‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
euronews.com
euronews.com
Government press release with a long list of pull quotes: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...
(I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a decade ago. It is embarrassing to be beaten on environmentalist regulatory efficiency by Germany)
I read what is happening in exactly the opposite way. To me it shows that Milliand and the government at large do very little with no strategic thinking and no plan (same as the guys before in fairness but this government was supposed to be soo different...) and, in this case, is only reacting in a panic after almost 2 years in office to the pressure of "doing something" because of the Iran war, while also being told (slight mitigating circumstances for Milliband) that it mustn't cost anything. I always picture scenes from The Thick of It/ In the Loop when I imagine how they come up with 'ideas'.
Like you just invented a story and made massive implications based on the invented story, with absolutely no hesitation. And you’re probably in at least the 50th percentile of intelligence.
This is why we’re screwed.
This Trump-level idiocy that is just never mentioned, even as people blame the gas burned in england on windy days as a cost of wind curtailment, when the curtailment is more a like a third of the cost. Burning gas to power people who chose not to build turbines is the other 2/3rds.
In the alternate world that is tens of billions of gas costs avoided to date and tens of billions more in future.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c995xjxk97mo
[2] https://www.energyvoice.com/insights/energy-opinion/594763/m...
> Industry body Offshore Energy UK (OEUK) claims that more oil and gas could be extracted by 2050. However, the ‘High Case’ scenario for future production in a report for OEUK would still mean that 92% of production has already occurred.
...
> Compared to the maximum oil production that occurred in 1999, UK output in 2025 was 77% (over three-quarters) lower.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/around-90-of-uk-north-...
Banning onshore wind turbines was just insanity. Despite the insanity, the UK has made great steps with offshore wind, but offshore wind is expensive and has all sorts of accompanying headaches. Onshore is super cheap and quick to build per unit power by comparison.
Onshore wind turbines are going to be much more important to the future of UK energy independence than balcony solar.
Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the cheapest inverters to sync frequency accurately. And
I have more faith in German standards and work ethic than our own.
So in the UK we have 2.5mm^2 wires in a ring on a 32A MCBs... Of course a 2.5mm^2 wire is rated ~20A so any issues with the ring (sockets still work since connected from the other branch) can burn the wire before the MCB trips...
From what I understand the UK allowed it because of a severe postwar copper shortage and it persists to this day because it's allowed and a bit cheaper.
I'd say "severe post-WWII money shortage". After wartime expansion, the global copper industry could physically meet peacetime demands. But the UK was very close to national bankruptcy. And the Luftwaffe had turned an awful lot of their prewar housing into rubble. So - any cost that could be cut, was.
If you plug it into an overloaded ring final (which is not uncommon in the UK - half our house's sockets are on a single ring), you have to rely on the generator being able to detect faults to protect that circuit.
You could also overload that circuit's wiring. If you have a a 16A Ecoflow, plug it into a 32A ring, you could draw 48A before tripping the grid circuit breaker, potentially causing significant heat in the wires. Dinky 3A generators won't do that but I don't think they're the limit our government are talking about.
It isn't as if electric charge coming from balcony solar panels is some new magical-seeming type of electricity.
Also, why do wires have to be fixed to joists every 300 mm? It's not about the electrons.
Not to mention that most houses aren't up to current electrical standards, much less fire codes.
However in the case of a UK home, where you may have a single ring circuit connecting all the sockets on the whole floor, what's in the breaker panel isn't going to protect you with plug-in solar anyway. Better hope what you are plugging in meets UK standards and isn't just some Chinese rubbish that claims it does.
After some research the main reason seems to be two-fold:
Answer #1: Many UK RCDs/RCBOs are actually single-pole devices and don't disconnect the neutral. In the simplest case, this means pressing the test button might burn out the test resistor when backfed. I don't imagine this to be a problem in practice, since grid-tie inverters shut down very quickly if the grid disappears under them, especially plug-in inverters. RCDs/RCBOs elsewhere are virtually always disconnecting the neutral, so don't care about this.
Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them, even if type A, because they're actively driving the trip solenoid of the MCB part, and if you sketch this out and do it in a very cheap way it's easy to see how you could burn that out if backfed (i.e. powering the trip solenoid during a fault is assumed to disconnect in a very short amount of time, but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver).
Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
This is not correct; all type AC and type A RCDs used in British consumer units disconnect the neutral as well. Some RCBOs do not disconnect the neutral and this is a problem in some circumstances. The datasheet I linked for Wylex NHXS1 RCBOs explains that these ones do disconnect the neutral.
> Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them [...] but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver
This is correct. For an example of this construction in an RCBO, see [1]. This illustrates that if the supply is connected to the "To Load" part of the schematic (toward the end of the video), as it would be if the supply is a solar PV inverter with battery storage, then it can continue powering the electronics and be shunted out by the thyristor after it has supposed to have tripped, very quickly burning itself out.
Bidirectional RCBOs are not designed in this manner. They have more complicated circuitry that makes them more expensive to manufacture, but are absolutely required in situations like this if you don't want your protective devices to burn and/or explode when they operate.
> Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
Yes it does, because if the power is flowing backwards to how they designed it, that is backfeeding it, keeping its circuitry powered after it should have been disconnected.
But that's rather the point here that consumers are the ones who are going to be plugging in these devices, with no appreciation for their circuits and safety devices. The only code that matters is the last version of it adhered to when their home was last wired. In extremes, that can be 40 years or more.
The conventional practice in the US is still to use GFCI receptacles rather than breakers.
If the circuit will be supplying power too (e.g. battery storage, an EV and EVSE that supports powering the house from the EV, etc) then you need a bidirectional RCBO.
People with no differential fault protection need not worry about any of this, they'll just be killed when it goes badly wrong.
Source: Am a UK electrician
Example: https://assets.cef.co.uk/downloads/pdg/wylex_nhxs1b32_datash...
EDIT: To say nothing of people with unidirectional electricity meters; plugging these into those setups will get them prosecuted for electricity theft. All SMETS 2 smart meters are bidirectional; you'd best check your meter if it isn't one of those.
