Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm | Hacker News Reader

Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm

hackaday.com

90 pointslxm38 comments

I have 2kW of panels on my balcony and 4kWh of batteries. I'm happy with the setup. I expect it to pay for itself in just a few years. The only thing I wish it had is open APIs to control the inverter and the batteries, ideally over bluetooth, so that I'm not forced to use an app.

If port 502/TCP is open you can probably access it via Modbus protocol. Implementing a Modbus client is trivial.

My rebranded Fox ESS hardware has it enabled and there's even official documentation of the so-called "registers".

I use victron devices and a litime battery + an esp32 of your choice and some LLM magic to read and relay data from Bluetooth to web.

For both victron and litime plenty of examples exist, including home assistant integrations.

Solakon One has a quite decent API you can control without cloud being involved...

Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601310

Drill baby drill...

... holes into the balcony railing.

Hehe "Balkonkraftwerk", available from Lidl for €250 (see TFA). This makes me unreasonably happy for some reason.

I really hope these become legal in Canada.

Right now it seems Utah is the only jurisdiction in North America where they are

Virginia recently became the 2nd state to allow it.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/virginia-to-becom...

There are two types of balcony solar. One is bidirectional power flow, i.e., classical balcony solar, and the other is called "zero export", in which a current flow direction sensor on your mains throttles back your inverter if you start to reverse the current flow and export power.

Where I live, in the US, National Grid is okay with balcony solar as long as it's a zero-export balcony solar. Your power utility may take a similar approach. They might also take a "if it doesn't cross the meter, and we can't tell what you're doing, then we can't tell you not to do it"

Anything that requires an electrician to come and modify your mains connections (followed, presumably by a municipal inspection), defeats the main benefit of balcony solar, which is that it is a commodity unit that can be installed by non-experts without any red tape.

Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.

The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.

The simple plug-in and go balcony solar is going to be constrained in many ways. Zero export solar is more sophisticated, yes, does require electrical inspection, but given that it lets you add extra solar panels, battery storage and keep all the power you produce on the house side of the meter. There is some win there. Additionally, if you live where there is time of day rate changes, you can store up cheap energy at night and use it during the day when it's expensive.

Net metering is common, but not everywhere and frequently there's a pricing differential between what you buy and what you sell. My mother leased her solar panels from SolarCity/Tesla. She buys electricity at $0.12 a kilowatt hour, but sells at $.09/kwh. Some of the regulatory shenanigans I've seen regarding balcony solar include no net metering. If you produce excess power, you get no credit for it.

The only negative thing I feel about all of this is that we're doing now. Once the glaciers are farked, the snow is going and the mass die offs are started. Better late than never they say, but why the hell didn't we just invest in this in the 1990s?

Solar panels were expensive and not very efficient then.

Do you think more investment / subsidies weren't possible over the last few decades?

They were and Germany was actually going in that direction, but it took the manufacturing scale of China to create an incentive to introduce the hundreds of minor changes necessary to get costs down.

Don't discount the importance of cheap Chinese (mostly coal) electricity.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/18/chinas-cheap-electric...

If it is so cheap why does your source say it was subsidized?

That's not a contradiction. From the point of view of the factory or household consuming it, it is cheap.

germany stoped the investment and killed the solar industry. Not saying that China helped too, but we don't know if germany would have pushed through it without China.

That only happened after China started eating their (and Japan's) lunch. There's a great old chart which shows this:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5_Largest_Producers_...

Right around that time Germany's solar boom started in earnest:

https://www.statista.com/chart/2397/solar-power-made-massive...

Which was powered largely by Chinese panels. Since we can't have nice things, tariffs were imposed:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_13_...

Lobby from the other people selling energy: the not green type. They have the money, the lawyers, the ads, everything. Balcony solar power is only allowed now due to energy shortage.

Balcony solar has been allowed for a number of years in Germany.

We did invest, starting in the 1970s, which is what brought the prices down so much. It just took time to get the R&D to the point where they were cost competitive.

The social problem is that fossil fuel usage was very profitable and employed enough people that polluters were allowed not to pay for externalities and a lot of climate change denial funded by the oil companies proved effective at getting politicians and the public to downplay the risk. Even today, even on HN, you can find people who’ll say it’s no big deal, the earth has been this warm in the past, that it’ll cost too much, that they can never drive an EV because their daily commute is 11 hours each way without stopping, etc.

Because fossil fuel lobbyists so successfully captured most right-wing parties, millions of people added that to their self identity and thus will struggle to admit they were wrong because that more or less means admitting that the same people who lied to them about the climate also lied about other things.

dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598378

Is this supposed to be a revolutionary European invention?

Neither the title nor the article implied so.

"In 1839, the ability of some materials to create an electrical charge from light exposure was first observed by the French physicist Edmond Becquerel"

So yes

> They come with small inverters to convert the DC output of the solar panels into AC power, which plug straight into an existing home power socket.

Hopefully these inverters are smart enough to cut the feed if the AC mains power goes out, to avoid backfeeding utility lines that may be under repair.

I think this is why they're supposed to be limited to 800 W, but is that enough to avoid serious danger to utility workers when a whole apartment building or neighborhood is full of these?

Central Europe has more buried electrical systems and nothing is safe until it's actively grounded so hard it'll arc flash the idiot who broke you LOTO before you even feel a clear tingle.

The 800W is about grid management impact limitation to levels that do not warrant the utility imposing any "but we first have to upgrade the substation before we can get you your local transformer with the higher speed EV charging and McMansion winter full heat pump setup" delays before you are allowed to turn it on/grid-tie it.

They are limited to prevent fires. They sit behind the breakers so any power they feed in allows more current on the cables before the breakers trip.

Yes. Any system that’s UL 3700 (or more generally IEEE 1547 / UL 1741) compliant mandates anti-islanding by shutting off the power within two seconds of grid loss.

Fortunately they do, and in fact the article makes that clear. +1 for reading to the end of the paragraph that was quoted.

You can't buy an inverter that is certified that doesn't do this. As well as a whole raft of other safety measures and grid quality measures besides.

See for instance:

https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/sites/default/files/2024-0...

Every region has their own set of rules which requires inverter manufacturers to have a bunch of different settings depending on where the inverter is installed.

All to deny the fact that new deal is incompatible with dense cities. Sorry but do the math and you realize that the future is homes and sheds, not condos.

What 'new deal'? If you talk about Solar and PV, it adds value already independen of how little it is. Even dense city has roofs on top. Also they have highways which have plenty direct space next to them were no one wants to live or grow produce (due to polution)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com