsidies" from the US Department of Commerce have come up with embarrassingly little.
The current €0.100/Wp price level (12¢/Wp) combined with the US$0.08/kWh given above does give us an upper bound of 1500 hours of full sun for the energy payback time. At a Californian 29% capacity factor, that's 7 months of operation.
But in fact not 100% of the cost of the solar module is the cost of energy; there are some labor and raw materials costs as well, as well as capital costs and, astoundingly, some profit. So 3 months is probably a better estimate.
Process energy will still be a lot cheaper than .08 US$/kWh in China. I doubt they process glass with electric ovens. OTOH that is primary energy then, which kind of supports your argument. Still other emissions in the silicon supply chain that cause global warming are also relevant. If I find the time, I‘ll look for recent LCA.
A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa...
Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).
Does importing a solar count against your countries co2 balance?
What is the real throughput of panels mounted vertically? I have put solar on my roof plus batteries and it reduced significantly my dependence on gas and cost of heating bills, but they're mounted on two sides so they see the sun from early-mid morning to mid afternoon, with peaks roughly mid day depending on season. I've always been skeptical about vertically mounted ones but people say they work, so not sure what to think.
You loose performance at noon/summer, when you are likely to produce over your demand anyway.
But during winter/rainy days, when you are limited to diffuse light, they deliver the same output.
The point is that panels are so dead cheap now, that efficiency of orientation is no longer an issue.
Approximately how much does a panel generate from diffuse light compared to direct sunlight?
Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.
> Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany.
Genuinely interested what you mean by this - could you expand, please?
(It seems like the success of this scheme would mean that there is a meaningful group of people who are willing to take such an approach in Germany, whether it is characterised as libertarian or otherwise?)
related recent discussion on YC about DIY solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476820
Balcony solar is limited to 700-800 watt for safety reasons. There's also a lobby to get ppl to need an electrician for installation, which is bullshit. Rising energy prices (I paid minimum 50 bucks/Month) and sneaky corporate tactics (they give you 12 ct/kwh then after like half a year make it 60 ct/kwh) makes ppl want more price independence, which is understandable
It's only bullshit if you're certain that the electrical installation passes muster. I've seen many installations that are downright dangerous, mostly in older homes and cheap apartments. There's a reason for the 800W limit, that's a little over 3A and shouldn't cause any fires in even the flimsiest of wiring. But erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea when it comes to electrical safety.
It's clear that hackernews is a DIY crowd and loves this idea. I'm pro letting people do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel good.
HOWEVER, I have to point out how incredibly silly this is. There is a reason why historically we have pooled our resources under the government to produce and manage energy infrastructure centrally.
Let's say these 500,000 individuals instead pooled their 1,000 euro (including installation & time) and funded one industrial-scale solar development.
You could generate a renewable 600MW+ (a 4X factor on what these randomly placed individual units will ever deliver in reality) for that money. And efficient centralized battery storage also becomes an option there.
Then your fellow citizens can spend time creating surplus value in the field they are actually experts in and also you don't have a 3rd world hellscape of outdated balcony solar units to look at out your window for the next 30 years.
The energy savings are great, but it makes buildings super ugly. Why not putting them on roofs?
That’s the thing about statistics - it is only somehow valid at some uncertain date. I know 3 not registered installations. One guy has big photovoltaic installation and installed balcony power plant to cover his special energy needs at sunrise. Another guy works from home and has two balcony power plants to cover his home office needs. Third guy didn’t like batshit crazy registration website and left the installation unregistered, but running.
should have a (2024) label
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs”
That's a shame, and makes the whole thing feel performative, especially for a country that nixed nuclear.
Total energy need is not equal to total electricity need. And electricity is a lot more expensive then heating energy. So the cost savings can still be significant.
This would be very cute if it was some 3rd world island country grasping at the straws to improve their quality of life...doing this.
But you're fucking Germany bro....where's your massproduced precision reactors and turbines everywhere..the planet needs work...what the f.. are you guys even doing..a rising standard of living means 10-100x more energy you know that right?
This whole attitude feels like clapping for a new garden tomato in the middle of a famine... go put some fucking tractors on the field lol but like seriously though.
Standard of living has been decoupled from energy consumption for quite some time now in developed countries.
Complemetely untrue. The evidence is pretty clear. There's no such thing as a low energy country with a high standard of living.
If I were to pick the #1 thing that most European are literally ignorant about is exactly this fact. Data below:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$ui$chart$cursorMode=hand;;...
That’s why I specified „developed“. Economic growth in developed countries has been decoupled from energy use since the early aughts at least.
That's because they've been in an energy crisis for the last 50 years, so much advancement was by improvement of efficiency. Because of the dramatic cost reductions of photovoltaic modules, that energy crisis is over now.
