Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine.
Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500.
I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
Not a bad legacy for Robert Habeck (along with the wind reforms), the leader we needed but didn't deserve [1][2]. Interestingly he's recently dropped out of politics and taken a teaching role at UC Berkeley.
Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had. The plants barely added any value to the market. When Habeck became Minister, most Nuclear plants were already gone, and the last remaining were phasing out, lacking nuclear fuel and permits. Habeck even gave a permit for the last plants to run some more months, squeezing out even the last parts of fuel as much as they could, just so they could serve as an additional supply in a problematic winter, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end.
Right at this moment Germany's electricity mix has 364gCO2eq/kWh carbon intensity, France is at 21. That is because 37% of Germany's production comes from gas and coal.
Even from an environmental standpoint, France is doing much better than Germany and that is thanks to nuclear.
Also, by closing operating power plants, Germany weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most.
Still not Habecks legacy. This was decided under Merkel.
Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions and effect on the water temperature in rivers (every summer more and more plants need to shut down because of this), etc. Even if this would be done right, there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance. In the end I would say it is always a bad idea to rely on only one technology to a large degree. Only a well done mix makes you resiliant.
I agree on this point, me not being anti-Nuclear doesn't mean I am anti-wind or solar. Every country has different circumstances, I live in a landlocked country with mild mountains, temperate climate and modest rivers. In our case nuclear energy seems like the most reliable and scalable option. For countries with huge coastline off-shore wind absolutely makes sense, simialrly with solar.
> Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions.
I think this point is overestimated. Based on a brief search, studies show nuclear carbon intensity around 6-12g, and the building emissions just around 13% of total lifetime emissions [1].
> there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance.
Valid point but the 2022 French nuclear "disaster" hasn't repeated at that scale so far. In recent years France is a net exporter to Germany. I can imagine that as with many problems in renewables having technical solutions the water temperature problem is also solvable technically.
How strong correlation is there with energy exports from Germany and the status of France nuclear reactors? From a casual look, exports seems to be correlated with weather and access to excess energy, rather than demand from neighboring countries. I would like to see some support that "Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance", rather than Germany export energy to France because windy/sunny weather is producing excess energy.
Looking at Denmark, their export and imports have little correlation to neighboring countries demand or supply. They will try exporting if the wind farms produce excess energy, and they will try importing energy when demand exceed supply. Neighboring countries demand will mostly only have impact on export price.
> Also, by closing operating power plants, Germany weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most.
Ironically that was France which needed to shut down a lot of its nuclear reactors in 2022 and 2023 due to repairs. So according to your own logic France "weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most."
Here in Switzerland the reason given for the "energy crisis" was also mostly France as Switzerland usually imports a lot of energy from France.
The current state wrt to nuclear in Germany reflects a decades long consensus in Germany that spans the majority of the population, scientists, intellectuals, politicians and even energy companies.
Any opposition you do hear on this from within Germany is usually opportunistic. People are against the Greens so they just take the opposite position on their policy. A good example of this is Markus Söder (CSU) who flip flopped on this multiple times.
Realistically speaking there is no serious politician or party with a pro-nuclear position in Germany that has a plausible plan for leveraging nuclear power at meaningful scale in an economical way. Any such plan would realistically invite massive opposition because nobody wants nuclear facilities in their vicinity.
russians paid good money for this consensus! Best Chancellor money could buy. It was so successful Germany became a proxy paying French NGOs to torpedo French Nuclear program!
Edit: Actually should be plural - Chancellors. Merkel, big cog in NordStreams, went on some podcast last week to blame Poland for the war in Ukraine. See if only Poles didnt object so much she would placate putin with even more money.
The anti-nuclear movement in Germany started in the 70s. The last nuclear power plant was built decades ago. In my opinion the decision to not invest into nuclear and scale it up further made the end of nuclear power inevitable.
Recent governments merely organized a shutdown that was effectively decided in the last century at the end of the cold war. The importance of Merkel, Fukushima etc. in these discussions are completely overrated imo.
As an aside Germany got fuel for nuclear reactors from Russia.
Well most of them were, but not all. Notably the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shutdown on 15. April 2023, while the last coalition was in power. At that time there was a big discussion whether the shutdown could be postponed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a measure to curb rising electricity costs in Germany, but ultimately it was decided to go through with the shutdown. It was a largely symbolic move, but carried a lot of emotional weight since it put last nail in the coffin for nuclear energy in Germany. Hence people now blaming the Ampel government (and Habeck in particular) even though it wasn’t their decision to shut down power plants in the first place (with people of the party who made the decision openly criticizing them as well). Just to add a bit of context as German…
The plan to shut down nuclear power plants was done under the premise of a stable supply of Russian gas. This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock (at that time nuclear power was even classified as sustainable by the EU btw.), he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable. In my opinion this was the worst political decision of German politics since WW2, unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Those 3 plants had been running on "deferred maintenance" as the plant shutdown was planned years ago. Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
This was one of the biggest factors in the shutdown. Even if the plants stayed open, multiple reactors needed maintenance (and thus shutdown of those rectors).
Remember, they kept the open even longer then the planned shutdown (what was already extended before).
And the issue with the prices was not nuclear. By the time those plants shutdown, market prices already stabilized to pre-war levels. I remember this clearly as my renewal of my electricity contract came up, and ironically, my electrical price was even 2 cent/kwh lower then my 2021 contract.
The biggest issue for the German industry was not nuclear energie, it was the gas. And not because of power generation but because gas is used in several chemical reactions, with basf moving their production to the US. And thus more costs because supply chain changes. The LNG that we import is more expensive then the ultra cheap Russian gas we got.
And THAT is a issue for the German industry. And even more so with the US pushing to be the sole EU supplier for LNG (aka to replace Russia and use their leverage on the EU).
Anyway, a lot of your opinion is based upon the wrong conclusion.
On top of that, NL govt is investing 10B EUR to prepare the construction of several new nuclear power plants, less than 300km from one of the abandoned German ones (Emsland).
In conclusion the nuclear exits of BE and DE are some of the most stupid and hypocritical decisions in EU energy policy. Both countries will continue to depend on nuclear energy (from FR and NL). The only difference is that it is now produced <200km outside of their borders, in neighbouring countries.
Nuclear is the answer to no problem we face currently. It’s expensive, slow to build new plants (decades).
It’s also not flexible in the way it’s useable.
Solar + battery storage on the other hand is super fast and easy to build, costs virtually nothing and leaves no toxic waste which can’t be recycled.
Nuclear fuel is also mostly only available from Russia, which no one wants as a trade partner.
> Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc... stated LCOE "associated with the long-term operation of a nuclear power plant generally falls in the range US$ 30-40 per MWh, for typical refurbishment costs for Light Water Reactors and a lifetime extension of 20 years".
That is not the issue. Let me give you a example. Belgium decided to extend the life on several nuclear reactors, that originally had plans for decommissioning.
So they started to do actual deep maintenance for the extended life. Then they ran into issues of cracks in the concrete, issues with cracks in metal storage tanks, and a whole lot of other issues.
Reactors down for a long periode for the repairs, AND a ton of extra costs. These costs of those repairs, i can not find them no matter where i look. Its interesting how hidden those are.
For the 2025 extension, the initial estimated 1.5 billion for the life extension. And still the whole issue about the reactors issues their full fix cost price is unknown. In other words, they did a patch job and for the next extension, they need to do a major maintenance / repair.
