Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
grist.org
grist.org
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.
1. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/habeck-gastdoz...
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...
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.
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?)
* There were multiple tax reductions and I think some are in the talks now. Those were independent (and before) the nuclear shutdown.
* Probably. Nuclear should have been shutdown after gas, coal etc. I am with you on that. But the ship had already sailed long ago, before the last three plants were shut down.
[1] https://www.iwh-halle.de/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/...
It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
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.
Solar + battery storage on the other hand is super fast and easy to build, costs virtually nothing and leaves no toxic waste which can’t be recycled.
Nuclear fuel is also mostly only available from Russia, which no one wants as a trade partner.
They had > 95.4% unit capability factor in 2022 per https://pris.iaea.org/pris/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsUnitCapab... . It doesn't sound like they were being run into the ground, rather things were operating very efficiently.
> Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc... stated LCOE "associated with the long-term operation of a nuclear power plant generally falls in the range US$ 30-40 per MWh, for typical refurbishment costs for Light Water Reactors and a lifetime extension of 20 years".
That is not the issue. Let me give you a example. Belgium decided to extend the life on several nuclear reactors, that originally had plans for decommissioning.
So they started to do actual deep maintenance for the extended life. Then they ran into issues of cracks in the concrete, issues with cracks in metal storage tanks, and a whole lot of other issues.
Reactors down for a long periode for the repairs, AND a ton of extra costs. These costs of those repairs, i can not find them no matter where i look. Its interesting how hidden those are.
For the 2025 extension, the initial estimated 1.5 billion for the life extension. And still the whole issue about the reactors issues their full fix cost price is unknown. In other words, they did a patch job and for the next extension, they need to do a major maintenance / repair.
The extension of the German reactors was estimated at 3B+ if i remember correctly. And that does not include if any issues are found.
That is the problem... This type of deferred maintenance start to stack up over time, when you have a phase out time for reactors. So issues becomes a big black money hole when you already committed to the extension.
https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german... is for restarting the German reactors, with buckets of < 1B EUR and < 3B EUR for quicker restarts.
Same goes for alot of industry, there also were industrial processes that BASF et al. were running that just required LNG as a reagant.
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.
Anti-nuclear lobbying by German foundations in France and Poland https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00217...
Edit: Actually should be plural - Chancellors. Merkel, big cog in NordStreams, went on some podcast last week to blame Poland for the war in Ukraine. See if only Poles didnt object so much she would placate putin with even more money.
Recent governments merely organized a shutdown that was effectively decided in the last century at the end of the cold war. The importance of Merkel, Fukushima etc. in these discussions are completely overrated imo.
As an aside Germany got fuel for nuclear reactors from Russia.
Even from an environmental standpoint, France is doing much better than Germany and that is thanks to nuclear.
Also, by closing operating power plants, Germany weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions and effect on the water temperature in rivers (every summer more and more plants need to shut down because of this), etc. Even if this would be done right, there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance. In the end I would say it is always a bad idea to rely on only one technology to a large degree. Only a well done mix makes you resiliant.
I agree on this point, me not being anti-Nuclear doesn't mean I am anti-wind or solar. Every country has different circumstances, I live in a landlocked country with mild mountains, temperate climate and modest rivers. In our case nuclear energy seems like the most reliable and scalable option. For countries with huge coastline off-shore wind absolutely makes sense, simialrly with solar.
> Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions.
I think this point is overestimated. Based on a brief search, studies show nuclear carbon intensity around 6-12g, and the building emissions just around 13% of total lifetime emissions [1].
> there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance.
Valid point but the 2022 French nuclear "disaster" hasn't repeated at that scale so far. In recent years France is a net exporter to Germany. I can imagine that as with many problems in renewables having technical solutions the water temperature problem is also solvable technically.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/article...
Looking at Denmark, their export and imports have little correlation to neighboring countries demand or supply. They will try exporting if the wind farms produce excess energy, and they will try importing energy when demand exceed supply. Neighboring countries demand will mostly only have impact on export price.
Ironically that was France which needed to shut down a lot of its nuclear reactors in 2022 and 2023 due to repairs. So according to your own logic France "weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most."
Here in Switzerland the reason given for the "energy crisis" was also mostly France as Switzerland usually imports a lot of energy from France.
France's total nuclear generation was ~ 361.7 TWh in 2024. It is expected to be even above that in 2025.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
France is currently the nation that exports the MAXIMUM electricity in Europe.
In 2011 ~25% of Germany's electricity came from their nuclear reactors [1]. Germany closed their last nuclear reactor in 2023.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/noland1/#:~:tex...
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.
Power line capacity is designed around the maximum power that must be delivered. Solar power by itself reduces the mean, and possibly the minimum as well, but never the maximum.
That's why I think we should end up with:
- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating
- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating
- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now
I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines
One interpretation is that solar adds variability to the generation side of the equation and managing that variability is currently a question without a clear answer.
Concentration of power production is just one of the problems that renewables / distributed power generation systems solves.
You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.
The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.
Both forms of generation want to be paired with something dispatchable, either gas turbines or energy storage. A mix of renewables and nuclear is a mix that is weaker than the sum of its parts, not stronger.
I‘m sorry but this is just absolute nonsense.
Nuclear energy is the most dense energy type humanity ever produced. To put it in one line with coal and oil is not serious. Not to mention it’s far less hazardous to human health, again compared to fossil fuels. Here is a basic comparison:
> With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235. Related to one kilogram, uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal.
https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/fuel-comparison/
edit: typo
I live in a part of Canada with mostly nuclear energy and i am thankful that my electricity rates are low. This helps me reduce emissions via heat pumps and EVs. I don't need solar panels and most people do not either.