Very solarpunk
As batteries and PV panels get cheaper, we'll see demand destruction from this sort of thing. It's going to be a bleeding wound on the grid.
This is cool. One annoying thing with much of San Francisco is that renting means you can't put things on the outside of the building usually (not a law just common lease language) but I have a little solar panel that I use to charge a phone that I can leave outside. This is wonderful. Power from the sun and no consumables!
A typical phone battery has a capacity of about 13.5 Wh. Assuming a converter efficiency of 90%, it takes 15 Wh (0.0015 kWh) to charge your phone from an outlet. Assuming an electricity cost of $0.39 per kWh in San Francisco, that's 0.58 cents ($0.0058) every time you charge your phone using the solar panel.
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings.
haha it's not the savings. It's the accessibility! This phone is out on a balcony by a herb garden. The big annoyance with electric devices is that they need to be connected to an outlet. PVs have saved this.
We have our blinds on PVs which is very convenient. No charging required and no wires required. Same thing applies here. The PVs allow battery recharge for places where power cables are inconvenient. The phone is a convenient tailscale device with a battery that can webcam!
"sOlAR pAneLzz"
Do tech bros have other interests than "Solar, renewables, EV, e-mobility, ..."?Most people worldwide have other pressing issues than aflluent-comfy-bubble-shit.
And btw fuck Habeck and his kind; his legacy is an economic downturn / economic incompetency. Along with Annalena as the worst foreign minister in German history.
Just 5.5 more million to go! And then another 65 million.
We’ve been seeing that exact sort of exponential rate from Chinese solar installations.
I wonder if the solar panels could be tailored themselves to be a balcony, but with a rather distinct look. That would be a massive win.
I bet some people wouldn't install it now because it looks kinda meh.
Solar facades can be bought with your desired looks https://solarix-solar.com/en/solar-panels-on-the-facade
I wonder how useful those are just small panels hanging off the side of a balcony oriented poorly.
They also kinda look terrible :(
When it comes to urban design, I consider balcony solar panels to be less of a nuisance than cars on the streets.
Much better than a lot of "architecture", too.
The 450W panels are quite large these days (2m²). I don't mind their looks.
Redirected from https://cleantechnica.com/2024/12/21/germany-embraces-balkon..., which points to this.
(And a reminder that the guidelines ask "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter".)
This is such a total failure of state capacity.
Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical?
It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of scale? Why are individuals having to take responsibility for their own energy generation? Are we doing our own sewer and water supplies next?
Why not approach the problem from all sides? There are big renewable projects in Germany as well, of course, but they take time to build, the grid needs to be adapted to handle them and there are many, many people/organizations who oppose all big installations that "block their view of nature" or whatever, so the big projects take even longer. By the way, this (nasty neighbours) would be a big issue for Balkonkraftwerke as well if they had not added them to a list of privileged things you are allowed to equip your house with (without permission process).
Are you seriously asking why individuals are supposed to take responsibility for themselves?
Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this?
Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity.
Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil (and it's fresh!). Same principle. Slightly higher yield.
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not.
In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation.
Batteries are even more egregious than solar, why install batteries .one. .at. .a. .time. behind switchboxes where they can only be used individually rather than a suburban installation that allows them to be used in aggregate?
I can only imagine how badly the numbers stack up somewhere suboptimal for solar like a German balcony. What if everyone instead gave their 1000 euros to a state organization that built a big solar farm that everyone shared? Oh wait - that's exactly how the state is meant to work!
The subsidy question is interesting, but in Germany these balcony panels are ~ €600 unsubsidized (depending on the exact kit; see my numbers elsewhere in this discussion) and still pay back in 5 years. The economics work with and/or without government help.
The fact the economics of DIY make sense, is the evidence of the market/state failure. (whether they really do make sense without fanciful efficiency calculations, I leave to you).
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
It makes sense for two reasons: firstly there's limited economies of scale in solar panels: they more or less make the same amount of energy per unit area and per dollar regardless of the size of the installation (rooftop is usually more expensive for installation but these systems have near zero installation cost). Secondly, because the generation is local you're not paying for any margin, co-ordination costs, or transmission costs. This secondary effect is already enough to offset the increased cost of rooftop installation in many cases.
(And maybe you can consider this a market failure, in that it doesn't fit some naïve idea of an efficient market, but you're always going to be paying for someone to make and take on the risk of the big, centralised version of things)
I think you need to make some better arguments to convince. Your argument only makes sense when wholesale cost of solar panels is significantly cheaper than retail. The better the economics of scale (i.e the smaller the difference between wholesale and retail) the more favourable "DYI" becomes, because the person had home does not need to cover the overheads that are necessary for large scale installations (financing, management, transmission, planning...). It's the same reason that hiring a vps to run all your compute is not necessarily cheaper than buying your own pc.