The extension of the German reactors was estimated at 3B+ if i remember correctly. And that does not include if any issues are found.
That is the problem... This type of deferred maintenance start to stack up over time, when you have a phase out time for reactors. So issues becomes a big black money hole when you already committed to the extension.
> the worst political decision of German politics since WW2
Except the shutdown had no negative effect. There was no supply shock and prices keep trending down since (Though that of course doesn't mean because of). Let's keep it real. I can probably name worse German political decisions from this week.
* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
* I would have dig deeper on that, but regarding the timeframe when the shutdown occurred, there wasn't a big effect on gas prices. That happened before due to the war with Ukraine and the reliance on Russian gas in general. [1] The idea once was to use cheap gas from Russia and at the same time build out renewables. The latter didn't happen, resulting in the mess Germany is right now.
* There were multiple tax reductions and I think some are in the talks now. Those were independent (and before) the nuclear shutdown.
* Probably. Nuclear should have been shutdown after gas, coal etc. I am with you on that. But the ship had already sailed long ago, before the last three plants were shut down.
Fair enough on the immediate consequences.. but shutting down these plants was a long term decision, so the long term consequences are still consequences. It is certainly true that no one predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine when Fukushima happened but Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas was well understood at the time. Which I raise only to point out that the bad things that did happen were foreseeable, the German energy system was subject to systemic risks and those risks were made worse by these choices.
It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
> This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock
There was nothing to mitigate. The nuclear plants deliver electricity, which was never a problem in Germany.
> he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable.
That's a lie. They even prolonged the usage for some months to appease the fearmongers. But without fuel, there was a limit on how they could run anyway.
> unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
> The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish.
Nobody believes that, WTF?
> In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal
Partly true, but not really. Coal is also used for other energy-forms than just electricity. Nuclear Plants cannot cover those areas. In the grand scale, it might have been better to first reduce coal-usage and transition to purely electric usage, while phasing out of nuclear slowly and use the save money for building up on renewables.
But that was never an option with all the sabotages from the fossil anyway. Nuclear in Germany was never a real option, it always has been fossil vs electric, with nuclear being a minor source for electricity, weaponized by the fossil lobby against the renewables.
Why do you think Germans voted against nuclear? It was because of fear of events like Chernobyl/Fukishima etc. Then 2022 was the final blow, with documents saying that nuclear reactors didn't produce much energy and needed maintenance anyways. Kind of like getting rid of working trains to ride bikes instead. Why not. It's healthier :)
In the meantime, the world laughs at us. Literally the whole world.
You keep on mentioning the lobby of fossils, which obviously had an impact.
However, with Merkel the change was happening. At exactly the speed it was needed: 5% every couple of years, or so.
Now the only lobby I see is the one of fear that there is no tomorrow. While the countries just next to us, without even bothering China all the time, don't give 2 cents about it.
They keep on buying gas, uranium and fossils.
We on the other hand can finally build 800W solar panels on the balconies without bureaucracy. Thank God.
EDIT: with Merkel, we reached an increase of 5% per year for energy generated with renewables. Which is and was really good.
Grid power and LNG use wasn't very fungible. e.g., if you have a gas furnace, electricity costs being low doesn't help you unless you replace the gas furnace with electric. In the short term, very expensive.
Same goes for alot of industry, there also were industrial processes that BASF et al. were running that just required LNG as a reagant.
I would say the main political crisis of the moment isn't one about being right but about consistent plans. The plan for a Green economy is pretty clear since more than a decade and revolves around Smart Grids. Without these no decentralized energy, no storage etc. Indeed that's something that was done right and proofs actual long-term plans are worth it.
The irony is, at this point even many environmentalists don't oppose Nuclear anymore. But there's still the lack of a coherent plan. Where should the fuel come from? How is EOL of a power plant handled? How is it paid? The answers changed a lot in the last decades.
Apart from this the last 5 years were a PR disaster for the Greens. Protesters (Last Generation) have been connected to them although the LG is even protesting against the Greens. When there were these massive floods the Greens actually lost votes instead of gaining those.
Well, I like the guy but compare the electricity prices in Germany to other European states, and also to China and the US. It’s about $0.15 kWh in the US vs $0.40 kWh in Germany. I personally think this is absolutely insane, but I don’t blame Habeck but the poor renewables transition execution in Germany. It is currently a failure in terms of electricity consumer prices.
Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 per kWh. Can anyone confirm?
> Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 per kWh. Can anyone confirm?
Yes, it is in the ballpark of $0.08/kWh. It varies a little bit across regions. Also in some places the price is only half during the night. But as you consume more power, you may see the price rise to $0.12/kWh.
In 2024, cost of renewable + storage was 0.52-0.88 CNY/kWh($0.08-$0.12). Advancement in storage is expected to drive that cost down by more than 50%.
The average wholesale price for electricity in 2024 was close to 0.09 €/kwh.
The consumer price is about 0.3 €/kwh currently, depending on the deals you are getting. The difference between wholesale and consumer price is made up of transmission costs, taxes and markups of various middlemen.
Shutting down nuclear power had 0 impact on electricity prices, as wholesale prices are set by the most expensive producer needed to satisfy demand. That is usually a natural gas turbine. All producers get paid the rate that this marginal producer demands.
I got a “expensive” renewable only energy plan and it’s 31,4 cents per kilowatt hour in Germany. Conventional ones should be cheaper. So no idea where you got 40 cents from.
Even if power plants magically worked for free and all schemes for cross-financing renewables were cancelled, German electricity prices would still be $0.19/kWh (€0.16), using the numbers from [1]. The German electricity network is great and very reliable, but also very expensive
It's just absolutely mind-boggling how the "But Nuclear!" refrain persists as a mind worm in this community. Every story on renewables, every single one, has a giant sub thread up near the top of the discussion screaming, again, about the clearly-must-be-important-because-everyone-says-so hypocrisy behind opposition to nuclear power.
It really just doesn't seem in good faith. It's been going on for a decade at least. Every win, every positive story, every bit of evidence that just maybe this part of the climate puzzle is actually being solved[1] gets met not with celebration, but with indignant tut-tutting that it was done with boring stuff and not Nerd Friendly power.
When does it stop?
[1] Doesn't take too much Googling to find coverage claiming that ~90% of new electricity generation capacity globally is renewable. This problem is solved folks. It's time to start looking at the higher hanging fruit.
I guess that depends on who you ask. There definitely is a lot of opposition to the Green Party, but that's hardly directed at Robert Habeck specifically.
Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.
Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence.
Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) )
Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]
If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.
I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.
France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.
People barely use A/C in France by the way.
> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy
Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.
Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now).
I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.
And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
> And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years.
Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.
The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.
Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
"Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe."
There are certainly different opinions on that.
Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
That statement is plain wrong:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times.
You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.
You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting.
The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.
> It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work
It’s far from obvious to me.
There are literally no exemple of one ever running and some of the technological challenges are still open questions at the moment.
I generally think proponents of renewables are overselling the idea and significantly minimising the challenges they pose at scale. They definitely have a place in the energy mix but I don’t personally believe they are the solution.
Mostly renewable has already been achieved, 100% renewable is on track and economically feasible.
In December 2021, South Australia set a new record for renewable energy generation and resilience, after running entirely on renewable energy for 6.5 consecutive days.
In 2022, it was stated that South Australia could soon be powered by only renewable energy.
70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources.
This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027.
