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.