Installing balcony PV is kitsch, fun, or even convenient as well.
What does your vision of perfect solar power look like?
And within that vision, is a free person still able to decide for themselves if they want to buy a solar panel to hang on their balcony?
I think you're misunderstanding plantain's point.
Where I live, in Argentina, every house has a water tank on the roof, which is filled from the water main through a float valve, like a toilet tank. Many houses need a pump to drive the water up to the water tank because the water main has such low pressure. This is somewhat expensive, and the pumps, float valves, and water tanks fail sometimes, which is inconvenient. And the tank is not really that high up, so the water pressure at the faucet is not that high, and it's somewhat variable, which is inconvenient when it changes the temperature of the shower.
Some other places I've lived, such as various places in the US, instead have a large shared water tank for an entire neighborhood, town, or even city—a so-called "water tower". If you've been to the US, you may have seen these. Making this work involves several expenses:
- Larger-diameter water mains to reduce head loss when water demand is high.
- Highly responsive repair crews to respond rapidly to water main breaks, because the higher-pressure water with a high flow capacity can be very destructive.
- The construction and maintenance of the large water tower, which is very dangerous if done badly.
- A high-powered pump to get water up the water tower in the first place.
However, these expenses turn out to be significantly smaller per person than the expenses of small per-house water tanks and water pumps. And they provide better service. (Also, because people are stupid, in the US they build many of their houses out of wood, so they need fire hydrants, which require the larger water mains anyway.)
So, the fact that people in my neighborhood Argentina are spending more to get worse water service is a failure of coordination.
Of course, people in the US can still put water tanks in their houses if they want to. In earthquake areas, it's even recommended to have a store of potable water that isn't dependent on the water main. But, because they have succeeded in collectively building excellent municipal water systems, they generally don't need to.
The claim that plantain is making is that people actually choosing balcony solar panels is a symptom of a similar failure of coordination. To me that seems plausible but not necessarily correct, for reasons I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
You understood my point better than myself.
Thanks! I've been experiencing collective action failures acutely in recent years, so I'm glad my perspective was valuable.
People are entitled to do as they want, even if it's not profitable. I am just pointing out that if the economics of this add up, people have been seriously let down by their governments.
According to the article, the economics of balcony solar pay off in less than ~5 years. That's really pretty good compared to approximately any other point in the history of solar power. The payoff is small, but the investment is also small.
Now, sure: That quick payoff is only possible because electricity in Germany is very expensive, but there's reasons for that, too: Unlike some nations, Germany isn't sitting on a ton of high-quality fossil fuels.
They do have lots of lignite, and they do mine it and use it, but lignite is so low-energy that transportation becomes a serious financial burden: A train full of lignite can cost more to move around than it can produce, Joule per Joule. They've solved some of that problem by putting power plants right next to the mines (which is smart: build transmission lines instead of rail lines!), but their domestic fossil fuel resources are not a matter of policy. They're limited to whatever they have in the ground.
And for reasons that must make sense to someone, they've completely phased out their domestic nuclear power. (I'm not interested in discussing whether that's good or bad, but it remains fact.)
As far as I can tell, electrical production and distribution in Germany is comprised of a mixture of private entities (eg, companies with profit motive) and public (government-operated) entities -- similar to how it is where I am here in the States, and also where you are in Australia.
And quite clearly: The private entities are obviously interested in maximizing their potential profit. They are, after all, principally in the business of making money.
It's easy to say that it's a governmental failure that ultimately allows balcony solar to have such a quick return... but private enterprise is also involved, so they get to share the blame as well.
If it is profitable to do solar power at utility scale, in Germany, then: Why isn't more of it being done? If the answer is "just rent a few thousand hectares at a few hundred euros per year and cover it all with solar," then why does the private sector not cash in on all the easy money of utility-scale solar power?
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Germany is a pretty rich company. They can do both if they want to.
> Germany is a pretty rich company
You're way ahead of my predicted cyberpunk timeline.
The fact that balcony solar has such short payback periods really emphasizes the scale of the failure. Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Balcony solar is a whole lot like Uber, a way to side step onerous regulators, landlords that won't permit/invest in rooftop installations, planning approvals, transmission bottlenecks (eg. SuedLink [1] being forced to use underground cables) etc. The German government tolerates it because it keeps voters happy and helps reduce dependence on foreign gas.
At the end of the day though balcony solar is better than nothing, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
1. https://www.jacobs.com/projects/Germany-SuedLink
> Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.
https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/
Exactly! Wind expansion has been going great as-well.
I guess the more fundamental question is why these expansions haven't led to savings for energy consumers and why the economics of these micro-systems are so attractive.