And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest. But H2 is only viable once renewable production exceeds demands during long stretches of time. Otherwise it is always better to use the energy directly or use short term storage (batteries) which are also growing exponentially: https://battery-charts.de/battery-charts/
Sorry, you are all emotion and provide wrong statements. What I wrote directly contradicted your statements and proved them wrong, but now you say they are missing the point? Reducing fossil fuel consumption by 50% within 10 years is an achievement. There are always things that could be done in a better way. But let's be real here.
That is kind of the point of having an integrated grid.
But 19TWh. While producing 470TWh. 4%. That is not ... a lot. And in 2022 Germany exported 5.5TWh and had to restart coal plants when the French nuclear plants were in trouble. So what? That what a grid is for.
H2 has been the alleged long term solution for decades while barely progressing at all. Even in aviation where it’s seemingly the only solution we have, it’s stagnating.
If you look at who is pushing H2, you will see that it’s mostly fossil fuel companies who want to prop up gas because as you rightfully pointed out "And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest."
> So what? That what a grid is for.
It’s going to be hard to reach net zero while burning coal and if the actual solution is importing nuclear energy from somewhere else while pretending it doesn’t happen, it would be simpler to just straight up go for nuclear.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2]
> How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this.
Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage.
Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators.
> At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage.
We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy.
> Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6]
> With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business.
You should look at what a proper planned all-in nuclear project looks like before commenting..
See Hualong One nuclear project that's operating at ~90% capacity and is ~1/3 of the price of solar, and 2/3 price of wind when comparing the same operation % capacity and taking into consideration the max life length of each technology.
Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.
That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.
Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.
The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.
I find that people with strong, pro fission feelings, but no hard numbers, often preface their opinions on the matter with phrases like 'honestly' or 'objectively' or 'non idealogically'.
Concentration of power production is just one of the problems that renewables / distributed power generation systems solves.
Nuclear and renewables do not like to share a grid. Their attributes do not complement each other at all, despite their differences, because fundamentally both of them are not dispatchable. In practice what happens is either nuclear has enough subsidies to survive or renewables completely wreck the economics of it by supplying way cheaper power most of the time.
Both forms of generation want to be paired with something dispatchable, either gas turbines or energy storage. A mix of renewables and nuclear is a mix that is weaker than the sum of its parts, not stronger.
solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house
In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.
That's why I think we should end up with:
- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating
- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating
- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now
I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines
yes, they are worse for the grid, depending on how you define worse.
One interpretation is that solar adds variability to the generation side of the equation and managing that variability is currently a question without a clear answer.
Power line capacity is designed around the maximum power that must be delivered. Solar power by itself reduces the mean, and possibly the minimum as well, but never the maximum.
In some places the annual peak demand is for summertime cooling, but in others the annual peak demand is for wintertime heating. It's too strong to say "never [reduce] the maximum" as the parent post did, but there are substantial regions where solar power can't reduce the needed power line capacity.
You do not, ever, need base load power. Base load power is by definition power generation that does not follow the demand curve because it is uneconomical to do so. In this way it is entirely similar to solar and wind in that it cannot, by definition, fill the entire demand for power and it needs to be completemented by dispatchable power sources.
You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.
The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.
You can also decide to look at countries which went 100% renewable and have even better CO2/kWh rating than France (Iceland, Norway, Albania for example).
Yes, situations are different I agree :) my point was just that you can pick and choose what you want to look at. We'll see how things evolve, but it's not very fair to compare the situation of France which did their switch to low carbon energy many years ago, to Germany which is currently doing it. When we have more countries with finished transition to full/mostly renewable, we can compare again.
In the last 90 days France's CO2 footprint is at 78% of Iceland's.
Also, what lessons learned in Iceland, Norway or Albania should we apply in central Europe? We don't have their geothermal and hydro potential (all your examples are not solar+wind but hydro primarily).
> The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
I‘m sorry but this is just absolute nonsense.
Nuclear energy is the most dense energy type humanity ever produced. To put it in one line with coal and oil is not serious. Not to mention it’s far less hazardous to human health, again compared to fossil fuels. Here is a basic comparison:
> With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235. Related to one kilogram, uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal.
Who really cares about density? The biggest thing that means is that blowing up two or three substations can cripple an entire country’s grid. Distributed energy generation and storage is actually quite strategic for national security.
It’s also massive cherry-picking to just look at refined fuel. For example, H
how many tonnes of ore do you need to mine and process to produce that 1kg of uranium (at least 2.5 tonnes, that is 2500 kg from one random source from a quick google).
But to use your metric, I did work out and find it interesting that the solar panels on my roof, per kg of silicon have produced over 1,400 kWh of electricity (multiply your figures by 0.3 to take into account efficiency from kWh of heat to compare) so far. I estimate almost 28 kg of silicon in my whole array, which has generated over 38 MWh so far, and I expect they will generate at least three times that over their life.
So 4000-5000 kWh(e) per kg of silicon sure comes in a hell of a lot of better than the 2.4 odd for coal or 4 for mineral oil (assuming your figures are correct).
Everyone. If you don’t, then you need to scale. Case in point with renewables. It’s also not cherry-picking, but a well-known fact in physics. Do yourself a favor and look at the source link I posted above.
The thing about blowing up things I will just skip, because it’s not serious. If things go that far, there will be far greater problems than just that. Besides, if that’s your worry why don’t use SMRs then? Russia does.
To your 4000-5000 kWh point, you are not burning silicon here, are you? And a PV is not energy fuel, it’s a device composed of many different materials. I don’t understand your point and I can’t say more than that - my reply to GP was about fossil fuels and nuclear anyway. Not sure why you decided to jump into renewables here.
this website is filled with people who believe that the future source of energy is entirely renewable energy. That is false, as many european countries show.
I live in a part of Canada with mostly nuclear energy and i am thankful that my electricity rates are low. This helps me reduce emissions via heat pumps and EVs. I don't need solar panels and most people do not either.
You are correct, the future is mostly renewable energy where feasible, with a combination of nuclear and hydro.
He has been well received among left-green voters, civil servants and alike. He communicated without the usual empty political phrases, that alone brought him sympathies. He also managed the Ukraine crisis well, for instance, he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines had been destroyed. I'd say he embodied the values, policies and mannerism of his electorate better than anyone else.
And yet I agree with you. Economically, he disappointed through and through. Same for climate change, which ironically is at the heart of the Green party he belongs to. For example, to more conservative voters, he's will mostly remembered as the politician who wanted to bring a central planning approach into their homes, forcing everyone to install costly heat pumps, with their own money, without much regard to their specific household situation. All to achieve no effective carbon emission reduction.
But to his left-green electorate, he remains sacrosanct, his critics are dismissed, often as far-right.
>he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines
The very same pipeline he helped to cover that their own ally destroyed
Also what the hell is your argumentation? "Actually the people who voted him, liked him" no shit. The very same people are more in favor of war than the average Nazi back in the 30s
I made no argument, merely tried to explain why he is viewed favourably by some. I could have left out the second and last paragraph, that was more about me showing that I didn’t agree with his performance either.
Sorry but Merkel reached almost 50% of energy production with renewables. Germany was already a leader in 2021-2022 with almost 45-50%.
The idea was to grow "sustainably", and in fact it was functioning.
Even the "original" GEG comes from Merkel who was slowly pushing for a change.
Then somehow someone decided they had to restrict and punish and this was our "undeserved" Habeck and friends.
There was no need at all to disrupt the country into what it has become today.
Literally everyone said that. Only the Scholz/Greens government didn't see that.