You are correct, the future is mostly renewable energy where feasible, with a combination of nuclear and hydro.
It’s also massive cherry-picking to just look at refined fuel. For example, H how many tonnes of ore do you need to mine and process to produce that 1kg of uranium (at least 2.5 tonnes, that is 2500 kg from one random source from a quick google).
But to use your metric, I did work out and find it interesting that the solar panels on my roof, per kg of silicon have produced over 1,400 kWh of electricity (multiply your figures by 0.3 to take into account efficiency from kWh of heat to compare) so far. I estimate almost 28 kg of silicon in my whole array, which has generated over 38 MWh so far, and I expect they will generate at least three times that over their life.
So 4000-5000 kWh(e) per kg of silicon sure comes in a hell of a lot of better than the 2.4 odd for coal or 4 for mineral oil (assuming your figures are correct).
Everyone. If you don’t, then you need to scale. Case in point with renewables. It’s also not cherry-picking, but a well-known fact in physics. Do yourself a favor and look at the source link I posted above.
The thing about blowing up things I will just skip, because it’s not serious. If things go that far, there will be far greater problems than just that. Besides, if that’s your worry why don’t use SMRs then? Russia does.
To your 4000-5000 kWh point, you are not burning silicon here, are you? And a PV is not energy fuel, it’s a device composed of many different materials. I don’t understand your point and I can’t say more than that - my reply to GP was about fossil fuels and nuclear anyway. Not sure why you decided to jump into renewables here.
See Hualong One nuclear project that's operating at ~90% capacity and is ~1/3 of the price of solar, and 2/3 price of wind when comparing the same operation % capacity and taking into consideration the max life length of each technology.
Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
People barely use A/C in France by the way.
> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy
Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.
Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.
And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.
The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.
Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.
0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...
"Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe." There are certainly different opinions on that. Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend.
Only 13% of gas is actually used for electricity ("Stromversorgung"): https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz... most of it was used as cheap energy source for chemical plants and other industry.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
That statement is plain wrong: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times.
You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.
The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
It’s far from obvious to me.
There are literally no exemple of one ever running and some of the technological challenges are still open questions at the moment.
I generally think proponents of renewables are overselling the idea and significantly minimising the challenges they pose at scale. They definitely have a place in the energy mix but I don’t personally believe they are the solution.
In December 2021, South Australia set a new record for renewable energy generation and resilience, after running entirely on renewable energy for 6.5 consecutive days.
In 2022, it was stated that South Australia could soon be powered by only renewable energy.
70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources.
This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027.
https://h2-global.org/the-h2global-instrument/
And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest. But H2 is only viable once renewable production exceeds demands during long stretches of time. Otherwise it is always better to use the energy directly or use short term storage (batteries) which are also growing exponentially: https://battery-charts.de/battery-charts/
Sorry, you are all emotion and provide wrong statements. What I wrote directly contradicted your statements and proved them wrong, but now you say they are missing the point? Reducing fossil fuel consumption by 50% within 10 years is an achievement. There are always things that could be done in a better way. But let's be real here.
And yes Germany imports electricity from France: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
That is kind of the point of having an integrated grid.
But 19TWh. While producing 470TWh. 4%. That is not ... a lot. And in 2022 Germany exported 5.5TWh and had to restart coal plants when the French nuclear plants were in trouble. So what? That what a grid is for.
If you look at who is pushing H2, you will see that it’s mostly fossil fuel companies who want to prop up gas because as you rightfully pointed out "And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest."
> So what? That what a grid is for.
It’s going to be hard to reach net zero while burning coal and if the actual solution is importing nuclear energy from somewhere else while pretending it doesn’t happen, it would be simpler to just straight up go for nuclear.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2]
> How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this.
Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage.
Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators.
> At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage.
We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy.
> Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6]
> With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business.
[1] https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...
[2] https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor...
[4] https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re...
[5] https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/
[6] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/rus...
You should look at CO2 / kWh in Germany vs. France
Also, what lessons learned in Iceland, Norway or Albania should we apply in central Europe? We don't have their geothermal and hydro potential (all your examples are not solar+wind but hydro primarily).
Norway has lots of hydropower and a a small population.
Not super familiar with Albania but they seem to be in the same situation as Norway.
France already implemented hydropower wherever it was possible years ago, so that's not an option.
Also France seems to have pretty much the same CO2 / kWh than Norway.
Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 per kWh. Can anyone confirm?
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-industrial-power-...
Yes, it is in the ballpark of $0.08/kWh. It varies a little bit across regions. Also in some places the price is only half during the night. But as you consume more power, you may see the price rise to $0.12/kWh.
In 2024, cost of renewable + storage was 0.52-0.88 CNY/kWh($0.08-$0.12). Advancement in storage is expected to drive that cost down by more than 50%.
The consumer price is about 0.3 €/kwh currently, depending on the deals you are getting. The difference between wholesale and consumer price is made up of transmission costs, taxes and markups of various middlemen.
Shutting down nuclear power had 0 impact on electricity prices, as wholesale prices are set by the most expensive producer needed to satisfy demand. That is usually a natural gas turbine. All producers get paid the rate that this marginal producer demands.
The irony is, at this point even many environmentalists don't oppose Nuclear anymore. But there's still the lack of a coherent plan. Where should the fuel come from? How is EOL of a power plant handled? How is it paid? The answers changed a lot in the last decades.
Apart from this the last 5 years were a PR disaster for the Greens. Protesters (Last Generation) have been connected to them although the LG is even protesting against the Greens. When there were these massive floods the Greens actually lost votes instead of gaining those.
