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Generally, balcony panels are hung off the side of the railing, so no space was lost. If this was blocking out windows or reducing the enjoyment of apartments then I could understand, but this basically unlocks “free” solar panel real estate in apartments, without any real installation costs.
Meanwhile, decentralized power generation with all these liminal spaces is basically impossible for a utility company. Hundreds of dollars/euros is not trivial, but spread across years of usage, it’s a pretty affordable way to reduce power consumption, and it’s well within affordable range for the median German household. Plus it’s subsidized! This basically lowers the cost for the utility to create locally generated renewable power, reducing demand over the expensive to maintain public infrastructure.
Being able to plug a solar panel into a spare wall outlet and reduce your bill and grid power usage is so easy, anyone can do this. This isn’t allowed in most of the United States, for example, because central authorities banned it due to outdated safety rules. Many areas with this banned have far more sunlight than Germany (eg California), so far more incentive for the population to want it.
It is easy to speculate that if were talking about the flip side about how power company cartels have regulatory capture to prevent home owners from complementing home power needs with private systems then there would be freedom outrage at the system. But a positive story about how a soft european liberal country allowing home owners to complement home power needs with private systems is seen as a failure of the state?
I mean, you could pay someone to do it for you, but most people will be able to do it on their own.
Completely disagree. This is definitely electricity that central utility organizations could generate. A central method to generate electricity with solar panels would benefit everyone. This method only benefits the individuals who have their own homes or have balconies.
The biggest problem with the above is that now the govt has even less visibility on planning their electricity needs and therefore cannot plan electric infrastructure better. Also, each home is now a single point of failure for its own electricity and this will inevitably feed back to the main grid.
The real reason this is happening is because govt is in policy paralysis and cannot provide cheap electricity from solar themselves and have to depend on each individual doing it on its own.
I have a proper setup on my roof, and installed a 2kW balcony setup (2kWp panels mixed with an inverter limited to 800W) at my in-laws place.
Both are registered in the central database. I got a new power meter for mine. But it seems my in-laws are to keep their old power meter for a while, which occasionally just turns backwards, whenever they produce more than they consume.
Only in the same way as allowing people to buy as many electric appliances as they want (or, indeed, have as many babies as they want) does.
In reality, estimating voluntary uptake of solar panels is almost certainly trivial. Energy producers already successfully model the variation in electricity demand throughout the day extremely accurately in order to optimise generation parameters, without everyone having to request government permission to turn on their kettle at 8:02 each morning.
I don't think you know what single point of failure means. This is the opposite of a single point of failure architecture.
Overcast day zapping whole region is made up issue here.
It reminds us that widespread personal solar panel deployment reduces the total amount of centrally generated energy required, but doesn't even make a dent in the max capacity, which is much more important in terms of deciding infrastructure investment.
Mine cost €350, of which €50 was delivery, and €50 of which was a set of brackets to mount on the outside of balcony railings, i.e. it sacrifices perhaps 10 square *centimeters* of balcony space taken up by the overhang in normal use.
(As it happens I have a house with a driveway and chose to not to mount them on the outside of the balcony, but the brackets are supposed to be used that way, I just didn't; YMMV).
With "mainstream" solar panels costing €0.100 per peak watt as of August (according to https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...) it's getting harder and harder to justify the efficiencies of centralization.
That is, maybe with single-axis trackers and optimal angle, your solar farm gets a capacity factor of 15% (I think Germany's average for utility-scale solar is 10%) so an average 500-watt load requires 3300 peak watts of utility-scale generation (€330), plus 3000 additional watts of inverter capacity, 2000 additional watts of storage capacity, 1000 additional watts of transmission capacity over something like 100km, and 1000 additional watts of distribution capacity. Maybe your capacity factor on the balcony is only 7.5%, so you have to spend €660 for 6600 peak watts, and you probably still need some storage capacity, so maybe you end up spending €1000, €670 more than the solar-farm panels. Maybe you need to spend €80 on a 12-volt car inverter, too.
It's very easy for the cost of utility-scale inverters, transmission capacity, etc., to exceed the €750 savings you get in this case from centralization. Also, note that about 20% of the energy produced in utility-scale generation is lost in power conversion, transmission, etc.
Note that I'm only talking about costs here, and only about the essential costs that come from the form of production. I'm not talking about prices, which may incorporate subsidies, permitting costs, taxes such as tariffs, transaction costs, lawsuits against non-performing building contractors, and market inefficiencies such as homeowners not having access to the zero-marginal-cost excess power that can be produced on sunny days for regulatory reasons.
A lot of times they aren't even real to begin with.
People assume that economies of scale keep going up as long as scale keeps going up, but that's almost never true. They typically have diminishing returns or thresholds past which the unit cost stops going down. If you want to build solar panels you have to build a factory. If the factory can produce a million solar panels a year and you only want 10 solar panels you still have to build the entire factory. It's more efficient to build a million than 10.
But if people want a billion solar panels a year then you need a thousand factories, and one bigger factory isn't materially different than having two factories across the street from each other, so there's no real advantage to having them all operated by the same entity. Moreover, even if you only need 10 solar panels, you can get them from any of the thousand factories that each make a million a year. You're not losing the economies of scale by having many sellers and many buyers.
Meanwhile centralization often incurs additional costs. You already identified several, but another big one is land. Individual homeowners each have a roof or balcony wall that was otherwise going to have nothing on it. A centralized solar farm is more often going to have to pay for space.
Centralization is usually pushed by someone trying to monopolize something.
Also, clouds are less of a problem for a transmission grid with distributed solar farms than for an individual household with its own autarkic solar power system.