EDIT: in fact, if we just reverted the commits to pre-2022 we'd be already in a better situation. No new changes. Just start from what was working. And well, keep the new solar panel stuff for balconies. It seems a nice idea (which a lot of countries are doing anyways, so nothing so innovative here).
What his enemies (CDU/AfD) don't mention is that even they wouldn't have been able to undo the stop.
But being in the opposition must be a fun thing since you can say the most beautiful sounding things and never have to actually deliver anything.
AfD even goes a step beyond raw stupidity because they want to destroy all the wind turbines. So not just stop the ones already delivering energy, but destroy them. They just don't realize that we need every bit of energy we can get. They have some donating friends which are against wind turbines, because of the looks.
It was close to funny how Elon Musk held back his disagreement with the AfD regarding their wish to destroy the wind turbines.
I'd go so far as to say that the only reason why Germany has the political and societal problems it has now are only due to the constrain in energy.
He had a pretty unfortunate card dealt to him with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Germanys dependence on Russian gas, especially in its industry.
I think the move away from nuclear energy in Germany was a mistake, but one which was decided on way before he came into office. Doubling down on nuclear would have cost a fortune (old reactors weren't maintained well enough to run for longer due to phase out decision after Fukushima & not enough new engineers in Germany). He was in a lose lose situation, I think he did pretty well overall, but was blamed for old decisions (Altmaiers abandonment of German solar industry, heating reform by CDU+SPD) and had bad handling of reports on him in the news.
He is on of the few politicians who follow his beliefs about what needs to be done, less so about what is popular. He also made sure Germany had enough gas. He had nothing todo with the pushback of nuclear energy (that was the CDU/Merkel). Nuclear energy is not cheap.
All politicians follow their beliefs. They just become more problematic the more interventionist they are. And Habeck was extremely interventionist. On top of that he used his position of power to go against private citizens under the excuse of free speech. He filed 805 criminal complaints, in some situations just for being called an idiot online.
Nuclear energy pushback in DE was a result of the fear caused by Chernobyl in 1986. Refreshed by the Fukushima incident. The CDU was not brave enough to go against that fear. And Habeck just continued that approach even in difficult moments for the German industry. Nuclear is not cheap, but it’s stable, predictable, does not generate CO2 and if well planned, also provides self-reliance for the country using it.
>All politicians follow their beliefs
No they don't they, a lot them will do whatever is needed (change their minds at will) to stay in power.
If you ever listened to Habeck, there are simple rational arguments why it did not makes sense to continue running the nuclear plants for longer. There was anyway no easy affordable way to just let them run for many years (contracts).
At the end nuclear was only contributing 1.5% to the overall energy production.
And just to be explicit, because I see people lie about this very often: this decision was made by the conservative party (CDU) while the Greens were not part of the government.
Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom).
When the conservatives got back into power a decade later, they started to roll back the nuclear exit. But during the panic after the Japan tsunami this policy became unpopular so the conservatives reversed course and stuck with the disastrous Green policy.
But make no mistake, if the Greens did not make it into government, the Atomausstieg would never have happened.
Subjects to read for details:
* “Atomkonsens” 2000 and
“Novellierung des Atomgesetzes” 2002, Kabinett Schröder,
* “Laufzeitverlängerung deutscher Kernkraftwerke”, 2010, Kabinett Merkel II
* “13. Gesetz zur Änderung des Atomgesetzes“ 2011 post-Fukushima, taking back the 2010 extensions
It was agreed upon under completely different circumstances, namely a stable supply of Russian gas. I cannot believe that people do not get this into their head.
And after a decade of planning the shutdown, stopping contracts, deferring unneeded maintenance, ... you can't just say "actually, never mind, keep them running". The plant operators themselves said it wasn't really possible or only at extreme costs.
And the politicians loudly screaming about it are mostly from parties that are responsible for the "we'll have russian gas, it's fine" policy, and didn't use the decade+ of being in power beforehand to do anything about extending nuclear, but rather often also strongly insisted the shutdown had to be done. Right until the point they weren't in power anymore and they started to blame the Greens for the consequences of their own policies.
That none of the energy companies went "oh, yes, totally, give us a few billions of the special budgets for dealing with the consequences of the war and we'll happily keep them running" should tell you something about the viability of that.
That post is some dangerous half-knowledge and simplifications stated as fact.
Yes, Habeck is an interventionist, but his biggest interventions were a direct response to... you know, the war in Ukraine. What did anyone expect? When Putin turned off the gas, was Habeck supposed to just let the free market sort it out while factories shut down and people froze? Those price caps and the Uniper buyout weren't pre-planned. I'm sure he would have preferred to have never been in that situation in the first place.
And the reactor shutdown argument never gets old, does it? The decision to ditch nuclear power was made in 2011 by Angela Merkel. Habeck was just the guy who had to turn off the lights at a party that ended a decade earlier. Remember all those predictions of nationwide blackouts in April 23? Funny how the lights are still on.
The claim about coal usage was true for about five minutes in the winter of 22. It was a temporary panic move to save gas, and since then, coal consumption has dropped to a historic low. It's also funny how renewables—the actual backbone of our energy system, which were on the rise long before Habeck, are framed as a "gamble." The upsides and downsides are very well understood by now. There was never any gambling involved but I guess let's just frame a strategic, well understood, decade long move to renewables as a snap decision gamble.
Look, no one's saying his term was perfect. And yes, the man has charisma, which is apparently a bad thing now?
But calling his term a "disaster" while ignoring the reality of the crises he faced—coming out of COVID, the energy war, is just strange.
> "That post is some dangerous half-knowledge and simplifications stated as fact."
That's... putting it mildly. To call a spade a spade: The post you replied to consists of nothing more than anti-Green crankery. The kind of tedious, intellectually dishonest click-bait crap you see disseminated in the Springer-Presse, e. g. ze WELT-Plus-Commentariat, or media of even less repute.
There was no strong push way from nuclear energy, just a continuation of Germany's general nuclear energy path.
Studies also showed that this had no negative effect on electricity prices.
Core voters of the green party are mostly highly educated people[1].
There are not many more women than men in their voters[2].
I hear the first time about public employmemt, and haven't seen any statistics about that.
Regarding energy he certainly didn't gamble on energy.
He gave everything for a transition away from gas and coal and invested in renewable storage systems (short and long term storage) backed by scientific institutions continuously evaluating, planning and simulating the transition of Germanys energy system including related sectors until 2045/2050 [3].
Thanks to storage a renewable energy system can be reliable while highly dynamic.
He reduced the time needed to create wind turbines massively as well.
He also prevented a complete crash of the economy and infrastructure caused by the dependency on gas of Putin which greens have not been a fan of, because of ecological issues as well as the danger of Putin which only the greens recognized before Putin started the war on Ukraine.
Rising debt to invest into the future and infrastructure was then plan of the greens, but they got blocked (and medially attacked for it - claiming it was not needed) by the current government which then realized this plan (at least from a high level perspective) with the help of the greens in the opposition, because a simple majority isn't enough for increasing debt.
I am not aware of active acceleration of a decline of the industry beyond the decline which was already in the system for years and the situation we were in due to COVID and the war.
> dependency on gas of Putin which greens have not been a fan of, because of ecological issues as well as the danger of Putin which only the greens recognized before Putin started the war on Ukraine.
Thats a lot of historical revision if you blame a dude who was minister for 3.5 years about decisions made 20-30 years ago. Same for your last paragraph. Nothing even close to that happened in the years he governed. Maybe you should start showing recipes because it looks like your grievances are personal in nature and everything but factual.