Pre-smart non-prepayment electronic meters (for those with old meters, still submitting manual readings, and paying by direct debit) will be fine. Most of these meters, and all smart meters, are inherently bidirectional, because they maintain 4 counts (energy imported and energy exported, in kWh and kVARh) and your energy provider will do all the necessary math to figure out what to actually bill you for (residential customers are not billed for kVARh usage).
The UK government in 2011 announced plans to have 50 million smart meters installed by the end of 2020. In typical overpromise underdeliver government fashion, they didn't even achieve half of that; by then, only 23.6 million had been installed, and of those, 4.5 million had stopped working because they were initially (and stupidly) designed to be tied to a specific energy provider and the customer had changed provider. This even affected me.
Nevertheless they'd still accurately track energy consumption and export even if they'd lost their reporting capability, so you have nothing to fear here. This situation has been rectified at the redesign stage with provider-independent SMETS 2 meters, and all SMETS 1 meters still in service have been hotpatched to bring them into line (restoring their smart functionality regardless of provider).
Even today (well, as of last September), this number is only 40 million, with only 36.7 million of them actually working as designed (reporting readings automatically).
This leaves up to 16 million properties with a meter that may stop working and expose you to a theft investigation when you obtain generation capacity that even momentarily exceeds your usage (for example if you have a dual RCD board and one of the RCDs trips, taking out half of the circuits in your home, but not the one the inverter is plugged into).
Realistically the true figure is probably around a quarter of that; prepayment meters were very popular among the renting population of the time, and those who wanted to track their energy usage carefully and only pay for it with cash as and when needed, and sometimes people had these meters forced upon them by suppliers after the customer had demonstrated poor payment history, but they were far from the norm.
Average home owner buying plug-in solar at a supermarket isn't going to know or care about any of this. They'll just plug it in, and it will work, until one day maybe it doesn't and their supplier opens a theft investigation.
So if you spent a week with the meter connected normally, then you swapped the input and output cables around for a week, the meter would be back at zero. Free electricity!
They used anti-tamper seals to make it more detectable, but there are ways around that sort of thing.
https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/anti-islanding-and-smart...
question is whether the ones allowed for sale implement it well and are tested for it
You have 4 neighbors, all with grid-tied inverters, all of which will do rapid shutdown if the grid goes down.
The grid does go down ... but are there circumstances under which the presence of neighboring inverters will "hide" the grid being down from each inverter, and so they will keep delivering power back to the grid ?
Consider 100 homes on a power line network and the breaker trips. They probably draw 50kW on average, more if it's hot or cold and AC is on. Unless there's enough power generation available to power that entire load, voltage will drop and any halfway reasonable hardware should give up.
What do you mean by "guaranteed surge protection"? Are you an electrician to write like that?
And it is of course home-counties obsessed thinking. They can both afford these toys and also have more sun
Every solar farm doesn't need to be China Size - it doesn't even need to be a "farm", just put them on roofs.
And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes there are times when solar doesn't produce energy, but there are also times where it OVERproduces.
When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could be producing energy instead. So you pay actually twice. When the solar underproduces, you need to bring in alternative sources, but those now have to cover all their fixed costs and generate return on investment over this limited timeframe, which means the actual backup prices hit stratospheric levels.
What's the actual cost of solar with actual net-billing?
Charge batteries, do electrolysis, or a multitude of other uses (I know some companies do that already)
There is no clear path to switching these arrays to Net Metering, as of yet. Prepare for all sorts of unrecycled solar panels and potential loss of renewable capacity that is already installed.
Old inverters might not have a second life though.
There is not-yet a fully funded or thought-through method for extending contracts or providing better-than-dismantle options to contract owners that is/are accessible.
Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner time and 50MW through the night, or if instead it's 79MW at noon and 91MW at dinner and 51MW at night. The gas costs about the same irrespective of when I burn it so a bit of a fuel shift doesn't really matter.
But take that 1MW and turn it into 20MW and suddenly we go from 80MW at noon to 60MW at noon, 90MW at dinner to 110MW at dinner and uh oh. You see the problem? Whatever losses I endured at noon I don't get to make up for at dinner because my plant only goes up to 100MW and now we're not just shifting when we burn how much fuel, we're literally having to shift the power generation to a different plant.
Is this example precisely accurate? Absolutely not. But it helps you get a feel for the problem of net metering at scale. The grid can act as a battery for a few % of total generation, but by the time you hit some number, maybe 20% maybe 40% net metering turns from a cool math trick to a real cost on the grid.
It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price. (Let's ignore the sanitary/health/quality issues that would come up.) You decide to buy a cow and you drink that milk. Sometimes you need more than your cow can give so you buy extra from the store. Sometimes you need less and you sell the extra to the store. Long term, you use as much as your cow produces on average, so you pay the store nothing. But the store has provided a valuable services to you and has incurred expenses in doing so. They have to keep the lights on and maintain a building and pay workers to handle your transactions but they make no money from you. The only way it would work at all is if they made enough money from their non-cow-owning customers to make up for it, and that can only take you so far.
I know of quite a few places where through net metering you don't get full price, you get the wholesale rate for your production which is significantly less.
And when the prices go up, you run that through a grid scale fuel cell and feed it back to the network.
You don't have to do this with solar, you can just disconnect the panel and have it go a bit hotter. For producers that have a long-ish bringup time, yes, you might need to do this at time.
Wind farms don't consume energy, but there is a real issue with how often they have to be "curtailed" (paid to turn off). That is to a great extent due to issues with grid connectivity between Scotland and the rest of the UK, which are (slowly) being worked on.
https://www.enlitia.com/resources-blog-post/what-is-wind-cur...
"paid to turn off" Wind energy providers in some countries are compensated for curtailment, this a form of subsidy for renewables. It can be payed directly by the goverment, or it is added to the price of electricity for consumer.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewable-curtailment-c...
Here's the thing. That's a rule and not a technical problem. Absolutely no reason to do this other than rules and regulations.