It really just doesn't seem in good faith. It's been going on for a decade at least. Every win, every positive story, every bit of evidence that just maybe this part of the climate puzzle is actually being solved[1] gets met not with celebration, but with indignant tut-tutting that it was done with boring stuff and not Nerd Friendly power.
When does it stop?
[1] Doesn't take too much Googling to find coverage claiming that ~90% of new electricity generation capacity globally is renewable. This problem is solved folks. It's time to start looking at the higher hanging fruit.
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).
And yet I agree with you. Economically, he disappointed through and through. Same for climate change, which ironically is at the heart of the Green party he belongs to. For example, to more conservative voters, he's will mostly remembered as the politician who wanted to bring a central planning approach into their homes, forcing everyone to install costly heat pumps, with their own money, without much regard to their specific household situation. All to achieve no effective carbon emission reduction.
But to his left-green electorate, he remains sacrosanct, his critics are dismissed, often as far-right.
The very same pipeline he helped to cover that their own ally destroyed
Also what the hell is your argumentation? "Actually the people who voted him, liked him" no shit. The very same people are more in favor of war than the average Nazi back in the 30s
But being in the opposition must be a fun thing since you can say the most beautiful sounding things and never have to actually deliver anything.
AfD even goes a step beyond raw stupidity because they want to destroy all the wind turbines. So not just stop the ones already delivering energy, but destroy them. They just don't realize that we need every bit of energy we can get. They have some donating friends which are against wind turbines, because of the looks.
It was close to funny how Elon Musk held back his disagreement with the AfD regarding their wish to destroy the wind turbines.
I'd go so far as to say that the only reason why Germany has the political and societal problems it has now are only due to the constrain in energy.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
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.
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.
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.
Easy.
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).
Such a proposal can be adopted much more easily if the population is rather small and homogenous.
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.
For example, there is a super interesting agri PV installation in the Hallertau, where they grow most of the hops for beer. The farmer built and payed it himself and its a commercial trial instead of a public testrun.
He lost about 20 percent of the hop compared to the non-pv areas; however, the money from the solar panels easily covered that and made a profit. In addition, he used about 30 to 40 percent less water with no impact on the quality of the hop, which is one of the biggest issues in that area, as it runs out of water in summer.
The Hallertau would be ideal for generating large quantities of power; however, due to not having a modern power grid, he is unable deliver more power to the grid. (article in German here: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/pilotprojekt-hat-erfolg...)
you would think that this is a simpel fix, and it would be in the political interest to decentralzie the powergrid and create local storage solution (or at least in the local power companies interest), but it seems like nothing is moving forward for about a decade now.
Personally, i think agri pv has a huge potential as enables the farmers to have additional income while keeping the field open for farming. Its also an easier sell than wind or hydro (especially because you have the farmers on your side, and with them their lobby), but it needs grid upgrades and storage capacities. It baffles my mind that our politicans are willing to throw millions at nuclear, but everything besides that needs to have a strict business plan or it is not even tried.
You can see a nice live graph here. Wind isn't blowing at the moment, so the fossil fuel co-generation plants had to kick in.
But also because it's wrong! There's one outlier bad data point, in 2020, and they draw a line straight through it. Take that one year out and it looks awfully flat to me.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Security will make this never as simple as balcony plug and play but there is a lot of room for improvement.
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.
Balcony solar production means Germans don't buy solar from their utility when utility costs are low, and they do want to buy some when utility costs are high.
Unsurprisingly, fixed contract prices are bound to be an average of electricity price at different times. With balcony solar, the times where it costs the least will be weighted less in the average, so contract price is bound to go up.
> Germany’s solar industry calls for 100 GWh 2030 grid battery target
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-industry...
> German battery storage hits 22.1 GWh in [2025]H1
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r...
> PV curtailment jumps 97% in Germany in 2024
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/03/pv-curtailment-jumps-...
> By the end of the first half of 2025, Germany’s official registry of energy installations recorded nearly two million battery storage systems in operation. This figure, now unofficially but safely surpassed into July , includes a gross power capacity of 14.535 gigawatts (GW) and a usable storage capacity of nearly 22.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh).
> Photovoltaic home storage systems constitute the majority of these installations, with 1.967 million small battery storage units (up to 20 kilowatts) accounting for 11.5 GW of gross power and almost 18.3 GWh of usable capacity.
> Small photovoltaic home storage units made up the bulk of new additions, with 251,948 systems providing 1.34 GW and almost 2.7 GWh. In the medium segment, 2,418 new systems added 117.7 MW of power and 160 MWh of capacity.
> The expansion of battery storage is driven by increasing demand, highlighted by 389 hours of negative wholesale electricity prices in the first half of the year. Germany has also significantly expanded its solar power generation, with approximately 107.4 GW of photovoltaic capacity installed and over 7 GW added in the first six months of 2025.
The future of electrification is distributed, broadly speaking. Distributed assets can be orchestrated to optimize for both cost and grid stability ("VPP" aka virtual power plants). Get generation and storage as close to the load as you can.
I’m in a tight valley where it snows a ton
Also got an interest free loan from the gov to cover the outlay.
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.
We got the full package and started the deindustrializion instead.
Seems like a good deal :)
What would the opposite have looked like?
Considering Germany is still getting 30% of the electricity from the fossil fuels[1], I wonder how that would be a net negative for the environment.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
These are millions of systems imported from China, they are inefficient (because they are small and often installed in poor conditions), useful life is uncertain, they will have to be disposed of afterwards.
So is this whole chain better than using the grid? I don't know but I can't assume anything just because "it's solar".
I’ve searched but the deluge of crappy systems that aren’t what you mean is overwhelming results.