It's fine to have those grievances if you can articulate them factual. Hell they are even fine if you can't. The only thing I am saying is that you don't need to make stuff up just to give those grievances weight or convey others to your sentiment...
This is a bit strong, given that you still need to register with the Marktstammdatenregister and get a permit from your landlord (relevant bc homeownership rate < 50%).
I think the high electricity cost has as much to do with the relative success of this than the reduced friction.
On the technical side you are also limited to 800W max and if you want a battery things get complicated quickly. I will still get one probably but it is far from no bureaucracy at all and plug and play - at least not when you want a battery.
Marktstammdatenregister is online and very easy to do, Allowance from landlord is more of a formality now as they can't really deny it. Of course some try but the law is pretty clear here.
A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
> A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Part of that is because our method of pricing is different than it is in the rest of the world.
It doesn't matter if you got a 3x50A or 3x200A three phase service, only during construction (because a 3x200A uplink will obviously be a decent bit pricier), the monthly fee is the same and very low (I think ~15€ a month). All other costs are rolled into the per-kWh price, making it appear much more expensive than in other countries. On top of that we have a ridiculous tax load because large industry is exempt from a lot of things and consumers gotta pick up the slack.
In contrast, Italians for example pay fees based on capacity which means a home there will usually have 3x10A uplink, something greatly troubling EV adoption and moving off of natural gas [1].
Additionally, Germany is one pricing zone whereas ENTSO-E, the European Commission and the Northern German population would rather like to have two or three pricing zones, given that there is a serious lack of North->South transmission capacity, but our "beloved" Bavarian prime minister Söder plus his green counterpart in BaWü Kretschmann both try to prevent that as much as possible because it would send prices in the south skyrocketing [2].
Yep in a lot of ways it's a failure of the electricity market.
It's absolutely bonkers how much I pay for electricity while I sit in the shadow of a giant onshore wind farm in Brandenburg. Transmission losses are nothing at this distance and the turbines cover the towns needs many times over.
But because of the lack of regional and dynamic pricing (and tax burden) we pay ridiculous rates.
I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
Maybe balcony solar is just a tax minimization play, in that the energy you get from panels isn't burdened by excessive network charges, consumer taxes etc.
> I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
That's actually happening already in some places - in Thüringen, nearby residents of a windmill get a share of the income [1], and the local municipality also gets a sizable amount... in small Mühlenfließ (Brandenburg) with less than 1000 souls living there, the 16 windmills provide 200.000€ a year in taxes, 10% of the municipal budget [2].
Unfortunately, you need politicians with a backbone to present such plans to their voters, and in rural areas many simply are afraid of far-right terrorism up to and including death threats [3], on top of "alternative" media and even supposedly democratic politicians riling people up against renewable power sources.
More and more "Energiegenossenschaften" are also founded, I think. At least here in the South-West near Freiburg it feels like every second larger village or community has its own Energiegenossenschaft. They are working on getting solar on every roof, pushing water and wind turbine projects forward and are really working on making the switch to renewables happen. I'm looking to get into some of them to fund the cause. :-)
Norway: yes, they are doing fine (80% EV, btw, so it seems you can actually use EVs in colder weather... I think the nordics are actually way ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to sustainable energy creation, with norway getting about 90% last year from Hydro - super impressive. https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Norway
France: I think they might turn around, because their low prices are tied to massive subsidies (that are scheduled to end in part end of 2025). And, France has the weather and sun to be even more successfull. That would however mean a decentralization of the power grid and probably storage solutions (batteries, hydro or h2), something thats complicated and not sexy to sell to the public - one of the reasons Germany is so far behind. Our grid is stuck in the past and enough company lobby politicians to keep it that way.
US: it is probably less of a pricing issue and more a topic of resiliance and stabilizing the power grid. It looks like rolling blackouts in the US get more, especially during the summer months (where solar could directly be used for the AC). https://urbanclimate.gatech.edu/current-projects/blackout-tr...
I think it would especially make sense to run your AC on if you have a flexible plan - i remember so many stories of people suddenly having to pay thousands during peak times in summer.
California, Texas and most of the rust belt does have enough solar to easily get by, especially if you add a battery backup.
Norway gets most of its wealth from fossil fuel. While it's not Saudi Arabia nor Venezuela, and they invested in long term sustainability, it's not fair to everyone else to say that they are at 80%EV because they are forward thinkers, but because they have the money to do that.
It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Australia started at a similar point with mineral wealth in the 90s and decided tax cuts for the middle class were a better idea (under Howard/Costello).
Yes, like any other argument about Norway, the situation must and shall be considered to be that they are smart and progressive and forward thinking, rather than rich. It's "not" that they have money to burn to do the new fancy thing. It must be forward-thinking policies!
There's a small amount of truth, I'll admit. I guess you can say that Norway's policies are easily a lot smarter than Saudi Arabia's policies. But what is always done is comparing Norway's policies to, say, Spain or France and declare Norway a progressive forward-thinking nation with great and working policies. In reality the opposite is true because France and Spain can't just fix big problems by showering them in money.
Yes, but you have to somehow insinuate that this is a bad thing without ever clearly stating a thesis of why it's a bad thing.
Otherwise people might think investing in green energy, EVs and heat pumps is a good idea with good return on investment and positive externalities and should be done by any competent government.
Any competent government with infinite money they can just dig out of the ground, and dump into the sky via its customers, a small, mostly-homogenous law-abiding population and military cover, at least until recently, mostly provided by the US taxpayer.
While we're on the topic, Finland gets around half of its energy from nuclear. It doesn't have the luxury of fjords for hydro like Norway and Sweden, or easily tapped geothermal like Iceland.
You can see a nice live graph here. Wind isn't blowing at the moment, so the fossil fuel co-generation plants had to kick in.
I mean, in Germany, issue number 1 is the grid, especially in Bavaria. Politicians were just asleep or did not care.
For example, there is a super interesting agri PV installation in the Hallertau, where they grow most of the hops for beer. The farmer built and payed it himself and its a commercial trial instead of a public testrun.
He lost about 20 percent of the hop compared to the non-pv areas; however, the money from the solar panels easily covered that and made a profit. In addition, he used about 30 to 40 percent less water with no impact on the quality of the hop, which is one of the biggest issues in that area, as it runs out of water in summer.
The Hallertau would be ideal for generating large quantities of power; however, due to not having a modern power grid, he is unable deliver more power to the grid.
(article in German here: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/pilotprojekt-hat-erfolg...)
you would think that this is a simpel fix, and it would be in the political interest to decentralzie the powergrid and create local storage solution (or at least in the local power companies interest), but it seems like nothing is moving forward for about a decade now.
Personally, i think agri pv has a huge potential as enables the farmers to have additional income while keeping the field open for farming. Its also an easier sell than wind or hydro (especially because you have the farmers on your side, and with them their lobby), but it needs grid upgrades and storage capacities. It baffles my mind that our politicans are willing to throw millions at nuclear, but everything besides that needs to have a strict business plan or it is not even tried.
To add to this, I know person a farmer who wanted to use part of his farmland for solar panels. The project failed. Reasons: lack of power grid connection, no one wanted to takeover the costs for added capacity; and local resistance from residents. „I want to see the nature in front of my home“ is all what’s needed to fail consent.
i don't understand those nimbys. With solar, its crazy! The soil will regenerate and you'll probably get more nature than before, especially if the farmers use sheep to mow it. That's why we can't have nice things.