People don't even bother to argue why it's bad, they've just seen so many headlines telling them it's bad they don't question it.
The people who pay that cost to the people using the energy are people running energy generators that suffer wear and tear when they ramp down.
Or sometimes it's a subsidy for the use of clean energy being passed on to ensure the clean energy is actually used, not wasted.
All upside, no problems at all.
In Germany's case it's the tax payer, thanks to extremely generous subsidies that are excluded from state aid regulation
Can't we just throttle the solar panel? In a worst case, you just pull the plug. It's not like a nuclear power plant which needs to be shut down carefully, or am I misunderstanding something?
Not sure how is situation with home installations, factory i work for runs 150kw plant for our own consumption and don't bother with selling, but i know that we can set up how much we want/are allowed to feed back.
It borders on criminal to have abundant energy production be disservice.
Even better though, would be a cheap electrically operated methane plant that you could afford to run intermittently. This, plus a peaker natgas generating plant make, effectively, a battery of infinite size, or you can sell it to any of the many eager buyers of natgas.
Building a small, prefab, plant like this, if possible, would seem to be mainly a problem of scale, and therefore it seems likely that China will get to it pretty soon.
I'm also surprised they aren't using batteries to capture overproduction. They've been clutch in the US, and we're not exactly pushing the envelope of green energy nowadays
I did my own battery backed installation. When I'm underproducing I can shed load (I turn off my AC - almost always that's enough, and it's automated by relay). When I'm overproducing (ex - my battery is full and my load is still not enough to consume input) I just don't let the panels generate more current than I can consume.
Managing grid scale power is different concern, and not particularly relevant to small household generation. Especially not relevant in the 800W category for "balcony solar" (which is much smaller than what I'm working with).
Solar is fucking coming, whether you continue to shove head into the ground or not.
It's just way more affordable. Getting easily more affordable as batteries continue to improve.
I honestly doubt I'll still be connected to a local utility grid for electric 10 years from now, and I live in a region of the US that has considerably cheaper grid power than most areas.
When it's too worn out for car use (SoH around 60-70%), it's still perfectly enough to run _everything_ in my house for multiple days - except for the electric sauna, and I'm smart enough to turn it on if there are production issues :D
There's a reason why EV's will never be as cheap as the cheapest ICE shitbox. Just the bare metals in the battery are worth thousands when recycled, even more if the battery is still viable.
I did mine with it and old leaf 24kwh battery (~60k km). After all the safety margins I get ~15 kwh out of the battery.
I'm curious what your home insurance provider has to say about your installation.
I'm somewhat sceptical that used batteries will ever be worth much other than as scrap given the cost and complexity in testing, installing, and managing a mixed set of used batteries in larger installations.
With new batteries halving in price every 4 years or so the value of the raw materials in old NMC batteries alone should make it economical to sell for scrap and buy new batteries for stationary use cases after 10 years or so!
(1) while it makes sense to me to distribute generation, because there are not really any significant economies of scale other than purchasing power, it doesn't make sense to distribute storage which, IIUC, has huge economies of scale.
(2) being fully off-grid where I live requires homes that can be heated in winter with heat pumps that require less than mid-winter generation levels. That means, in general, much better construction techniques than most current houses have. At our house, we generate 2x of our needs in the non-heating season, and 0.5x of our need in the heating season - covering that demand with a battery would be ridiculous.
This is a really big component in most western countries, so big installations are always going to be more cost effective, but there's nothing special about storage vs solar or anything else.
I suppose storage is smaller, so you don't have to pay for much land like you would solar (and where homeowners are basically utilising an underused resource so they have a cost advantage in that respect)
Our grid infrastructure isn't cheap. We need a huge amount of equipment to do the voltage conversions to make power lines semi-sane. We also need a ton of space, maintenance and equipment to run the wiring, install the transformers, handle substations and distribution, etc...
My suspicion is that if you account for that, local storage is cheaper. But I think we're still finding out where battery tech is going to settle.
I'd be having a very different conversation if we hadn't introduced LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries, and realistically - these have only been on the market ~15 years now, and only really generally available for 5 or 6 years.
These are already pretty incredible batteries. A bank them the size of a washing machine will power most residential homes for days, cost under 10K, and be very safe. Prismatic LFP cells run ~$100/kwh (not theoretically, right now: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...)
If we see a similar upgrade with Sodium (and it's looking more and more real, multiple commercial products have hit the market last year) - then I think a decade from now we'll really start to wonder why we're wasting so much land and spending so much on grid equipment if you can just install a small bank of batteries for a couple thousand dollars and call it done.
Will you still have economies of scale with storage? Probably. Will those outweigh costs to transmit that to where it needs to go? My hunch is no.
---
On a darker note - individual generation and storage is WAY more robust to military disruption. No central location to bomb to knock out power for a whole city.
Curtailment is when an energy company has successfully bid on delivering electricity for the next block of time (an hour, for example) but it can’t provide that agreed amount of power because it would overload the grid. There are various reasons why that would happen: faults and unexpected lack of demand, for example. In that case the company is paid for the energy it was contracted to deliver, only for that period of time, even though it did not provide power.
It is wrong to say that overproducers HAVE to be paid. They don’t. They only have to be paid if there was an agreement to buy that power but for whatever reason the grid can’t take it. Normally if there is a generation surplus, the cheapest companies will win the bid to provide power and the others will simply not be paid.
A few times the price has actually been negative, people got paid for using electricity due to overproduction =)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
The amounts for year 2025: Nuclear 32 TWh, Wind 22 TWh, Hydro 12 TWh, Solar 1TWh.
In California grid scale batteries have capital costs of around $125/kWh to $155/kWh while a home battery might be 20x that including installation.
Once the early adopters run out they will have to start competing on price to make sales. There's no justification for a home battery when they charge 10k for 10kwh as they do now - only early adopters and government subsidies getting it over the line.
IMO home batteries should be a relatively easy install in principle, it's just still in that early expensive phase.
