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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Germany should have about 70GW of PV installed right now [citation needed] - I really wonder where the remaining 30 GW went. Conditions don't get much better than this weekend. So how is the missing capacity explained? Turned off? Facing east/west?

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> Germany should have about 70GW of PV installed right now [citation needed]

See [0] for a table of the installed peak power and it was at 66-67GW at the end of 2022. We're half a year into 2023 already, so 70GW sounds pretty reasonable.

> I really wonder where the remaining 30 GW went.

Some capacity is installed already but not connected to the grid yet. This seems to happen disturbingly often but hopefully doesn't explain a difference of 30GW, though.

[0] (de) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaik_in_Deutschland#En...

I am not sure but perhaps Germany had some baseload power, perhaps 30 GW as per your calculation. Because baseload power is not turned on and off easily, they let it run even if they could turn off and have enough power. I don't know.

Some of that is lost due to regulatory 70% limits during peak times.

Also the rated capacity is for some synthetic sun conditions. I have no idea what's the conversion factor between ideal sun in Germany and the PV rating sun.

Then there is the fact that many installations are explicitly using small converters, not all installations face the same way (east-west setups are a big thing for farms and other large scale setups). I live right next to Germany and getting 80% of your installed capacity is considered optimal.

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