Wind expansion isn't that great actually.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
https://www.wind-energie.de/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/pu...
Looking at who's responsible for policy now, I don't see things improving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
It may be actually better (in the welfare-economics sense) to build the micro-scale setups because the economies of scale may actually be inverted by cheap solar panels. See my analysis in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
I don't think so. This is well studied. The LCOE of rooftop solar is terrible compared to utility. I can't imagine what it looks like for balcony.
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
That page, although it was written only four months ago, is citing LCOE figures from 02021, when mainstream solar panels cost €0.25 per peak watt. Now they cost €0.100 per peak watt—see https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Power electronics and batteries are also enormously cheaper now. Also, note that the LCOE numbers it cites are for the US, where most of the costs stem from the US government's anti-renewable-energy policies such as punitive tariffs, policies that are not in effect in Germany.
That page also undermines its credibility by citing the hypothesis that the low cost at the time (which it acknowledges was already down to 36% of the number in 02012) was because the "massive wave of imports" was "subsidized by China’s central bank"; if that were the case, you'd expect that once China owned the world's solar market, the prices would have gone back up to reflect the true costs of manufacturing the panels, so that China's central bank could stop hemorrhaging money in these subsidies. Instead, the prices have continued to drop. They've dropped as much in the four years since that report as they had in the nine years before it. And, if you read the Department of Commerce filings justifying the "anti-dumping" tariffs, you will find that the arguments being made about "subsidies" are transparently ridiculous; the supposed "subsidies" include the fact that Chinese panel manufacturers pay their workers less than Turkish electronic assembly workers, and the fact that they have good public infrastructure to use.
It also incorrectly claims that solar panels need to be replaced after 25–30 years (that's just the warranty period) and that doing so would add US$20–30/MWh to Lazard's US$36/MWh LCOE, which is an obviously an arithmetic error that's off by orders of magnitude.
But its central claim, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility-scale solar, is actually true. The reason for this is mostly that rooftop solar requires much more labor and enjoys poorer economies of scale. You have to pay someone to design custom racking for your particular roof and a custom inverter and battery storage system for your house, pay someone to climb up on your roof and possibly die, pay for permitting and inspection, etc. You can find a more detailed breakdown of "turnkey installed cost" in SEIA's Solar Market Insight Report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight....
However, all of these factors are completely the other way around for balcony power plants. You don't climb on the roof; you walk out onto the balcony. You don't design custom racking; you buy an off-the-shelf retail product. The same thing for battery storage, if you buy a system with battery backup. Instead of spending thousands of dollars, you just hang the solar panel off your balcony like a potted plant and plug the plug into the outlet. The engineering is being done at the factory for a mass-market product, not for your house or for a single utility-scale solar farm. So you're spending less in engineering and permitting and construction costs than a utility-scale solar farm would, not more.
There is one way in which balcony power plants are worse than rooftop solar: they are at terrible angles, so they don't get much sun. But that just means you get less power, maybe two or three times less than you'd get in an optimally-designed utility-scale plant. That matters much less now that solar modules are so cheap.
That seem to be the conclusion when you start with the assumption "vertical scaling is always the best option". When you don't start with that assumption, maybe you reach a different conclusion.
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
Because there is always a good amount of loss in transmissions.
For solar, the best thing for grid and consumers is to have it very very close to consumption.
Ideally, a home with a good capacity battery, coupled with solar panels, and a smart grid connected controller that charges the batteries based on grid conditions of demand and supply, would be a great system. Costly, but good for the grid.
The transmission losses are trivial. 5-10% max. It makes no sense to isolate batteries behind meters. Sharing batteries on a neighborhood or suburban level would make far more sense. We are meant to be a society, not libertarians living in proximity.
That is so wrong, both your take about transmission losses and the expectations that there is enough land in a 'neighborhood' to do that.
Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
It is completely rational to install one of these. The paypack times are just a few years, depending on how sunny the balcony is.
Well not if you value the time you put into the project, that can easily double or triple the payback time.
It takes literally two hours to install and plug it in if you have two left hands like me.
Plus the time getting the material, driving to the hardware store another time to get something you forgot, doing the registration, plus the time needed for planning/ calculation of economical feasibility/ decision making. Even at a very moderate 50 € per hour rate (for the typical Gamer) the material cost is the smallest part of the project. Treat it as a hobby, but don’t tell me it is an investment.
You get everything you need shipped from Amazon. You open the box and install it. These things are designed to be set up by amateurs. It’s half a dozen screws per panel. To hardest part is lifting the panels outside the balcony.
As with many things, the hardware store is probably going to be rather expensive and transport is a hassle (most people do not have a car with enough space to transport solar panels). So you order this stuff from specialized companies who will deliver it to your doorstep in one more or less convenient shipment. Same for pretty much any bigger, more expensive things needed when building or extending a house. Hardware stores are convenient if you quickly need something but that's mostly it, IMO.