_grabbing popcorn_
Like you say, I want trains - proper infrastructure supported renewables, not Teslas - home individual infra only affordable by wealthy individuals at the cost of shared infrastructure while lowering resilience because it still uses shared infrastructure.
The inevitability of the energy transition has been obvious for so long, and even when it’s done there will be cranks insisting that it’ll never work.
We don't produce solar panels or have the materials to produce them in Europe. So we're just as dependent on imports as before.
And even if you don't make them yourselves, they aren't make and then burn like fossil fuels, they are durable infrastructure, you don't have to replace them often - they have an expected lifespan of >30 years. Buy as many as China will sell you, and once you have more than enough installed, you're good for a long time, regardless of whether they cut you off.
I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long, it's a bit tricky to mindset shift that once these things are installed, you're just good. And they're super fungible, you don't need any precision replacement parts, so you can make your own replacement parts if you want.
More like <25 years.
> I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long
France isn't. And they are net exporting their (nuclear fission) electricity to their neighbours who shut down nuclear power plants.
Unlike what you imply, they don't explode and you have to replace them all. They just keep producing, but less.
If you chase down all inputs into everything you need to generate power you will find you're not truly independent from anyone. But solar panels and various other renewables hardware is much easier to stockpile than oil.
> but there is nothing inevitable about it
The Middle East is not going back to normal any time soon. The Israeli/US attack on Iran is a strategic catastrophe, implemented by two felons advised by ideologues and incompetents. The conditions are right to make oil more expensive for a long time, regardless of the outcome of the war. True peace is very unlikely to never be achieved. For instance: Iran now has a massive incentive to build nukes.
Meanwhile solar panel, wind farm, and battery prices are dropping like a rock and they avoid all of the problems of oil. Only the most ideologically fixated wouldn't invest in and install renewables. Anything that makes huge amounts of money is indeed inevitable.
Huge difference between tranistioning to renewables and going completely de-centralised. Even if we put a limit to the latter at the community level, it's a recipe for de-industrialisation. Centralised power production, even with renewables, has economies of scale, and those economies amplify with volatile demand sources, e.g. residences.
When you consider the logistics of strengthening the last mile of residential to accommodate EVs in a sparsely populated place like the US (or rather the apparent lack of political will to do so) it starts to look extremely attractive.
There is a middle ground: decentralize enough to run essential services. Run the rest through the grid. The big downside to decentralising residential power is that's variable demand–precisely the sort of demand you can net out against other parts of the grid. The sort of variance that makes grids more economic than everyone powering themselves.
(Again, in rural settings, yes–decentralise.)
Residential is variable but for the most part not all that amenable to time shifting, at least at present. Isn't a grid most efficient with a constant load, with the next best being something that varies only slowly over time and is highly predictable?
Then there's EVs. I'm under the impression that replacing a notable fraction of the ICE cars on the road with EVs would at present place the grid over capacity most places in the US.
When it comes to unit cost doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook? I don't see why residential considerations should make much (or even any) difference to dense commercial or extremely high capacity industrial users. Given that solar plus battery is reasonably affordable for a large chunk of the US population it doesn't really seem like much of a downside when framed as a voluntary expense. I still see people building it out where I'm at (suburbs) despite (AFAIK) the subsidies ending.
That’s fine. A solar system specced to a house has to meet its max drawdown. A house connected to a grid can effectively pawn off its unused power to another user. That’s the efficiency of a grid.
> doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook?
Yes. The NPV of a blended system (solar, maybe battery and grid) almost always beats going all in on one or the other. You spec to your base load and put the uncertainty on the grid. That way you don’t have to overprovision solar and battery. (And you’re good with your essentials if the power goes out.)
This is almost universally true unless you have super-subsidized solar (bonus points for an expensive grid, e.g. California) or stupidly-cheap and reliable grid power (until recently, the Gulf).
I think the evidence is overwhelming that renewables plus storage will provide the bulk of our energy needs, or at least electricity needs, in the very near future. But I think the idea that it will be some sort of libertarian/individualistic utopia if we're all generating our own power and living off grid is a fallacy. This sort of widespread "off grid" living (beyond a small number of ideologues/enthusiasts) is what you only see essentially in failed states, where communal services are unreliable and the social contract is so frayed that people need to inefficiently generate their own power. One can argue the US and other Western countries are headed that way, but I don't think that's "obvious" or necessarily a good thing.
A much more "obvious" solution IMO is to invest in efficient, grid-scale renewable generation combined with robust storage tiers, as well us long overdue updates to the grid.
And to emphasize, because I'm sure it will get lost in translation, I'm in no way saying people shouldn't be self-sufficient or install rooftop solar if they want to. What I am saying is that widespread rooftop solar as the "of course that's the right answer" endgame of renewables deployment is in no way obvious, inevitable or even desirable.
Individual rooftop solar + home batteries _is_ how we're doing this in Australia. You can connect your home setup directly to the wholesale grid and import/export electricity at appropriate times.
Anything bigger in scale is prone to being shittified to the limit by public entities.
Putting them in charge of your electricity won't be all sunshine and rainbows.
the what now?
Even the battery installation for a large house borders on questionable. That's not a utility closet your average person should be wandering into under any circumstances and it's easy to run up a massive bill in an instant (if you aren't lucky you might simultaneously kill yourself) but at least that's limited to your personal property.
It's relatively easy to set up a grid in which several houses produce, storage and exchange energy with a simplified free market pricing system.
Alas, in most countries it's illegal because you aren't allowed to set up such a network. Energy is one of the big control levers the State has over people.
Energy independence is good for individuals, not just countries. Just like privately owned cars are horribly inefficient, independence wins out.
Back in the day having hundreds of nets that are not interconnectable and running everything on coal or gas made things hard to scale. But today interconnections can easily be done through a converter, you don't even have to match demand and production as you have storage and the more productors available, the cheaper and more stable the energy gets.
You also have individuals on the microgrid that actually care about the quality of the microgrid.
