Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t understand this sentiment at all. They didn’t sacrifice their balcony, and this is electricity that the central utility organizations couldn’t generate. Many parts of the world don’t even allow this kind of solar panel to be used by individuals, so its legality is actually a policy success.

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 This isn’t allowed in most of the United States, for example, because central authorities banned it due to outdated safety rules.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.

Yeah the narrative always seems to be bent by political biases seeping in.

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?

People often forget that installation costs dwarf panel and battery costs at this point. A gizmo that had 3kwh of battery (and a fan) sitting behind a well matched solar panel would sell like hotcakes, especially if it supported daisy chaining and back feeding into the grid (with safety interlocks for power outages).

The thing about balcony solar is that there are no 3rd party costs. Just the time you need to install it on your own.

I mean, you could pay someone to do it for you, but most people will be able to do it on their own.

> I don’t understand this sentiment at all. They didn’t sacrifice their balcony, and this is electricity that the central utility organizations couldn’t generate. Many parts of the world don’t even allow this kind of solar panel to be used by individuals, so its legality is actually a policy success.

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.

This being Germany, you actually are supposed to register every panel in a central database. So the utilities know where generation is happening. This is for proper solar installs as well as for balcony solar.

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.

You characterise massively distributed power generation as a single point of failure for each house? Even though they also have the grid?

I don't think you know what single point of failure means. This is the opposite of a single point of failure architecture.

I agree that GP's take is broadly wrong, but there is a sense in which it does introduce a single point of failure: the sun. If everyone has solar panels, an overcast day zaps an entire city/region.

They have normal grid too and also batteries exist. Also, these houses normally exist during the night and during the winter when days are short.

Overcast day zapping whole region is made up issue here.

All this really only shows that the single point of failure fails quite regularly, to varying degrees.

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.

You really do not know what single point of failure is ... do you?

It's clear from context that "failure" here means a state that is no better than if there were no solar panels at all, i.e., complete dependence on central generation.

Almost but not quite. These are mandated to shut down in case the grid fails. There are installations that go into island mode in that case but these are a lot more expensive to set up if you want to pass inspection.

I've never been in a house that isn't a single point of failure for its own electricity. Possibly you didn't think this point through when you wrote it.

Yup, bad point. Sorry about that. I forgot about the feeding into the grid aspect of solar.

> 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.

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.

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