Founder, CEO, serial entrepreneurs, who have pivoted from micro-services to blockchain to ai bill their time out to themselves at $100,000 per hour. ROI - its all in the grindset.
I think you are exactly correct. As the state fails, it feels good to take some personal control.
'Industrial scale' projects are also happening and they are quite easy to find on Google Maps, for instance around Berlin there are some pretty big areas covered in solar panels:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6242449,14.2273341,7219m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6993717,14.2185555,3756m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6476471,13.6945097,2856m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.0173558,13.5345601,4387m/dat...
Or this one near Leipzig in a former lignite mining area:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1680221,12.4092084,4502m/dat...
(interestingly most of those seem to be located in former East Germany - probably because land ownership isn't fragmented as much as in former West Germany due to the forced farmland sequestration after WW2).
...and smaller solar fields exist nearly everywhere (even in the back of the woods where I was born: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.5463975,12.9038206,658m/data...)
E.g. why not build renewables at all possible scales?
The cost of solar power is close to independent of scale, so the benefit of doing those industrial scale plants is often smaller than the one for repurposing some bit of underused land.
There's nothing absurd about it.
It's 10x more expensive. https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
This is exactly right. Germany has failed to provide low cost electricity at scale and has now incentivised placing panels everywhere, even on those beautiful balconies we once invested in. It is not surprising that you are being downvoted by the solar stasi.
It's mainly corruption, ignorance and incompetence. Germany has a strong fossil-lobby, because of industries and ancient home-tech. Around 15 Years ago, Germany had a strong solar-industry too, until the government basically buried it and sold it out to China, because of "failures" happening. Till today, there are forces trying to feed on nuclear-power and cheap Russian gas, while simultaneously sabotaging all renewables and electrification. It's so bad, they are willing to destroy whole industries for this BS.
Solar power is fundamentally different from traditional power plants because it's modular. Since the panel is the basic unit, a network of rooftop systems is as effective as a single large installation. A rooftop installation makes perfect sense.
Paying contractors to climb on rooftops one at a time and cable up a million distinct houses is clearly not comparable to an industrial installation. Similarly the generation from a balcony on a bad angle, and from walking around Germany, typically shaded, makes no sense.
So by bringing up shading and suboptimal angle you're already admitting that for an unshaded balcony these things make sense? The overhead of hanging one of these over the rail of your balcony is pretty minimal, compared to industrial scale installations. There is plenty of overhead with finance, management, billing, land use, and utility profits. That's why it makes sense.
You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Power consumption in the EU has flatlined and is even falling. New HV transmission lines are not needed - put the solar farms next to some of the shut down nuclear plants (as we now do with big batteries in Australia and decrepit coal plants).
For context, a hectare (10000 m²) directly facing the sun receives 10 megawatts of sunlight at 1kW/m². The city of Kiel is at 54°19' north, so at the equinox a hectare near it receives about cos(54°19') ≈ 58% of that: 5.8 megawatts. If you were to cover the whole field with horizontal solar panels with a mainstream 22% efficiency, the peak electrical power generated that day would be 1.28 megawatts. But you'd need 2.20 peak megawatts of solar modules to do it, because the modules are rated based on directly facing the sun and getting 1kW/m² of sunlight, which they could never do in this situation. According to the prices on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... those modules are currently 0.100€/Wp, so that's 280 kiloeuros of solar panels. This is about an order of magnitude more expensive than the land under them.
The average produced would only be on the order of 100–200kW, because Germany's capacity factor is for shit. Kiel is in an especially terrible place, with only about 2.7kWh/m² per day on average, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
In real life people tilt the panels in a solar farm toward the sun and leave space between rows of panels so they don't shade each other even in the winter. That is because, even at today's historically record low prices, the panels cost enormously more than the land they're sitting on, so it makes sense to economize a bit on panels even at the cost of needing more land.
>A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent
Acquiring land-use rights, permitting, environmental reviews, and zoning changes for an industrial power plant costs far more than the raw rent.
>Power consumption in the EU has flatlined
This is dangerously short-sighted, the mass adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps will place enormous new demands on the grid.
> put the solar farms next to some of the shut down nuclear plants
Solar is much more land demanding than what the decommissioned sites of nuclear power plants can offer.
>Acquiring land-use rights, permitting, environmental reviews, and zoning changes for an industrial power plant costs far more than the raw rent.
So the argument against my claim that the government and market has failed if balcony solar is cost effective, is that the government is the problem?
This isn't a government failure. The government is correctly pricing the true cost of industrial land use: the loss of farmland and natural space.