I have solar on my house and am seeing around 50% self sufficiency overall. Of course with this much saturation, the rate you get paid for feeding back to the grid is quickly dropping to zero. So self use is the game now.
The problem is now shifting to home batteries and storage. Because peak power household use times are in the evening when the sun is not shining.
Back when solar was much, much more expensive this sort of thing mattered. Now the panels have plunged in price so much, you just deploy more panels (cost of install and other central stuff is the same) and/or accept the longer payback period.
Cold climates do better than one might expect because the colder a solar panel is, the better it works.
It's not really, the sun doesen't rise above the horizon for over a month where I live. quadrupling zero output is still zero. The country has massive renewable so by the time solar would generate something, electricity is already super cheap
I'm getting a 48kwh battery put in with a 3 phase inverter for $6500 AUD in like a week.
I'm going to start calling this a Jehovah's Witness complex. Where amplified, mostly imagined mockery of an incredibly dominant view, at least in group, is used as evidence of that view's righteousness and, by extension, rightness.
> prices will not be dropping...Energy grid decentralization is occurring
Cost versus resilience. A low-cost grid has lots of centralised production earning economies of scale. A highly-resilient system doesn't even need a grid, but it's going to be high cost.
The correct answer is in between. Rural electrification should be done entirely decentralised. Meanwhile, trying to run a city (or even most industry) on de-centralised power is a recipe for ruin.
But it is not just cost. It is a level of control the contractor has over it. The solar systems, as currently pushed, are designed to be carefully monitored at all times; if you read the contract ( in IL anyway, but I presume it is common, because my mom had a similar experience ), I have to give the company a way in every time they desire to look at the panels. I can't just take it down, I need to hire them. I can't not sell the house without them ( and the buyer has to take over that contract ).
I like solar tech, but the was it is designed is .. very American in the worst possible way. Yes, there seem to be better options popping up, but that is not where contractor money is at..
edit: Just in case, I got a quote in 2024 so obviously things may have changed on that front ( oddly, BBB may actually help with my particular set of complaints as the contractors will have to spread their bets somewhat ).
This varies from place to place. I got a quote for solar in Wyoming. It's 100% my deal. Nobody is leasing anything. If I skip inspections and fuck up my roof, that's on me.
I did my own install of a ground mount 6.7kW array. I initially declined to connect to the inverter manufacturer's monitoring, because I did not want my system hooked up to the internet.
Then, in the spring of 2024, the inverter failed (it was still under warranty). I was travelling at the time, but that may have made no difference at all. It took me a month to notice that generation had gone to zero.
Once I found out, and replaced the inverter, I chose to connect it not because the system requires it (it absolutely does not!), but so that the manufacturer would alert me in the future if a similar failure happened.
Ideally, I'd like to be able run a monitoring app locally, with no internet connection. For now, I'll take the remote monitoring despite my misgivings about it.
I did have to take a very challenging exam to get licensed by the state for "home owner solar" - much harder than I expected given the NEC sections and the fact that it was open book.
I have a Shelly Pro 3EM three phase current meter device on my home battery connection just to get more accurate data into Home Assistant because the battery provider doesn't provide it. (In hindsight I should've bought a different battery install but that's not something I can change after the fact...)
Spot on!
Here in Canada I did a half DIY install, I own everything, forever. Zero out of pocket, interest free loan. Over 30 years I’ll pocket about $25k
Amazing what you can do when you copy how the US electrified in the first place.
https://shop-sicatron.de/products/sicatron-910w-balkonkraftw...
You still need attachment material for your balcony.
Keep in mind that this system will input all it's power into your power grid. If you don't use the power it will go directly into the public grid.
Still, really good cost saving measure.
So for 250 to 400€ you can get a system that will break even latest after four years, likely earlier.
Consider a circuit in a home, designed to carry 16A like a common EU/UK circuit, protected by a 16A breaker. Then plug in solar or a battery that delivers just a small 10A. Now in case some other thing on that circuit draws 26A, the breaker doesn't stop it and the circuit is overloaded.
If that same solar was installed as a fixed setup on its own circuit with no other loads on it, it would be safe and protected by the 16A breaker in the switchboard. It's the combination with other loads that causes issues.
Perhaps they could somehow detect each other and shut off.
Plus it increases equity because this primarily opens up solar for those in rented accommodation and apartments/flats who otherwise couldn't access it. Personally that feels well worth pursuing if it's deemed safe.
Instead of the solar having a plug that goes into a wall socket, why not have a plug on it that screws directly into the fusebox ? Then you know that it is the ONLY device on the circuit.
Now let's take french household prices per kwh of 25ct/kwh. It means at 5kwh/day consumption the bill would be 450eur/y. So a 3k investment in this case would pay for itself in 6-7 years.
For a german household with highest prices in EU payback would be in about 4y assuming 40ct/kwh
But realistically many will not even buy a bess not being able to capture all solar output and many will have worse solar conditions. I'm not sure balcony solar in Germany generates even 1% of total solar production in the country despite streamlined installation process
"Many consumers want to know how long it will take them to make back the upfront costs of solar"
my answer is that the payback is imediate, right from the first moment watching as energy is generated out of thin air, and the sudden relief from getting off the energy angst missery-go-round, and the sheer borring inertness of solar pv as it does the thing with zero detectable effort, is gratifying and relaxing in a way that money never gives.
I will add that solar pv is increadably robust, and damage tollerant as well, you can drive a claw hammer through a panel, and while it does not improve the performance, the degradation is actualy not that much, and it will continue to function for years
At the same time, many people will just use a solar calculator or watch or yard lights etc, oblivious to it all.
Show people a solar powered laptop, a solar powered phone, or a solar powered tablet, then they will be impressed.
Remember the craze about solar powered car competitions?
permacompute + solar would make for quite the $100 laptop competition.
Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess if we had a battery too (more investment) then we could switch to using electric oil-filled radiators, though they would not heat the whole house. And we could install a hot water tank.
I guess for new builds there is a real opportunity, but for an existing household I'm struggling to see how it works - and I want it to!