"SUNNIVA 920 W Balcony Power Station BIFAZIAL Full Black Complete Socket TSUN 800 W Inverter, PV Solar System, 2 x 460 W Glass/Glass Solar Modules, Includes 5 m Cable, Bluetooth WiFi, Complete Set"
Literally the first result that comes back for "balcony solar panel kit". 239 Euros with 4.2 star rating and > 200 purchase in the last month.
I can't vouch for this brand or kit but that's what comes up on top on amazon.de. Looks like some Chinese manufacturer, as you would expect. Plenty of pretty positive reviews in German with a few deployment photos. There are indeed a lot of solar panel related products on Amazon. It seems to be a popular product category.
You might get different results from outside Germany.
100% this.
Thank you. This is exactly what I was after.
Where are you getting these figures from? Is it realistic to expect it to cover 5-10% of your usage?
7/30 ~= 22 cents. Or about half a kwh per day here in Germany. Per day. I think that should be feasible with a well positioned panel. You might do better on sunny days. But if you balance that against all the lesser days, I don't think it's a strange average. All back of the envelope of course. If you get six sun hours on your 800w setup, you get almost 5 kwh. That's sort of the upper range probably. Maybe on really well positioned panels you might get 10 sun hours in the summer months. Or 8 kwh. I think few people would get that.
But an average 0.5kwh per day is fairly modest and adds up to about 7 euro per month. Probably too conservative but that was on purpose. I think the official figures project higher yields.
Since setups are capped at 800w, the percentage depends on your monthly usage. Easier to work in absolute numbers. I think most people could shave between 7 and 20 euros per month off their bills depending on how much sun they manage to get on their panels.
But this assumes that you consume the power as it's produced, right? Otherwise you need a battery as well.
I imagine, for example, that the power produced during weekdays while at work would go mostly unused.
This is not necessarily a disadvantage. If you have a contract with pricing based on the 15-minute intervals of the day-ahead market ("dynamischer Stromtarif"), then the electricity price spikes in the morning and evening. Typically with such a contract, you also get this higher price for injecting power back into the grid. And the price will almost always be lower than a traditional contract outside of these spikes.
A vertically oriented panel is also ideal for this scenario, because the sun will be low above the horizon when the panel is producing power in the morning.
edit: after looking into a bit more, it seems in Germany you may not actually get dynamic feed-in pricing. Too bad. I assumed that this was the case, because it works like that here in Belgium.
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.
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
Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
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”.
That's 0,38 Euro/W of panel power, including inverter and cable. And there might be a solid price uptick on that because of the shop that's selling it. Wholesale from specialized shops is probably much cheaper...
The thing is: Prices are falling fast and that's great for everybody.
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.
Germany is definitely not one of those zones
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.
The state's power company seems to stop approving grid-connected solar panel system due to oversupply. It's fine if it's not connected to the grid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing?
> Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland
> Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia, and then please do tell about Russia's supposed expansion plans
> 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.
NATO should do more to help Ukraine. They absolutely should.
>Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia,
That is countries deciding to join NATO in the hope it will protect them against Russia. No one forced them into NATO. Russia does not like it only because NATO prevents Russia from expanding. This is such a ridiculous talking point.
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.
Also: "if you want peace, prepare for war" has never been more true than now, as sad as that is.
Russia had previous success (with managable pushback) annexing Crimea (and the Chechen wars before).
Things just went south really hard this time and now they're kinda stuck, just like France/Germany in WW1 or the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Writing off a lost war effort is also much harder for a totalitarian regime, because you are not gambling with your re-election: It's literally your life on the line, or your whole career at the very least (kleptocrat network & favors), so doubling down is kinda the most rational approach from the decision-makers PoV.
The entire war was planned as "It will be over in 3 days, we will accomplish all our objectives trivially, it will be a massive gain". There was never even an idea in the Kremlin that it would be anything other than a milk run, no contingency plan for if Ukraine fought back at all.
Russia did not even take control over hundreds of billions of dollars of cash reserves in foreign banks that they expected to be part of their war chest, and which were frozen early on.
Then they failed to take Hostomel airport, failed to be welcomed by the population, and their invasion column was an abysmal, laughable even, execution on whatever plan they had.
From that moment on, there was no "Success" option. It's geopolitical sunk cost fallacy.
Russia did not plan on losing over 4000 tanks! Russia did not plan on throwing away most of their Soviet inheritance and outright emptying all the storage yards for old tanks! They did not plan on causing the outright or near extinction of several entire types of Soviet military vehicle! They have lost 8000 IFVs! They definitely did not plan or want to lose several irreplaceable strategic aircraft, including multiple EWACS type aircraft that they didn't have a lot of in the first place, and again, irreplaceable.
Russia did not plan to have 30% of their fuel refining infrastructure damaged by a neighbor without a serious air force! Russia did not plan to have an attempted coup that was well on its way to Moscow. Russia did not plan on having most of its industry hampered by foreign export controls and limits.
Russia most certainly did not plan on having to beg and trade North Korea for a few million artillery shells, and they did not plan on having the Flagship of the Black Sea fleet sunk by a country who scuttled their navy months earlier!
If Ukraine rolled over and willingly submitted to total control today, including the actual populace (instead of resisting), Russia would still be utterly fucked for decades to come.