Rooftop solar is cost-effective because it cleverly avoids that cost by using land that's already developed. It's not winning because of bureaucracy, but because it's using a limited resource in a smarter way.
No, land is not a significant cost, not even in Germany. You're in completely the wrong order of magnitude.
You don’t want PV to crowd out local food production though, land is generally overused in Germany and the pressure is rising.
That could start happening if Germany's electrical energy consumption were to grow 100× or so, yeah. That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but no, cheaper forms of energy tend to lead to more energy usage, and solar energy is cheaper, so we might see a lot more energy usage. But we're talking about problems we'll have in 20 years after we've solved global warming.
It happens already. Lease for green land (probably wrong terminus) and arable land went up by more than 30% in ten years [1]. PV is arguably a very small factor of influence yet. But the pressure is real.
[1] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/landwirtschaft/landwirtschaftl...
That page doesn't say anything about PV. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... says that 17 million hectares are used for agriculture in Germany, 48000 hectares are used for golf courses, and (as of 02021) 32000 hectares were used for photovoltaics, which would be 0.2% of the agricultural area. I'm having a hard time finding current figures, but I doubt photovoltaics are more than 2% of the agricultural area yet. I don't think that's why land prices have risen 30%.
Thanks for looking up the numbers, and it wasn’t my intention to exaggerate the influence of PV. I just wanted to point out there is a lot of pressure and it may be a sensible policy to use up rooftops first instead of arable land (even though the influence of PV on land lease rates might be negligible today).
That will never happen in Germany.
Most people in Germany don't live big and don't have any intentions of doing so. No AC and people have real concerns about the environment and our impact on it.
Obviously it won't happen anywhere from air conditioning. But, for example, atmospheric carbon capture (putting the CO₂ back in the ground) could use a lot of energy.
Most likely, though, it will be things we can't even imagine today.
Imagine that you're in 01980 trying to predict how people will use personal computers in 02000. Would you predict the World-Wide Web, Usenet erotica newsgroups, virtual reality, banner ads, Geocities, MUDs, and spam?
Or, in 01903 trying to predict how people will use flying machines or automobiles in 01923. Would you predict metal airplanes, women getting pilots' licenses, dogfights between forward-firing fighter planes, transatlantic airline flights, strategic bombing from the air, helium airships, and French airmail service to Morocco? Or, would you predict Henry Ford would be making two million Fords a year?
Things change. The last time we had a new cheaper source of energy like this was 250 years ago.
Wise of you to be using 5-digit years. Really preempts the "but what about 8000 years from now" questions.
No regard for aesthetics of buildings for pitiful power generation. The German state has completely failed to provide users with cheap electricity and it continues to miss-step with incentivising this nonsense. Shame on them.
I'm in Germany and keep seeing these, I always wonder what a 400w poorly oriented panel getting like 3 hours of sun a day is good for. If they weren't basically free thanks to tax reduction and other tricks I assume no one would get them
Article cites manufacturers as saying that
> installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give savings of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill, but there are lots of variables that come with that claim. It depends on which direction the balcony faces and whether the panels are shaded part of the day.
My german electricity bill is around 1200 euros a year. Sign me up for a one-time purchase of 426€ to save ~360€ every year if I had optimal conditions -- call it 50% effective and it's still earned back in under 3 years. The thing lasts, what, a decade? More?
(Price taken from https://kleineskraftwerk.de/products/kleines-kraftwerk-gitte... for 450W, first one I could find from some review site.)
Edit: figure corrected for not using the tax rebate that it apparently advertised with
Yeah so depends on your cost per kWh, and usage time versus production time. My 800W of balcony panels can theoretically produce 3-4 kWh per day (they peak at about 550w of actual production), but they generally produce a lot less than that. This is because my usage during production time is both less than that and also very spiky (my power usage is often 0w or 100-200w base load, with 2kw spikes as the compressor in the refrigerator kicks on, or some other device kicks on). So the savings for me isn't 3 years payoff, it's probably more like 6. But yes, these panels will product for 25-30 years. So yeah, they can pay for themselves very quickly depending on your usage patterns.
I'm in the US, and over here we also have some other complicating factors (here we have 2 sets of breakers that are 180 degrees out of phase and so the solar panels can only feed into one half of the breakers without extra complications. I only sort of understand this, someone else can explain better), so solar panels plugged into the balcony that don't backfeed straight to the grid can only cover a subset of the usage. In Germany you have 240v power so I would assume you would hit payoff very quickly.
Have to also consider the opportunity cost of that upfront cash. Those numbers sound worth anyway, but the 5 year break-even mentioned in the article is more questionable, and that's with subsidies.
A 5-year breakeven for a durable good is a 20% annual return on investment, which is very good indeed.