This ROI calculator looks reasonable: https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html - note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case where the final figure is positive is profitable. But of course that depends on whether grid prices go up or down in the next decade ...
I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is that it is understood that electricity production is in dire straights, taking into account that the transition to EV requires a lot of electricity.
Not really. Urban flats frequently got resistive heating (rather than heat pumps) but when France finally phased out furnace oil it phased in gas heating (again instead of heat pumps).
And EU grid integration was mostly a boon, at least to EDF, with the country able to export its large stable supply and arbitrage between its neighbours.
It largely missed its opportunity and should have ramped up electric use way more aggressively in the 90s. And built up research labs and industrial and practical knowledge in heat pumps and batteries tech.
[1] https://franfinance.com/les-francais-et-le-chauffage-de-leur...
It's 40% of households not homes, and per your link it's 55% of rentals.
That's the urban flats I mentioned, they use inefficient resistive heating because that's cheap to install (no plumbing and no vents, just the electrician adding a circuit per radiator from the box).
The mistranslation gives the incorrect impression that owners have migrated their personal residences to resistive heating and that this is the normal heating method for the country.
Landlords cheaping out on heating is a completely different situation, and does not support your assertion. Especially with (again per your link) renters are significantly less satisfied with their heating situation than owners.
> you agree with me then
No.
I think both.
For an 800W balcony system your background house usage is likely to be enough to self consume most of it.
You'd wouldn't be able to run even a small oil heater except maybe in peak summer.
It's a good match for working from home as it's a small amount of power spread over daylight hours.
Yes it's probably more practical that it's powering your laptop and the coffee maker and that sort of thing.
At this point, I do not understand how anyone can possibly believe that the people advocating for this stuff are thinking in terms of economic (as opposed to political or social) returns. This stuff makes no economic sense and is already bankrupting the country.
Also, there is a legal requirement for new builds to have this now, this is with a massive shortage of housing, with a government that is a government of the "people" but has just put out the same housing targets as the last one and is running 75% behind annually. The scale of subsidies being given to these industries is probably tens of billions, green energy subsidies are now 5x larger than industry profits...this makes no sense, even with sky-high electricity prices (to be clear, it is consumers who are ultimately paying for this...we pay higher prices so that a lawyer somewhere can prattle on about leading a "green revolution" that is lining the pockets of donors).
Guy I spoke about above lives in a part of the UK with less sunlight, there was extensive tree cover around his property, and the job was done incorrectly (but full subsidy paid). As I said, there is wilful corruption and, therefore, it is impossible to engage with this subject on the basis of rational economic thought. Companies receiving the subsidies pretend to be doing work and politicians pretend the companies are saving the environment.
My ground mount array(s) required concrete foundations that were 5' deep and 17" in diameter, and the frame cost $2k in iron piping. There's nothing remotely comparable in a roof install.
I guess people just charge more because "we're on your roof, which is tricky".
> my answer is that the payback is imediate,
So if I pay $35k for an install, I get a $35k check the first time I connect it to the grid? Pretty sure it doesn't work that way. But it would be a nice subsidy from the government if they were really motivated.
I guess you're saying you start to feel good and validated to have spent the money by seeing _some_ savings every billing period. It's hard to argue with feelings of course, but that's not not the original concern. People want to know how long is it going to take: 1, 5, 10 years or ... never (if panels degrade or break before it will never pay off) to pay off their investment.
> According to Solar Power Europe, it takes an average of two to six years to recoup the cost of the system, depending on what you paid for it, its size and where you mount it.
And then it just keeps working for decades. There's degradation, but even after 25 years I believe it's down to maybe 85% output, which is still huge for something with essentially no operating costs.
The fun part is that we might never recoup the cost of our gasoline backup generator, as it only worked for about 10 hours in 30 years.
Anyone that worries today about degradation has zero real interest in this stuff, just complains for the sake of complaining.
The other thing it made me is angry at the political morass that these things seem to be in.
At a technical level I understand the ‘base load’ arguments, but we are throwing away _so much energy_ that’s just there for the taking by not having these everywhere. On most days, our house (in Western North Carolina) gets enough energy from the sun that we net-export to the grid - and we have an EV! There’s just no need for the massive amounts of carbon we are spewing into the air - the energy is just falling onto us!
In the future, providing we’re still around, we’ll look back at a time when we could’ve been getting all our energy needs from just the sun (and wind etc.) and shake our heads in disbelief at those who fought against the idea that we should even think about efficiently using it so viscerally.
Over 30 years we’ll profit ~$25k after spending zero.
It’s crazy how my energy just hits the ground everyday.
As far as I know, they never cracked the European market, so if you’re interested in working on that, I’m currently available for hire! Info in profile :)
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/switzerland-...
For instance, isn't it complicated to have their output be in perfect sync with the frequency that comes in via the electricity net? Because to me it seems that if they won't, you will have lower benefits or even a net minus after plugging it in.
Not especially, given that the inverter has a microprocessor in it. All it has to do is measure the phase of the existing grid.
I don't have references for how it's actually done, but one obvious approach is simply to wait at each zero-crossing for a new half-cycle to cross a voltage threshold before turning on the output. This also implements the requirement to drop out if the grid goes away. It is probably also possible to measure during the "off" side of inverter output PWM, in the same way that variable frequency motor drivers work.
Some systems are capable of running in isolation from grid (providing 230V AC on their own), but this is less common and often unnecessary.
If everyone plugged one in, could the transmission network reliably deliver the power generated where it's needed? I thought that was a serious long term challenge for utilities wrt solar.
It’s a downside of many grid tied residential systems (even large ones). No grid = no solar.
The Enphase IQ8 series is one of the first mass market micro inverters based systems to have the ability to make its own tiny electric island when the grid goes down. Requires an isolation switch and a relatively power hungry controller to use that feature, though. I looked into them for a balcony solar setup but it would be way overkill to run a full on controller for 800w of solar!
The best way for a small setup is just have a small “solar generator” battery that can take MC4 connectors as input. Prolonged power outage? Unplug the inverter, plug in the battery.