However I couldnt ignore this topic since im from Voronezh, Russia. Totally agree about government’s lies and impulsiveness, however:
- when they say “X is what totally not gonna happen” actually they introduce X event to the news so 99.99% it is gonna happen later
- impulsiveness huge, they got a lot of people in jail for labeling “svo” as “war” and in last months all the government refers to the conflict as to “the war”. However(!) they kinda translate will of the nation, some basic russians, trying to create narrative that will make average russian proud and happy and from the other side praying for any luck in war (actually they need not luck but supply chains, that ones are corrupted as hell, and that shit going for three centuries at least, nothing new)
So, about prep to a war I’m afraid you’re right, I don’t think it’s reasonable to stay at Russia at all for now at least for 6 years. Also it’s risky to stay in Poland and Finland. For Baltics not that risky but really depressing though. h o w e v e r
- russia had a deal for nato not to get close to its borders, that was violated in a really bad manner, the neighbor just stopped all communication from 2020 and at beginning 2022 declared cancellation of other deal of not to place any atom weapon nearby.
- USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”. So there is nothing else this country can do if it doesn’t want to give up. The reasoning is pretty clear and emotional, stand for national security, do not became another India for UK. But the whole thing is messy, and smells like a slavs genocide. Russia became isolated, people are really angry and tolerable to constant violence threats, that is just insane turnaround since 2018 world cup that was hosted in Moscow.
This deal doesn't exist, at least anywhere on paper. There is an obligation related to the reunification of Germany that no NATO troops are stationed on the territory of former East Germany which has been honored by the reunited Germany.
Countries are also not forced into NATO, they ask to join.
> USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”.
As far as I have read, Russia wanted to 'skip the queue' ahead of smaller countries. When this special treatment was denied, Russia suddenly didn't want to join anymore.
Just before Ukraine invasion Zelensky speak up about cancelling Budapest memorandum https://amp.rbc.ru/rbcnews/politics/19/02/2022/621108ac9a794... That’s not a first time Ukraine presidents discuss this, but that timing was tough.
About Russia - NATO membership: western media hold narrative “in 1990s Russia was close – in 2007 Putin declared independent way of using energy and army resources”, but I find this 2001 Bush reaction humiliating (reasons unknown, pure subjective observation) https://youtu.be/x7kkRkWbIzI?si=LBhci7V_qdWDBDT9
Putin says he saw some secret KGB documents about the whole east-west situation when he became a president, idk if that’s legit at all.
I can only add up to the topic that in 90s almost all oil/gas in Russia was exported by western companies, and only in 2002 all sources became formerly owned by russian companies and citizens. As for now 20% Rosneft still held by BP Russian Investments Limited.
Russia does have resources, it has the desire, and importantly the state it depends on (China) has a very strong motivation to have Nato distracted when it acts on its plans for Taiwan.
It's got to the point where the media/gov could claim Russians eat babies, and many would believe it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I assume balcony solar panels provide you with a power socket. How do you connect all the appliances in house to that socket(s)? Isn't it a lot of cabling?
During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
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
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.)
Grid operators project costs of around €250 billion [1] (within 2045) for grid expansion alone, and NIMBYism is a big problem everywhere in Germany.
Battery storage to allow going full PV (1 week) would be at least twice that [2].
There is also plenty of "anti-green" sentiment in Germany generally and the current government coalition is in a somewhat precarious position, discouraging long-term investments like that.
[1] Source for grid costs (this is what grid operators are planning, so take it with a grain of salt): https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023...
[2] Battery cost is just assuming full power for 1 week at 50 €/kWh (IMO quite optimistically).
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.
0 - https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors...
> 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. ;)
This is a newbie question, and I look forward to learning how it's more complex than this.
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.
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.
What problem (or solution) is the concern, here?
A person can add other things to the scenario and the microinverter may elect to play ball, but it is simply incapable of kickstarting bloody anything on its own.
Are there any other wildly imaginative corner cases you'd like to explore that have nothing at all to do with balcony solar, as it is implemented in Germany?
The design features of currently existing microinverters are irrelevant to hedora's point about what microinverters could be designed to do, except insofar as they constitute an existence proof. (Obviously something is possible if it's already being done, but the inverse is not true.)
Furthermore, unsafely plugging your house wiring into a cheap generator or car inverter isn't a "wildly imaginative corner case", it's a common enough practice that there are YouTube videos warning people against doing it, because it's unsafe and in most places illegal, and also explaining how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjpS1vfGio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiicSQZqGd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIhzy6hfvyM as well as safer approaches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydRveyXkf4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmmhOXsIRjw
Yes. This is Germany we are talking here. I doubt any other country has higher (and more annoying) safety standards.
https://www.heise.de/news/RelayGate-Deye-Solar-Microinverter...
They only had a software implementation and were forced to send all customers in Germany a free relay dongle to ensure safety.
Well, I hope that any competent electrician will measure if there's still any voltage on the circuits after pulling the breakers.
https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy...
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
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmsesbk&xf=1601_780.50*1200~1603_2&...
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.
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 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".
With potatoes you only really pay with your time.
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.
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.
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 implies a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can get a multiple of that). 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 below 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years and require no maintenance if installed correctly.
In the end you're lucky if you get EROI of 1.5-3. That's an extremely bad deal. All other sources of energy, renewable or not, are in the 20-100 territory. The purpose of the energy production system is not to barely sustain itself but to actually produce usable electricity for everything else you want to do. It's the means, not the ends.
Solar panels have very solid benefits of course, you can buy them for your house to be more autonomous -- I would do that if I had a house. But from the energy/CO2 perspective what you're doing is buying a sort of "battery" that was charged with cheap coal-based electricity in China and shipped off to US/Europe. This makes sense in certain situations but presenting this as a green solution or as future of humanity is just delusional.