There are very few subsidies. Some local ones, nothing else. Not calculating a vat tax is not a subsidy.
And they dont matter. This is strictly worth it in every scenario when energy production is not already solar.
(I'm too late and can't edit anymore, but I just noticed upon re-rereading that it says "couple of 300W panels" in the quote and not just "a 300W panel". My math (though done with a 450W panel for an example sales price) is likely off in the wrong direction. Sorry about that.)
"Poorly oriented panel" can equally well be described as "generates most of its power in the evening, when you have gotten home from work and want to use electricity".
It's better to get power at a useful time, even if that means the panel only generates half as much as it could, because storage costs far more than panels.
The tax-credit (there are no other "tricks") just shortens the pay-off time of 3-5 years by 19%, that's all!
A 400W half decently oriented panel (i.e. south facing balcony, 60 degree angle) is sufficient to run your AC to cool your 50sqrm apartment during summer for free.
In the summer the optimal angle where I live (35.5º S) is 12º. Panels lying flat on the lawn are losing only 2% from that. Just now, near the equinox, panels lying flat on the lawn lose around 18% at noon.
I'll find a way to prop them up at 50º for winter when the time comes for that (April or May), though that's for sunny conditions. In our typical overcast in winter flat on the ground is probably still fine to catch the most diffuse light. I'll experiment when the time comes.
Right. I mentioned the suboptimal 60 degrees because many people hang it from the balcony (90 degrees) and the tilt it a bit, but usually not too much. From what I've seen 60 degrees seems like a good average number.
Yeah, in northern Germany vertical and 60º are pretty much equally good/bad in winter (75º would be ideal), but 60º will be getting 70% more power in summer than vertical, and is near ideal in spring/autumn.
That's mostly true, but you're mistaken about the reason they're basically free: it's because the costs of manufacturing them have been dropping dramatically for 20 years, thanks to (in large part Chinese) manufacturing innovations, not because of things like tax reduction.
It's mainly virtue signaling, which has been very important in Germany. People are willing to spend a lot of money for this.
It's 800 watts or about 570 KWh per year in berlin, assuming balcony points directly south. At 0.2 euro, that's about 114 euros per year.
Percent-wise I'd guess it's less than 10% of yearly total?
Overall it's OK payback, but mostly penny pinching in grand scheme of things.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=48.886392,9.470215,6&s=5...
Solar is cheap, non-peak-efficiency installs get to be the priority once you get the first 40% or so of production in solar.
This kind of thing just knocks the edges off of production and transmission costs. You get to the point where you're not trying to squeeze peak efficiency any more and you're just trying to fill in spaces wherever works reasonably well.
Maybe these can pull 700 watts on a sunny day? And you’d need a battery to store it. Would likely make 50 cents a day or less in electricity, on perfect days. The cost for a battery, panels, and install would be ~1000 euro (or more if it’s a bureaucratic mess).
I just did some modelling with the help of claude (which can write 200LOC+ numpy code faster than I can)
300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.
I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.
But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.
Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
I built one in Utah which is the only part of the US where it's currently legal, so I can give you the numbers.
- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ each for $670 total
- 1x EcoFlow Stream Microinverter for $257.
- Various cables, MC4 crimping kit, etc.. about $150
Grand total was $1077, I set them in direct sun on my patio and have generated 6-8kWh per day. At Utah energy prices (0.12 where I live), they will pay off in about 4 years. Somewhere like California with 4x the energy prices as here, it would probably pay for itself in <1 year.
That's fantastic! What's the microinverter's peak capacity?
My 1kW southern facing setup produces a little less than three kWh a day, about 1000kWh a year. A have a battery too so I manage to use most of that energy myself.
16–20% yearly return on investment is a hell of a lot better than the stock market.
They don't use a battery; they just supplement your apartment so you use less grid.
I use a battery -- 6kWh, 3600W inverter, with 6x 440W panels -- and don't feed power into the house wiring, but simply power the appliances in the same room as the equipment: Starlink, Mac Mini with 32" monitor, 16" i9-13900HX laptop, half a dozen small SBCs (5-15W each), fridge, espresso machine, air fryer, microwave, toaster, kettle, 4kW (output, 900W electricity) portable air conditioner, dehumidifier (250W). some LED lighting.
At the moment (spring) in half-decent weather all the above stuff is 100% off-grid. I'm still using grid power for hot water heating, dish washer, clothes washer -- all of which I do for free in my daily "Free Hour of Power" -- and for intermittent incidentals such as the water pump (e.g. runs for 15 seconds when I flush the toilet) and lighting in usually non-occupied rooms such as toilet, bathroom, and bedroom -- which together means I'm paying around 10c-20c per day over and above the fixed daily charge.