We were warned if we turned on the system before the meter upgrade the old meter would sum together power coming from the grid and power going into it from our solar and we would be billed for the combined.
So with some old meters you don’t want to put power into the grid.
Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e. landlord) actually can't easily stop you from doing this.
It's not clear to me why, for example, 2kW of panels which are also limited to 800W need need the special plug.
Hopefully I'm wrong!
"With a standard Schuko plug, a maximum of 960 watts peak is allowed on the DC side, regulated by DIN VDE V 0126-95. With the Wieland connector, a special feed-in socket, the limit increases to 2,000 watts peak. Anyone wanting to operate a system with up to 7,000 watts of module power will need a permanently installed feed-in socket, thus entering a range that is technically possible but also more complex to implement."
Shockingly unbureaucratic for Germany.
There is, as one could imagine, somewhat more burden for larger systems that require the involvement of someone who is actually an electrician, but I don't want my neighbors to be able to DIY fire hazards.
God forbid you produce more, or try to sell it for market prices or even sell it directly to other individuals through a microgrid.
It's a worse deal for people who have spent the capital to reduce their ongoing expenses, and it's a worse deal for people who have very low electricity usage (likely poorer people and those who are naturally frugal). It's possibly a better deal for heavy electricity users, and I'm not sure that's who should be rewarded. No, I am sure: they shouldn't be rewarded.
Heck, I don't even have anywhere to place a heatpump, let alone a hot water tank.
America - "I'mma roll coal and scream about birds and windmills."
Compare that to oil and gas which has to continually be shipped. And no one says that we won't figure out how to produce these things ourselves one day.
Wait until you tell them you can run cars entirely on electricity from a solar farming. I'm sure they will ignore you until the price of diesel reaches four-digit territory. 1000p today? If only we didn't have to pay these incredible prices, what a miracle that would be..
So politicians have a choice: do what's right for the people, or gain more power/money for themselves. Not every one of them chooses poorly, but enough do that it is difficult for real progress to be made.
People earnestly and genuinely spout "But the birds" to wind installations. Why are they so intent on taking any possible excuse? Why do they need to have an opinion on something they know nothing about?
- panel 490Wp 2sq.m chinese = ~80E
- battery 5kwh Li chinese = ~1200E , non-chinese ~2000E+
- hybrid invertor+charger 4kw = ~800E chinese , ~2000E non-chinese
- grid and regulations:
-- day price: 0.15E/kWh, night: 0.09E/kWh
-- no such thing as spot prices - summer or winter, peak sun or midnight, no difference
-- can install anything AS LONG AS Nothing goes back into grid - and does not break other city/dwelling rules
The (proven) efficiency one can get is about 50-60% per Wp (if there is sun). So.. it depends how much panels one can install as that is the monie-source, all else is monie-sink :/
Rough Napkin math, electronics with german prices, ~5 hours per day sun on average: 10 panels (1000E) + 2 batteries (2000E) + inverter (1000E) ~~4000E yielding on average 440kwh/month i.e. pay itself in 5-7+ years, mostly for summer loads. While 5 panels + 1 battery + inverter ~2500E -> ~220kwh/month -> 6-8+ years
BUT only IF you can use that much electricity, otherwise it will take much longer to repay. And, batteries have to be replaced probably in 5-7 years, depending on depth-of-discharge.
In most places here everything is electrical. i have convectors, boilers, stove, etc. No A/C. (all other electrics is maybe under 2kw in total). i use like day/night 400/250kWh in summer, 1400/800 kWh in winter. Some people have noisy heat pumps but doubt that changes things much.
If it was a separate house - i would have done it long ago. But it's a block of flats.
So... small Balcony stuff makes no sense (a very expensive UPS?), big balcony stuff (like putting those 5 panels as balcony's shade.. a) probably won't be allowed, b) only a short balcony faces south-ish.
The roof of the building is empty - 250sq.m - and can hold about 75 panels - but dividing that into 15 (or 50+ in higher buildings).. is not pretty. a) Making one single farm and splitting the bill/output seems the only reasonable way but does not work without completely rewiring the building's grid input and measurings; not doable without bunch of permissions/certifications ; while b) making 15 separate 5-panels-packs - is not much economical, plus few kilometers of cables.. And c) If only few people want panels on roof, maybe some form of renting the roof space from others who don't want.. may work for a while but as any renting, may go crazy.
So.. been sitting and thinking.. and recently seems only sitting..
The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into the grid.
The problem is that in the end it will become more expensive for everybody because at times you have a surplus driving the whole sale electricity prices into the negative while still paying fixed prices for injection into the grid.
To make this economically viable, you have to have everyone paying spot prices. Everything else is just green ideology driven inefficiency.
Just to make it clear, I think renewables are an important option for the future. But to make them a viable option of the electricity energy mix, supply and demand, storage and grid capacity need to be taken into account.
Last not least, there is plenty of low hanging fruit to drive CO2 emissions down: drive up the truck tolls. Currently you have potatoes farmed in Germany, driven to Poland to get washed, transported to Italy to be converted to french fries and transferred back to Germany into the super markets.
Same goes for home office, during Covid it was possible for many workers to continue with their work. Does an accountant need to drive to an office every day? Nope. How many business trips could be replaced by a video call?
If the CO2 emissions problem is to be solved rather sooner than later, the money has to be spend efficiently as there isn't enough of it.
What is this supposed to mean? You flush less water, therefore water price is more expensive, because flushed water needs to be paid too?
I honestly don't see the problem, it's probably still worth it (because society still needs to provide less tap water and saves there).
Or not. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article152318777/Wassersparen...
Edit: parent changed his answer, I have included it now.
If you, a single person, cut your water usage in half, you pay half as much. But if everybody uses half as much, the system still needs about the same amount of funding. So now you double the per-unit price, and everybody pays the same they were before spending money on water saving features. In this case, even if each person used half as much water, the total water needed isn't cut in half because the sewers need more water to function.