Scientific publications say otherwise. It's quite hard to come by any numbers, but page 11 of https://www.wisdomlib.org/uploads/journals/mdpi-sust/2025-vo... says that typical solar inverters require about 15 MJ/kW of power for their production in total, which would amount to approx. 4 kWh per kW of inverter power. A solar panel square meter produces about 200-250 watts of peak power, so it needs inverter power that cost about 1 kWh to build. Let's triple that, because inverters have a typical lifetime of 10 years in contrast to the 30 years of solar panels. 3 kWh for the inverter is negligible when compared with 300-2000 kWh for the panel itself. So we can just ignore that.
Batteries are interesting. According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24, it takes about 35 kWh in total to produce 1 kWh of battery capacity. Let's say we'll need 250 Wh of capacity for our 250 WPeak solar panel square meter (the rule of 1 kWh capacity for each 1 kWp is a typical estimate applied when sizing solar installations for residential homes). That makes up about 8 or 9 kWh to produce this battery capacity. Admittedly that doesn't include the raw materials, of which the cell requires quite a few expensive ones. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good resource on that, so I resorted to asking ChatGPT for a rough calculation, and it came up with about 140 kWh for our 250 Wh LFP cell, which doesn't sound entirely wrong, as it assumed a cell weight of 1,5 kg and splitted that up into different materials. The weight matches what I would expect from personal experience with LFP batteries.
Basically, we can just ignore the inverter and must add about 150 kWh for the battery to our 300-2000 kWh for the panel. That does not substantially impact an EROI calculated from a 1000 kWh assumption for the panel alone.
And this is a calculation based on Germany. Again: weather conditions are far from optimal for solar in Germany. It's much better in many regions in China, where solar panels are made. They can easily achieve EROIs of 20+ with solar there, which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
> which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
State-run economies get delusional pretty easily, but in this case China is safely on the "makes sense in certain situations" side:
* keep electricity prices low
* invest heavily in nuclear
* install solar within reasonable limits (currently around 8% of the grid)
* for better or for worse they burn more and more coal every year
They certainly don't make insane green commitments and they don't say solar is the future of humanity. I don't like China much, but I don't see how they can fall into "delusional" category according to my criteria above, they have none of it.
Now Germany's policy is the complete opposite of China's, except for the "burning coal" part. Germany killed their own economy over high electricity prices because they wanted to go green, but then somehow they've got almost 2x CO2 emissions per capita compared to France.
If someone says "I sacrifice A to get B", but then never get the B and still lose A, and then insist that the plan was a great success -- he's certainly delusional, that's like the definition of the word.
Maybe you can explain in more detail what you mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value", but on my assumption that you're talking about EROEI and energy payback time, your assertion is profoundly incorrect.
If you use electricity prices to make that calculation, you need to take in account that solar panels are produced in China off cheap coal-based electricity. If you produce a panel in Germany it would take much longer to break even economically (if ever). That's what I mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world".
> we found a Fraunhofer report by Simon Philipps and Werner Warmuth with a more detailed estimate arriving at a 1.1-year energy payback time in Northern Europe, 0.9 years in Southern Europe
This article doesn't explain how they make their calculations and I struggle to replicate them. The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm. Measured (not projected) yield in Germany is 160-180 kWh per 1sqm per year. A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally. Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe. In the end you may get anywhere between 10 and 100 kWh per 1sqm per year (would love to see some real measurements by the way, not projected ones).
So my view is very simple: these balcony panels make sense economically because German economy is cooked. However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment. Which by the way could be a reasonable price to pay for autonomy in case of power failure but these balcony setups can't run when the grid is off.
Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
> Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe.
That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
And clearly, we are discussing the energy break-even here, as indicated by "The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm."
> However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment.
As I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is.
In addition to this, as I've described in another posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45490555) there's the psychological side of things, where cheap and easily profitable balcony panels for everyone are a gateway drug for "normal people" to get actively involved in the field of renewable energy and must not be underestimated in their ability to open the minds of people for other, more efficient actions to get closer to a carbon-neutral energy economy. Since those activities tend to be heavily inhibited by broad refusal that's often not based on factual arguments, but simply on inertia in people's minds ("we've always done it the other way") and a certain lazyness to actively grapple with new technologies and developments, this effect is at least as important as the actual impact on the energy grid. Just like on the stock market, the raw numbers are only half of the story. Psychology is the other half.
No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
> That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would. This is a fundamental tradeoff with solar: it's either too small to make any difference or you never get your projected EROI because you have to shut them down during the very time they produce maximum energy.
> I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is
You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do. Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
I'm extremely sceptical of all these "concrete calculations", not because they're mathematically incorrect but because they are detached from real life. It's like when they sell you a timeshare cottage on a ski resort and mathematically it's profitable, but in reality it's a huge liability.
„which are even worse“ is an assumption you make, you do not have any data to back that up. From what I regularly see, they are not worse at all. People without sun on their balconies do not buy balcony solar kits in the first place. Also there’s the fact that people can spend time to meticulously optimize every single panels’ location (which they usually don’t when someone places 30 panels on a roof in a single day, it’s just about getting them up there quickly). If you are interested in numbers, browse https://www.reddit.com/r/Balkonkraftwerk/ - it’s German language but Reddit does quite well with auto-translation as far as I know. Every month, people post their yield numbers for comparison there.
> No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would.
You are equating the time during which a home solar owner cannot use his own solar power with the time during which there are negative electricity prices. This is grossly wrong. In 2024, Germany had 457 hours of negative power prices (see https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/03/bundesnetzagentur-457-...). That’s roughly 5% of the year. Typical home solar power usage if no battery at all is installed is about 50%. If we talk about batteries, which are increasingly getting common in balcony solar installations due to significant price drops, it’s more like 80-90% of power that the owner can use directly.