Ensuring no one buys expensive thermal power when the grid is flooded with zero marginal costs renewables and near zero marginal cost storage.
Rephrasing that to be more understandable because I didn't get this as it was: "Making sure no one buys expensive electricity from coal or gas plants when the grid is full of cheap renewable energy and almost-free stored energy."
I'm frankly still not sure what you're trying to say even if I understand the sentence now, e.g.: what free storage?! Isn't germany's projected storage capacity by 2050 somewhere between negligible and tiny?
Storage isn’t free.
But when you have it the marginal cost of an extra cycle is very low.
Germany’s battery storage-related grid connection requests swell beyond 500 GW
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/01/germanys-battery-storage...
That's like saying the cost of taking an additional bite from your food is very low once you have already bought it, if I'm understanding the continued use of marginal correctly in context?
When I buy food, the marginal cost of a bite from the food is very close to the average cost of a bite, because if I eat 5% more food this week, I have to buy 5% more food next week.
Contrast this with the case of listening to music on my stereo: if I listen to 5% more music on the stereo, I don't have to buy 5% more music, and I don't have to replace the stereo 5% sooner. The marginal cost is near zero: just the small amount of electricity the stereo uses, plus a tiny amount of wear and tear. Maybe I only listen to music three hours a week and the stereo cost me $313 and lasts for 20 years, so the average cost per hour is $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.
Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller.
These storage systems are generally warrantied as 5000-10000 cycles with 85% capacity remaining in 20 years time.
Guaranteed money today is better than saving a few cycles to maybe make money in 20 years time. Now also factor in discounting the risk etc. and the calculation is given.
But the business case is of course calculated on having the entire construction cost be amortized with profit over a chosen period. With some days making more money than other.
What batteries do are extending the time renewables flood the grid with cheap electricity and thus force nuclear reactors to throttle down, gas peakers to shut down etc.
Or these thermal plants can bid negative ensuring they don’t have to turn off while hurrying on their own demise.
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason
But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.
Yes. Phasing out coal is a multi step process.
The next step is coal plants forced to become peakers thermally cycling daily because they are loosing too much.
As seen in for example Australia:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
The next step is being a reserve plant only activated seasonally.
Finally rounding off with purely being a reserve plant and then decommissioning when it costs too much to even keep it runnable.
And instead they make you a bunch of money a bog standard autumn day because the French and Swedish nuclear power decided to crap out.
Another possibility is retrofitting the coal plant with a thermal battery.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
> 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant.
See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid):
https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-stor...
While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
But that's not a problem they're trying to solve, or one they need to solve.
As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine.
But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
No, their market is not dependent on it. Generation of power from stored thermal energy is significantly different from directly using solar: it is completely dispatchable. As such, it serves a role even in a situation where most solar energy (or most solar + wind) is used directly. It enables solar to be used in places, like at high latitudes, where it is otherwise strongly disadvantaged by seasonality (something batteries cannot fix).
Long term storage of this kind reduces the overall cost of providing steady solar/wind output in Europe by half.
They are also addressing markets where the need is for heat. If you are going to make heat from the solar energy, storing it as heat is much cheaper than storing it beforehand as electrical energy and then converting it to heat later.
Possibly one of the worst possible investment choices From a collective point of view when it comes to electricity.
One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
Can you explain why it is a bad investment? These 800W of solar pay for themselves within 3 years usually.
It costs the state nothing to remove regulations preventing the installations and people who buy one see ROI of 15-20%. It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
> It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
On the side of the grid, balcony solar means grid maintenance is supported by less revenue (your utility bill pays for the grid, balcony solar expenses don't).
On the side of the producer, it means manageable production means are only amortized when balcony solar isn't producing (this isn't a small factor in a grid where electricity costs frequently reach zero). That increases the cost of electricity when the sun doesn't shine. Another aspect of this is that
These factors mean that balcony solar would be unprofitable if power was metered depending on real whole-system costs (e.g. market prices and/or a subscription for the grid). That it is profitable for some actors now just means that the cost system isn't aligned with the billing system. This isn't bad per se (people prefer to have predictable, stable energy costs), but can't be sustained in a system where this imbalance can be arbitraged.
My bill includes a fixed cost part that is supposed to pay for grid maintenance iirc.
> One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
Easy: The most expensive energy prices in the world.
The infrastructure investments needed to handle renewables are massive and are effectively passed down the consumer, who to be fair is ideologically on board with this.
thus the downvotes on your post (predictably since Berlin timezone coming live) and this balcony thingy as a crumbs-off-the-table for the non-roof-havers
It's fitting that solar installations are also very popular in third world countries where the government can't provide reliable / affordable power to their citizens. Godspeed, Germany.
Cellphones are popular there too, does that make them a bad idea?