(Also, water isn't "used"; most of it's transported, cleaned, transported, dirtied, cleaned again, transported)
All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.
As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is very different when it comes out of a different account.
(everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers of new homes)
They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.
Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards.
On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.
I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels to a large grid scale one.
But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra 12% of installed solar capacity.
Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now. But it's also almost free.
In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.
To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the US only utility scale is competitive with that.
Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.
Neither of these is going to be true for the UK balcony scheme (you can't get export generation pricing unless it's an MCS-certified install).
> drive up the truck tolls.
The price of diesel is going to do this anyway very soon.
It would make much more sense to import (renewable) electricity from Spain to Germany than strawberries.
Gold coins? Pesos? Cows? Inferior-quality copper ingots?
It's entirely possible that you have a good point, but if so, it's gonna need a whole hell of a lot more context to elucidate.
That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The web of collaboration between all these far-flung people who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most of our material stuff.
... And in a conventional market system, the core of how those people coordinate their efforts is money. The price that each person is willing to buy something for or sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about it relative to other things. And markets are one popular way of aggregating that information, helping guide society's cooperative efforts in the direction of what people care about.
There are various allocation systems that don't involve money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to discourage freeloading, for example, can be found all over the place in pre-modern history because it worked – as long as your community was small enough that you can realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to scale up operations research toward the level of nations, since suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures were both instructive.)
--
Coordination problems are hugely underrated in political discourse. So when I hear people say things like "The economic system is the ideology holding us back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this person thought about a what a viable alternative would look like?
"I dislike the current system" is only the first and most trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink here.]"
Rising petrol prices here in Australia draw criticism against fossil fuel wholesalers - as if they are doing this solely to screw over Australians. The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.
Careful using words like "need". The resources are allocated to the economically most efficient sectors. Since if you are economically efficient, your profits are higher and can afford to pay more than others.
In most cases these are congruent ideas, though. If I have no choice but to drive, but someone can drive or take public transport or work from home, high fuel prices incentivise them to not use it, saving some for myself.
I'm sure there are plenty of people throughout an economy who just don't care, but on average it has substantial impacts, and it's common now for people to totally dismiss that.
"It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology." - Slavoj Zizek
> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.
This, for example, is a deeply ideological statement. Do I really need something most just cause I can pay more for it? Does the billionaire need the mansion more than the homeless person needs some living space?
Yes, there are plenty of people with high incomes who continue commanding resources they may not strictly "need", but across the economy as a whole the effects of these prices is still to allocate resources in an efficient way. The point is this avoids an acute shortage and rationing, which is the alternative to transmitting this information via prices and almost certainly far less economically productive.
Grids are not set up to move significant percentages of national consumption over longer distances, and expansion is slow, expensive and prone to nimbyism.
Countries already struggle to move electrical energy inside their own borders (e.g. Germany: north=>south), shifting double digit percentages of national consumption across Europe is not gonna happen any time soon. Germany alone plans to spend at least ~€100bn over the next decade on this (internally, not on connecting Spain!).
Much more effective to focus on local generation first than to try and rely on slightly better conditions for solar panels half a continent away.
The reason why personal solar installations are profitable is that you can buy electricity for fixed prices from your local power company. You pay the average of the vastly different low (or negative) prices during the day and the extremely expensive prices on windstill nights. Solar allows you to use your own electricity when the average is below spot prices, and get power for much less when the price you pay is cheaper than spot prices. It's like a state-approved scheme to play the market in the name of decarbonization while actually increasing everybody else's prices and possibly even CO2 emissions.
There are various good websites for showing the UK generation mix, but pricing seems less public. A lot seems to be done on day-ahead, which is pricing for the whole day not minute by minute. Is there a minute-by-minute ticker? Tariff?
(the reason I'm asking is that I'm skeptical as to how true this is for places that aren't California)
It would be nice to have some belated insight into how the bids look. Like maybe a few random hours released from a week ago?
Oh, and it's half hours. You can't buy or sell five minutes of electricity, just half hours, which is why your smart meter also thinks in half hours. 48 periods per day.
You can do exactly that by buying battery packs but (1) they are more expensice pieces of kit than solar panels and (2) capacity and output of DYI/plug in systems is very limited.
A quick check online also says that (in the UK) peak spot prices are usually 7am-10am and 5pm-9pm, which are basically when demand picks up or hasn't dropped yet while solar panels are useless...
Batteries help, but even that is limited in northern countries like the UK. If you look at the data, in July '25, solar produced 2.36 TWh. But in December '25, it was only 0.535 TWh: the output in summer is >4 times the winter output. So either you need to discard 75% of the electricity produced in summer, or you need truly gigantic batteries that store power produced in summer for winter. Both is not economical. Solar is far less efficient in the UK than in, for example, Florida.
With solar specifically you have the obvious day/night cycle, which makes storage required to make the most of it.
Which is never, because even then you are still paying some sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network fees.
The price of electricity from the network also has to include the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to recoup initial investment.
Of course this means given enough home installations (in places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the network will rise, more people will install their own stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already in Pakistan.
This will also happen to people that use residential gas. As less and less people use residential gas, the maintenance of the gas network gets distributed among less and less customers.
> The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into the grid.
They are subsidized on purchase, but the price they get when pushing energy into the grid is by default fixed at 0. The network accepts the power, but there's no payment. It's also capped at 800W delivery, meaning that at peak power generation, you'd earn a whopping 5 cent an hour with the current subsidy for full scale solar power. So in practice, the only benefit owners have is that they draw less power from the net which is much more attractive because of the pricing structure. You can, optionally, register your balcony power station as a regular solar power plant, but then you're subject to a whole bunch of rules and regulations (for example you need a suitable elctricity meter etc.). This option is generally not attractive for such small power generations.
Fundamentally, though, the same issue as with the water and gas network exists with all localized (solar) power generation. If more and more people use the grid only as a backup, or for winter energy needs, then the overhead of maintaining the grid will have a larger cost contribution to the total cost of electricity.