> You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do.
The panels are the exact same panels used for large-scale solar installations. These are tested and guaranteed by the manufacturer for 30+ years. Nobody doubts that they’ll reach that lifespan in most cases. The inverters are a negligible amount of kWh invested, as I pointed out in the parallel threads’ posting. So you can easily buy one or two replacements over the 30 year timespan without impacting the EROI of the panel at all. Also, a lifespan of 30 years does not mean that the panel fails after 30 years. It just goes below a defined point of efficiency (80% of original peak power). You can very well use it for another 10 or 20 years, you just have to accept that it produces only 80% of the original output.
> Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
That’s not what I see, because it is surprisingly hard to dispose of solar panels in practice. They do not fit into the typical „dumpsters“ people use to dispose their regular trash. You would be able to dispose of them for free at the next recycling center in Germany, as they are mandated to take them, but most cars cannot be used to transport solar panels as they are too large, so it’s not trivial to get them there. From what I observe, people therefore simply sell or donate the panels to the next renter/owner when they move, which is obviously a good idea as they are usually installed on a balcony or garden house or whatever and you usually buy the matching installation equipment for a particular situation which you wouldn’t be able to use at your future home anyway.
I find it quite interesting that you did not object to my second argument about the psychological impact/use of this technology.
https://www.renewableenergyhub.co.uk/main/micro-combined-hea...
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.
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.
Let's do some napkin math:
* For the whole package people report 200-300 Euro prices. Let's make it 300.
* To get to say 8GW of capacity you'd need 10 million of these units
* The price of that ends up being 3 billion
* With a capacity factor of 12.5% it will produce electricity like a 1GW source that is constantly producing at full capacity
Now let's take a look at the "economical" production at scale model.
* Hinkley Point C currently under construction with a 3.2 GW capacity
* Estimated costs right now in the 50 billion Euro ballpark or 15-20 billion per GW
This is at least 5x more expensive on construction costs alone. The opportunity cost in the lost 15 years of no return on investment during construction, running cost per year difference, cost differences when it's time to scrap both things in around five decades etc. is an exercise left to the reader.
tl;dr sorry but you literally have no idea what you're talking about.
The fact that they forgot how to build reactors (France got them at 1.5B per GW adjusted for 2011 prices) and that China burns more and more coal to maintain the solar bubble doesn't change much long term. I don't think the current situation around solar is sustainable.
I could be wrong of course but hopefully we'll live long enough to see the outcome. In the meanwhile I heavily bet on the nuclear being the future.
* last year around 600GW of solar was deployed, or 0.6TW
* Imagine a 12.5% capacity factor (which is low)
* Imagine their capacity will degrade linearly to 80% over 20 years (I don't know if this is completely true but it's a rough approximation), thus their average output is 90%
* Imagine they will stop producing electricity after exactly 20 years (which is not true, they will continue to work unmaintained for decades)
They will thus produce total electricity of
.6 * .9 * .125 * 24 * 365 * 20
11826TWh
If their EROI was 3 it would mean it took 3942 TWh to produce them.
China used a total of 9852TWh of electricity in 2024.
I would strongly presume China did not use 40% of its electricity to produce solar panels.
That gotta be a big laptop!
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
Your laptop doesn't have a battery?
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.
Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).
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.
Energy payback time around one year (p. 8)
You are probably right about the glass. Processing glass in electric furnaces has been a well-established technology for many generations, but it is more expensive than fossil-fuel-fired furnaces, and is used for making more expensive kinds of glass. But the glass in solar panels is an especially cheap kind of glass.
Coal is probably the cheapest form of energy. https://www.coal-price.com/ says that currently in China coal is on the order of US$100 per tonne. Coal has up to 33MJ/kg, so that works out to 0.3¢ per megajoule, or 1.1¢ per kilowatt hour, or more if the US$100/tonne coal isn't the best anthracite. You probably can't literally run a glassmaking furnace with a coal firebox, because of the contaminants from the coal, but you almost certainly can't run it on cheaper energy than that. If 100% of the cost of the solar panels were coal energy instead of electric, that would extend my upper bound out from 7 months to a bit over 4 years.
This seems to be in rough agreement with Fraunhofer's more informed estimate that you cite.
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.
Very important point that is often ignored.
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?
Right now owners of older rooftop photovoltaics in Germany swap functioning modules for newer ones with better efficiency.
Even if some small percentage of older modules fails it is probably not the fault of the cells but of connections in the module due to moisture. It is a system. In theory you can take the cells and build new modules. But that is too expensive compared to buying new modules.
Solar is one of those magical technologies that seems to keep giving in different ways.
> “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,”
the article concludes that the most prominent effect of balcony panels is of psychological nature.
At best it pays out in 5 years. Our landlord, for example, requires the panel to be installed by certified professionals, hence it will take even longer to break even, even assuming the device will not malfunction during the time, which I am sceptical about, especially when talking about the cheapest sets from amazon/kaufland.
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?
You are also only allowed to install a couple hundred watts yourself like this, anything above 800 Wp still requires a professional.
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.
Over a whole month, peak summer production here is 1.4MWh, winter is 0.14MWh.
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?)
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings.
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!
That's a shame, and makes the whole thing feel performative, especially for a country that nixed nuclear.
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.
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.
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.
And yes, 1% of German energy is a ton of energy; but that is an incredibly optimistic forecast of if _every_ German did this. There are 85 million Germans; they could do a lot of things with their combined efforts. Backyard furnaces produced millions of tons of steel; seems like a very apt comparison.
I actually have solar of my own. It powered my entire life (off grid!) for years. That still doesn't mean I think individual small-scale solar is a meaningful solution to the climate crisis.