To be honest, I do understand some people preferring pastures in front of their home. But we can't have nice things if individuals are capable of blocking projects for that. Personal preferences should not be a valid reason to block projects. Unmitigated negative externalities are reasonable objections, but even then, you have people "finding" this one protected snail type living there and - boom - project can't be realized due to environmental protection laws. There needs to be a re-balance of the commons, but try getting that through legislation.
FWIW, that "blackout tracker" link is garbage. First, because it's five years old: if the data showed that growth someone would have updated it.
But also because it's wrong! There's one outlier bad data point, in 2020, and they draw a line straight through it. Take that one year out and it looks awfully flat to me.
And it barely works out in Germany. I did the math for my small city flat with a small south facing balcony and got a realistic payback period of 6 years.
The issue is not solar per se, but that tiny installations are not very efficient. It'd make much more sense to bolster funding for building sized installations.
The other aspect of this is the reduction of demand on the grid - which potentially reduces infrastructure costs ( or reduces the rise ) and hence shows up in a reduction in electricity prices ( if not absolute, against where they would be ).
Balcony solar is likely to make this worse, given Germany has low/zero electricity market prices when the sun shines.
Balcony solar production means Germans don't buy solar from their utility when utility costs are low, and they do want to buy some when utility costs are high.
Unsurprisingly, fixed contract prices are bound to be an average of electricity price at different times. With balcony solar, the times where it costs the least will be weighted less in the average, so contract price is bound to go up.
Germany needs more battery storage, full stop. It is rapidly declining in cost, it is fast to deploy, and it will soak up excess low carbon energy (both domestic and imported from interconnectors) versus curtailment as more generation comes online.
> Germany’s solar industry calls for 100 GWh 2030 grid battery target
Yup. Flexibility should be the thing that’s subsidized. However, I would advise against "balcony" battery subsidies, and I assume balcony solar is an electoral strategy more than an energy strategy.
> By the end of the first half of 2025, Germany’s official registry of energy installations recorded nearly two million battery storage systems in operation. This figure, now unofficially but safely surpassed into July , includes a gross power capacity of 14.535 gigawatts (GW) and a usable storage capacity of nearly 22.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh).
> Photovoltaic home storage systems constitute the majority of these installations, with 1.967 million small battery storage units (up to 20 kilowatts) accounting for 11.5 GW of gross power and almost 18.3 GWh of usable capacity.
> Small photovoltaic home storage units made up the bulk of new additions, with 251,948 systems providing 1.34 GW and almost 2.7 GWh. In the medium segment, 2,418 new systems added 117.7 MW of power and 160 MWh of capacity.
> The expansion of battery storage is driven by increasing demand, highlighted by 389 hours of negative wholesale electricity prices in the first half of the year. Germany has also significantly expanded its solar power generation, with approximately 107.4 GW of photovoltaic capacity installed and over 7 GW added in the first six months of 2025.
The future of electrification is distributed, broadly speaking. Distributed assets can be orchestrated to optimize for both cost and grid stability ("VPP" aka virtual power plants). Get generation and storage as close to the load as you can.
I pay 13 cents a kWh here in Canada. I got a 7.8kw system on the roof, payback will be 6-7 years, then I get $1000 of free electricity a year for the life of the system.
I’m in a tight valley where it snows a ton
Also got an interest free loan from the gov to cover the outlay.
That is definitely a factor. But depending on your energy usage and how smart your home appliances are, you can save a lot more than 10%. I.e. if you run all your washing and most of the heating of the water tank during your own generation times you can potentially save quite a lot more than 10%.
Electricity costs 24c per kwh in France and I just checked and can get it for 23c. So it's not true any more. Once you factor in that one is financed by the state and the other is not, it was likely never true. Germany's expensive electricity is a myth.
This is not necessarily a disadvantage. If you have a contract with pricing based on the 15-minute intervals of the day-ahead market ("dynamischer Stromtarif"), then the electricity price spikes in the morning and evening. Typically with such a contract, you also get this higher price for injecting power back into the grid. And the price will almost always be lower than a traditional contract outside of these spikes.
A vertically oriented panel is also ideal for this scenario, because the sun will be low above the horizon when the panel is producing power in the morning.
edit: after looking into a bit more, it seems in Germany you may not actually get dynamic feed-in pricing. Too bad. I assumed that this was the case, because it works like that here in Belgium.
It's relative to my cited bill of about 70 euro, obviously.
7/30 ~= 22 cents. Or about half a kwh per day here in Germany. Per day. I think that should be feasible with a well positioned panel. You might do better on sunny days. But if you balance that against all the lesser days, I don't think it's a strange average. All back of the envelope of course. If you get six sun hours on your 800w setup, you get almost 5 kwh. That's sort of the upper range probably. Maybe on really well positioned panels you might get 10 sun hours in the summer months. Or 8 kwh. I think few people would get that.
But an average 0.5kwh per day is fairly modest and adds up to about 7 euro per month. Probably too conservative but that was on purpose. I think the official figures project higher yields.
Since setups are capped at 800w, the percentage depends on your monthly usage. Easier to work in absolute numbers. I think most people could shave between 7 and 20 euros per month off their bills depending on how much sun they manage to get on their panels.
"SUNNIVA 920 W Balcony Power Station BIFAZIAL Full Black Complete Socket TSUN 800 W Inverter, PV Solar System, 2 x 460 W Glass/Glass Solar Modules, Includes 5 m Cable, Bluetooth WiFi, Complete Set"
Literally the first result that comes back for "balcony solar panel kit". 239 Euros with 4.2 star rating and > 200 purchase in the last month.
I can't vouch for this brand or kit but that's what comes up on top on amazon.de. Looks like some Chinese manufacturer, as you would expect. Plenty of pretty positive reviews in German with a few deployment photos. There are indeed a lot of solar panel related products on Amazon. It seems to be a popular product category.
You might get different results from outside Germany.
These are millions of systems imported from China, they are inefficient (because they are small and often installed in poor conditions), useful life is uncertain, they will have to be disposed of afterwards.
So is this whole chain better than using the grid? I don't know but I can't assume anything just because "it's solar".
Some people laugh at the 800W output.
However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less.
Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.
To be sure, when talking about solar panels, 800W is the nominal/nameplate capacity. That's how much it generates when conditions are perfect and the sun is shining straight down on them. Most of the time an 800W installation will produce rather less than that.
You'd need rather more panels (and/or some combination with batteries) to hit 900W output constantly. (on the other hand, do you need 900W constantly, or is that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
The awesome part is you can circumvent the 800W. First you can legally install 2000W solar panels, making 800W output much more likely. The 800W is only how much you can feed back into the grid. Second you can install one or more batteries and feed devices from them, further increasing the usable energy.
Yes, that is exactly what is happening. 2000W solar panels feed the battery, up to 800W are allowed to be fed back into the grid/house network. Keep in mind you could also plug a 3000W device directly into the battery, meaning you could power a lot more than that if it is not connected to the grid. If you have devices that need little power for a long duration or high power for a short duration they can be fed with 100% solar that way. Depending on your use case that can save further money.
Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all? I'd think it would be pretty hard to keep people from importing solar panels from Vietnam or Thailand—although of course you'd probably have to put it somewhere that surveillance drones could see it, if you want it to get any sun. (In that case, if you have a rooftop, maybe you could put it under a frosted-glass skylight.)