Even for solar energy, land is not a big cost, financially speaking. Morally and environmentally, it may be (it's arguable—solar farms don't have to devastate the ecosystem the way strip mining and oil spills do), but not financially.
This is 100-150 people a year. It's not even clear that this is more than the number of people who would die in car accidents on their way to work at centralized solar farms etc.
> A single-axis solar tracker can rotate hundreds of square meters of solar panels.
Those also cost thousands of dollars and it's not clear that it's a significant savings over the units that rotate fewer panels but cost less money.
> Washing dust off solar panels can increase their output by several percent, but is much more likely to happen if it's somebody's full-time job instead of a household chore, especially a household chore that puts you at risk of falling off a roof and dying.
This is a cost rather than an efficiency. If you get home and see dust on your panels you grab the hose and spray them off from the ground without having to pay anyone. The solar farm has to pay salary and benefits.
> A FLIR image can identify failing solar cells so you can queue them for replacement or repair
This is an inefficiency again. The centralized farm is paying for space so they replace panels with degraded output. The homeowner leaves them to run, gets 10% of the expected instead of 0% and if they want more capacity they get more panels instead of doing work to identify and remove existing ones.
> a lawsuit against a maker of faulty solar panels is much more feasible if the potential damages are €60 million rather than €600.
Class action lawsuits are a thing.
> Even for solar energy, land is not a big cost, financially speaking. Morally and environmentally, it may be (it's arguable—solar farms don't have to devastate the ecosystem the way strip mining and oil spills do), but not financially.
Land cost is why they can't put the solar farm near where the users are, because that's where the land is expensive, so instead they put it in the middle of nowhere. But even that land isn't free, and then you have to eat even higher transmission costs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448087/ says that in the US, where the statistics are best, "electrical injuries cause approximately 1000 deaths annually. Of these, around 400 result from high-voltage electrical injuries, while lightning accounts for 50 to 300 deaths." That's 400 deaths per year from high-voltage transmission lines and substations, and from other high-voltage sources such as CRT televisions being repaired or ion-implantation voltage sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... says the USA's utility-scale electricity generation was 4230.723 TWh in 02022.
So that's ballpark 100 nanodeaths per megawatt hour from transmission wires and the like. Or 0.1 deaths per terawatt hour. By contrast, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... claims that rooftop solar claimed 0.44 deaths per terawatt hour at the time; possibly that has improved since then, but I doubt that it has changed that much. Brian Wang returned to the question in 02021 in https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us... and estimated almost 1 death per terawatt hour.
So it seems clear that the infrastructural deaths are much lower than the deaths from falling off roofs.
> I'm not talking about prices, which may incorporate subsidies, permitting costs, taxes such as tariffs, transaction costs, lawsuits against non-performing building contractors, and market inefficiencies such as homeowners not having access to the zero-marginal-cost excess power that can be produced on sunny days for regulatory reasons.
Every single thing here is policy failure by German government.
The numbers you quote suggest there’s going to be a black market for diy house-scale solar soon.
Cost breakdown:
- 400 EUR 2.4kWh 48V battery
- 320 EUR 4x 360W solar panels
- 200 EUR 800W microinverter
- ~200 EUR for helping hands when getting the panels onto the flat roof
- 160 EUR flat roof mounting equipment
- 153 EUR solar cable, connectors and crimping tool
- 115 EUR MPPT charge controller and cables
- 95 EUR electrics (e.g. fuses, dc/dc converter for OpenDTU)
- 50 EUR other assorted costs
So about 1693 EUR in total.
Total yield after 1.3 years: 1715 kWh (including power fed back into the grid)
Of that, discharged from battery: 488 kWh (battery already paid back ~146 EUR)
At the current energy costs, 1715 kWh would be ~514 EUR imported from grid
The main subsidy is that you don't pay VAT. There are some smaller subsidies but they are local and come from the town/region you live in (none available in my area, for example).
Installation is 2-4 hours when you do it yourself.
My city Berlin is subsidizing 250 EUR of the purchase/installation cost but it wasn't worth the paper work hassle to me.
In my childhood everyone (like your parents, your neighbors, all the ordinary people) were growing potatoes. Highly decentralized and fully voluntary sustainable food production, sounds like a dream. This happened of course because the state-run economy created food shortages.
Its fun to do, it makes sense and was easy.
And your potato example is also shit. Being able to buffer a higly complex and easily disruptable supply chain for things you need to survive is smart not stupid.
Economic sense is largely defined by the economic policy set by the government. No one puts balcony solar in France, somehow their economic sense is different.
So it isn't that France economic policies have made installing balcony solar unattractive, it's the permitting policies which are blocking people from installing more.
You have it inverted, pun intended.
Germany has very high electricity prices, even higher than the US (see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...), and this is due to policy failures in Germany. That's what makes these balcony systems so appealing.
I'm not sure that the outcome of having a lot of decentralized solar generation is a bad outcome.
While I agree that you can't just arbitrarily raise safety-based limits, not all "safety-based limits" are actually safety-based, and I'm pretty sure you've misidentified the safety concerns in this one.
It's a both-things can be true, even though France has also been getting more issues with electricity generation from its nuclear fleet caused by droughts, and high temperatures in their cooling water supply.
For individuals in Europe that have the possibility to spend a few hundred (or even a few thousand) bucks up front to lower their energy bill is a win for everybody, it lowers emissions, decentralizes energy production and generates ROI. My own system (which is a little bit larger) paid for itself in the first three years and has allowed me to do all kinds of things that I would not have been able to do otherwise if I had had to pay for the electricity. The surplus that I don't use I sell at a discount to the grid and that's fine by me.
Not much to disagree about generating energy at home though.
By not building the gas pipelines.