The biggest risk around climate, in my opinion, is the risk that people and governments think "we're doing something" when they are not. In this case, balcony solar has a very short payback time (a claimed 5 years for one guy's install! That is preposterously short for any investment!) because of the strange way that residential power is priced. If people really paid for the power and the grid infrastructure in relation to the real costs, balcony solar would never pay itself back, but essentially nobody understands that. Instead, they see the large amount they're saving and mentally that magnifies the impact of what they're doing. From the various posts I found, an ideal, un-shaded install produces between 200 and 500 kWh per year, depending on orientation and size. Obviously any sort of shading would drop that off a cliff. Compare that with the 38 MWh (38,000 kWh) per year of primary energy that the average German consumes...
In a way, it is a sort of modern indulgence.
------
Here are some yearly numbers on the Chinese steel industry at that time as a whole: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/factbox-a-history-o...
You're wrong about this. There are a lot of people who still think solar power is only about environmental virtue-signalling and it can never compete with good old dinosaur juice. If everyone adopts balcony solar, it'll help convince these people they're wrong. At least the ones who are merely misinformed rather than dug into an ideology.
Not sure it’s a good idea really
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?
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.
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!
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
(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)
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?
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?
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/landwirtschaft/landwirtschaftl...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
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.
There's nothing absurd about it.
Besides, it's all numbers from 4 years ago, when people weren't all putting solar panels on their balconies. And the report about gains from scale mention things like the lack of tracking in small scale installations, that the large-scale ones haven't used for many years now. So propose that your numbers are all wrong.
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Germany is a pretty rich company. They can do both if they want to.
You're way ahead of my predicted cyberpunk timeline.
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.
Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.
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.
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.
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?
I bet some people wouldn't install it now because it looks kinda meh.
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.
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;;...
They also kinda look terrible :(
(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".)
One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
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.
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
Your bill is priced that way so that you can have predictable price for what you consume. That means sometimes markets electricity at zero, but you'll pay the full contract price. Other times, electricity is _much_ more expensive than your contract, and, likewise, you'll pay a fixed price.
That fixed price is not competitive with balcony solar because it pays for services that balcony solar doesn't provide. That means that on average, your solar panels produce electricity when electricity is cheap for your utility provider, and when they don't, electricity is on average (but not always) more expensive.
The logical consequence of this is that your contract is going to become more expensive, because you use your solar when it would be profitable for your utility, and you draw from the grid when it's unprofitable to them.
Another alternative would be the end of fixed cost contracts, where balcony solar users would have to pay market price + subscription for their electricity. If that was the case, balcony solar users would probably spare cents during sunny weekends, and get hammered during winter workdays when there is no wind.
edit: just checked the data, in August, Germany's prices at noon hit 0€ 17 days. On the other hand, prices at 18h soared above 100€/MWh every single day, and above 150€ 10 days in the month. In Sepetember, prices at noon hit zero 14 days.
Another (wind-related this time) example, market electricity prices this weekend were negative most of the time (with a tiny 4€ peak) for 40h straight.
I believe that already exists in Nordic countries, I had heard of it in Sweden ([1] says 10% of the population uses it) and Norway ([2] quotes 75% of the population).
[1]: https://swedenherald.com/article/so-you-should-think-about-e...
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
That said, I do have 2kWh of battery for my balcony solar (it cost only a few hundred euros and prices are coming down even further), so I can spread the usage of the generated power over a longer timespan, not just during peak sunshine.
Of course, balcony solar is only for small installations. For home owners, you'll probably want something like 10+ kWp of solar panels and 10+ kWh of battery. Both of which are no longer very expensive(§). Once enough households have this, we only need those gas power stations for those rather rare periods where there is neither wind nor sun. We can also use EVs as batteries for the grid once V2G finally arrives (that's something the big utilities are stalling).
--
(§) See what CATL is doing: $40 per kWh in the near future: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
What I'm saying is that the consequence of your action will be to rise the price electricity for those without a balcony (that includes industrial users), which is a very bad systemic outcome. This outcome should have been avoided by system-wide policymaking, not by a selfless act from you.
> that's something the big utilities are stalling
V2G is an extremely complex thing to set up in reality, you don't need a conspiracy to explain why it's not around the corner. Just like you don't need to involve big oil to explain why fusion power is likely not happening tomorrow.
Aside from that, that would probably require a complete change in the way Germany subsidizes its energy sector, and probably harm to some private companies that benefits from these private companies. I don't really see it happening soon, but who knows?
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?
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...
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.
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
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.
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...
But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
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.
I agree that it would make solar usable in situations where it would not otherwise be usable, and high latitudes are a good candidate.
For reasons like these I do not think that they will result in a cost reduction.
Standard Thermal has been bending over backwards to store their heat at the high temperatures I mentioned, resulting in a lot of engineering challenges that a lower-temperature thermal store (say, 400° or below) wouldn't have to deal with. For the most part, process heat is lower in temperature than 400°, so I think that isn't their market either.
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 $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.
Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
At the moment (spring) in half-decent weather all the above stuff is 100% off-grid. I'm still using grid power for hot water heating, dish washer, clothes washer -- all of which I do for free in my daily "Free Hour of Power" -- and for intermittent incidentals such as the water pump (e.g. runs for 15 seconds when I flush the toilet) and lighting in usually non-occupied rooms such as toilet, bathroom, and bedroom -- which together means I'm paying around 10c-20c per day over and above the fixed daily charge.
300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.
I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.
But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.
Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ 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.
> 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
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.
And they dont matter. This is strictly worth it in every scenario when energy production is not already 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.
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.
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...
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.