If anything, I'd expect the prices to be lower. Do you have a local Indonesian equivalent of eBay like we do here in Argentina? Or, just eBay?
I assume "electricity capacity of 900W" means that the wires from the transformer (and in the walls) are only rated for 4 amps at 230VAC. This means that you can't really run a 2000-watt air conditioner at all. Whereas, with an 800-watt solar panel charging a battery, you can run a 2000-watt air conditioner 40% of the time when the panel is in full sun. Washing machines and refrigerators are an even bigger difference, since they usually have huge peaks of current draw when they start up their motors, but relatively low average power. So the solar panels may actually be a much bigger boon than simply comparing 800 to 900 makes it sound like. A single car battery can typically source 6000 watts for brief periods of time.
https://www.tokopedia.com/ is the Indonesian Amazon. You can get everything it seems, also grid-tied inverters, but the prices are higher than in Europe from a quick check. Probably import taxes.
What do you mean by 'that price'? Are there heavy import tariffs or another artificial reason why you can't order from the same chinese manufacturers as germany does?
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
Some countries with state gas or utility monopoly will ensure legislation blocks solar power. Example Thailand has huge solar potential but cheap gas, so they block solar panel installations
Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.
Surely you can do what you want within your own home, so long as you don't hook it up to the grid?
I'm also not sure if this fits with the price restriction they mentioned. Prohibitions can't be bypassed by paying a higher price, unless it were to refer to bribes
The systems in the article are hooked up to the grid though.
They're hooked up in an extremely safe and responsible manner, but it's understandable that there are regulations about what can be hooked up, and simply not surprising that they haven't been updated to say "yeah, this is ok".
A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.
It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.
The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.
They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.
But in that case the regulations would only have to apply to plugging in something that doesn't do that. There shouldn't be any forms or approvals or fees for someone who buys a product that does.
I agree there shouldn't be, but I don't think it's surprising that in many places there are. It takes active work for the regulator to look at the product and say "this design is sound, we're sure it won't kill anyone".
Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.
Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.
Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.
Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.
The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
That's 0,38 Euro/W of panel power, including inverter and cable. And there might be a solid price uptick on that because of the shop that's selling it. Wholesale from specialized shops is probably much cheaper...
Just for the record, that seems to be an 860Wp "Schwaiger Balkonkraftwerk 860 Wp Wifi fähig" for €325, "inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.", but not including "Versand- & Lieferbedingungen
+ 99,99 € Versandkosten". So it's €424.99, which is €0.494 per peak watt, about five or ten times the wholesale price of just the solar module.
Yes, but you could also just drive to one of the roughly 2.000 home and garden markets and just take one of the sets home with you in your car. Or get yourself cables and an inverter and buy the cheapest panels you can find, maybe even used ones.
The thing is: Prices are falling fast and that's great for everybody.
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
Legality can be a funny thing. Governments can make anything they want illegal. Here in Argentina it's illegal to import used capital equipment that hasn't been refurbished by the original manufacturer or to import maps that say that the Malvinas Islands aren't part of Argentina. In Thailand it's illegal to step on paper currency because the king's face is on it.
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
Heating is always the culprit (or cooling but that's less of an issue in our area).
But one thing to realize is that the industry was just lazy and none of this is actually "needs" a full electric line.
- You don't need actual heat for washing clothes if you using washing detergent. There are no real simple "machines" available as far as I know, except simple camping washing machines
- A rice cooker can work from as low as 250w. I have a "cooking" option in mine drawing 500w taking no longer than the usual 2000w plate (better isolation, optimized heat transfer, ...) to get water cooking.
- Heaters are difficult, I've tried a lot of electric options and they all draw a lot of power when you heat something like 20°C over the outside temperature. However ex. "Ecomat 2000" (small ceramic heater) can easily heat a average room at 450 watts.
One way to get warm and way lower wattage is heating blankets. From 50 - 100w usually on for 50% you get very far with little power.
Not sure if that helps anyone. But I spent a lot of time researching efficient caravan alternatives.
Most powerful draw is going to be on heating and cooling things which can also be done using gas. Is Indonesia using a lot of gas (or even wood) or they just not cooking?
Kerosene cookers are still very popular in Indonesia, or gas from portable bottles. I've not seen gas refrigerators, but maybe some people also have them.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
800 Watt balkony power stations are generally listed at low hundreds of euros, not thousands; cheap enough to be a no-brainer and sold in budget shops like Lidl.
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).
Balcony solar panels isn't necessarily a bad outcome. It's enormously more resilient to natural disasters and warfare than centralized power stations, it's potentially more responsive to individual power needs than an electric regulator, and it may not even be inefficient—while solar panels in a utility-scale solar farm will have a higher capacity factor than balcony solar panels, that only saves you money on solar panels, but requires transmission, distribution, metering, and utility-scale storage capacity between the solar farm and the apartment, all of which are costly. At some price point, putting up a solar panel costs less than running a power line to your house.
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.
> it's getting harder and harder to justify the efficiencies of centralization.
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.
Well, there really are economies of scale involved in building solar farms. Accidental deaths per installed megawatt are orders of magnitude lower than rooftop solar. A single-axis solar tracker can rotate hundreds of square meters of solar panels. 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. A FLIR image can identify failing solar cells so you can queue them for replacement or repair, and a lawsuit against a maker of faulty solar panels is much more feasible if the potential damages are €60 million rather than €600. Etc.
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.
> Accidental deaths per installed megawatt are orders of magnitude lower than rooftop solar.
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.
I think the answer is that they are, because there aren't that many infrastructure deaths.
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.
There are definitely economics of scale. They are just not visible in Germany due to outdated building and policy practices.
> 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 installations discussed in the article switch off power generation if mains power goes away, both for technical and safety reasons. If you want mains-independent power, more devices are needed, which seems to cost about as much as a typical balcony solar panel installation (which is still needed, of course). I doubt many German deployments are like that, so it doesn't really improve resiliency of electrical power.
I'm imagining autonomous intercontinental narcosubs full of solar panels navigating upriver and mooring under trees on a rainy night, met by hard-boiled crews of heavily tattooed solar panel installers with gold teeth toting AK-47s, who load the illicit panels into a beer delivery truck.
What a ridiculous take. I have one of these systems and a 2kWh battery attached to it. It reduces my electricity bill by about half and will pay for itself in less than five years. I sacrifice nothing of my balcony, the panels hang outside.
Not OP, but I installed a "Balcony solar" 1.4kWp panels 2.4kWh battery system on my parents garage. The only subsidy was the tax free purchase of the components (we did file for an additional tax break with the city, but they had already run out of funds for that because it is so popular). You also save a lot of money on installation costs.
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
A kW of panels produces about 1000kWh a year in a sunny location in Germany. Electricity is around 30c/kWh. A 1kW+2kWh batteries and inverter set costs about 1k€ shipped from Amazon.
Not the person you are replying to but my four panels with about 2000W cost me about 370€ shipped including an inverter and cables.
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).
I don't think you understand how this works. People voluntarily do this. No one is forced to. Public power providers exist and work. Balcony solar is added and helps save some cost because you don't buy those 800W from the public utility provider.
People are forced to do it by high household electricity prices which are the direct result of the government policy failure.
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.
Exactly, like growing potatoes made economic sense to my parents' generation.
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.
France has changed permitting laws to allow small-scale solar, i.e.: balcony solar, the difference is that the nominal output is much lower (350W vs 800W for Germany) which, by policy, makes it less attractive.
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.
What do you mean about preventing fires? 800 watts at 240 volts is only 3.3 amps. Are you saying there are German houses where you could plug a solar power system into an outlet whose wires would pose a fire risk if they carried 4 amps? Because I think the minimal rating for a German residential outlet is 16 amps, which would be 3520 watts at 220 volts.
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.
That's 3.3 amps behind the breaker. So if your wiring is set up for 16 amps you can now draw 19.3 amps before the breaker kicks in. That's within the safety margin. But if you allow PV to feed in more you exceed the safety margins and can cause the wiring to overheat.
Hmm, I guess you're right. If your oven is plugged into a different breaker than the one where you plug in the solar panels, that doesn't happen, but most people won't know which outlet is on which circuit. Thank you for explaining!
caveat - 20 amps on a b16 breaker will take a very long time (minutes to hours) to trip; in practice, you may never see it tripping during normal usage, but yeah your walls will get a bit warmer.
No, I didn't miss the point, I know they were talking about electricity prices. My counterpoint is that France is not seeing balcony solar not only because electricity prices are lower but due to policies which limit it.
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.
I can easily afford my power bill. I still have a Balkonkraftwerk.
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.
This is a ridiculous take. Germany did not screw up their energy policy, they had a transition plan that ended up not working due to one of the partners in that plan starting a war and believing that they had Germany by the short hairs to stop them from interfering.
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.
Well, Germany made an assumption that their „partner”, which already was starting wars, would at least keep them far enough from their home turf. It backfired spectacularly and we can blame German government for that.
Not much to disagree about generating energy at home though.
The 'handel durch wandel' policy was always predicated on the fact that economic pressure would be a strong tool to force russia to abandon its policy of expansion. It did not work. I don't blame the politicians so much for trying as I do for not realizing way earlier that it clearly wasn't working. The revolving door to high positions in the russian oil industry should have been forbidden to them and obviously they should have known better. But hope springs eternal and I can see why they fell for it, even if I think it was dumb (and I already thought so at the time, but I'm more of a pessimist I guess).
I share your take on the gas policy failure. It was hard to prevent because Russian gas was so cheap. How could the German government have forced companies to buy more expensive gas elsewhere?
We don't remove comments. Comments that are sufficiently bad get flagged by the community, and if there are enough flags, a comment is killed, which happened to that one.
The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.
1.) Russia is already sending drones to border countries.
2.) Russian politicians openly talk about such possibility.
3.) Russian interest in expansion is no secret.
War with Russia is a real possibility. Considering NATO is not reliable anymore (due USA being less then reliable partner) , considering China seem to low key support Russia, it is not even crazy from the Russian side.
If anything has become clear in the last couple of years is that Russia doesn't act rationally, and their government lies as soon as they open their mouths. E.g trying to explain Russia's actions with 'reason' is just a waste of time.
Also: "if you want peace, prepare for war" has never been more true than now, as sad as that is.
Hey, I find you from another topic (about speed of js/rust calls, im really curious about best effective way of wasm 3d app with additional raycasting, etc)
However I couldnt ignore this topic since im from Voronezh, Russia. Totally agree about government’s lies and impulsiveness, however:
- when they say “X is what totally not gonna happen” actually they introduce X event to the news so 99.99% it is gonna happen later
- impulsiveness huge, they got a lot of people in jail for labeling “svo” as “war” and in last months all the government refers to the conflict as to “the war”. However(!) they kinda translate will of the nation, some basic russians, trying to create narrative that will make average russian proud and happy and from the other side praying for any luck in war (actually they need not luck but supply chains, that ones are corrupted as hell, and that shit going for three centuries at least, nothing new)
So, about prep to a war I’m afraid you’re right, I don’t think it’s reasonable to stay at Russia at all for now at least for 6 years. Also it’s risky to stay in Poland and Finland. For Baltics not that risky but really depressing though. h o w e v e r
- russia had a deal for nato not to get close to its borders, that was violated in a really bad manner, the neighbor just stopped all communication from 2020 and at beginning 2022 declared cancellation of other deal of not to place any atom weapon nearby.
- USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”. So there is nothing else this country can do if it doesn’t want to give up. The reasoning is pretty clear and emotional, stand for national security, do not became another India for UK. But the whole thing is messy, and smells like a slavs genocide. Russia became isolated, people are really angry and tolerable to constant violence threats, that is just insane turnaround since 2018 world cup that was hosted in Moscow.
> russia had a deal for nato not to get close to its borders
This deal doesn't exist, at least anywhere on paper. There is an obligation related to the reunification of Germany that no NATO troops are stationed on the territory of former East Germany which has been honored by the reunited Germany.
Countries are also not forced into NATO, they ask to join.
> USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”.
As far as I have read, Russia wanted to 'skip the queue' ahead of smaller countries. When this special treatment was denied, Russia suddenly didn't want to join anymore.
I honestly don't think the Ukraine invasion was that irrational.
Russia had previous success (with managable pushback) annexing Crimea (and the Chechen wars before).
Things just went south really hard this time and now they're kinda stuck, just like France/Germany in WW1 or the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Writing off a lost war effort is also much harder for a totalitarian regime, because you are not gambling with your re-election: It's literally your life on the line, or your whole career at the very least (kleptocrat network & favors), so doubling down is kinda the most rational approach from the decision-makers PoV.
I mean yeah... in a sense it's also not quite irrational for Russia to attack a NATO country (like one of the Baltics) if Russia is convinced that the rest of NATO (or at least the US) isn't coming to help. It would still be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
The Ukraine War became irrational the day after it started.
The entire war was planned as "It will be over in 3 days, we will accomplish all our objectives trivially, it will be a massive gain". There was never even an idea in the Kremlin that it would be anything other than a milk run, no contingency plan for if Ukraine fought back at all.
Russia did not even take control over hundreds of billions of dollars of cash reserves in foreign banks that they expected to be part of their war chest, and which were frozen early on.
Then they failed to take Hostomel airport, failed to be welcomed by the population, and their invasion column was an abysmal, laughable even, execution on whatever plan they had.
From that moment on, there was no "Success" option. It's geopolitical sunk cost fallacy.
Russia did not plan on losing over 4000 tanks! Russia did not plan on throwing away most of their Soviet inheritance and outright emptying all the storage yards for old tanks! They did not plan on causing the outright or near extinction of several entire types of Soviet military vehicle! They have lost 8000 IFVs! They definitely did not plan or want to lose several irreplaceable strategic aircraft, including multiple EWACS type aircraft that they didn't have a lot of in the first place, and again, irreplaceable.
Russia did not plan to have 30% of their fuel refining infrastructure damaged by a neighbor without a serious air force! Russia did not plan to have an attempted coup that was well on its way to Moscow. Russia did not plan on having most of its industry hampered by foreign export controls and limits.
Russia most certainly did not plan on having to beg and trade North Korea for a few million artillery shells, and they did not plan on having the Flagship of the Black Sea fleet sunk by a country who scuttled their navy months earlier!
If Ukraine rolled over and willingly submitted to total control today, including the actual populace (instead of resisting), Russia would still be utterly fucked for decades to come.
Russia is still by far the biggest country in Europe, with tons of natural resources and support from the biggest industrial manufacturer on the planet. It has an industry that is now fully oriented to produce military goods in war-time quantities that it can't easily spin down.
Russia does have resources, it has the desire, and importantly the state it depends on (China) has a very strong motivation to have Nato distracted when it acts on its plans for Taiwan.
On drones: there is no evidence of that. The supposed "drone ship" that was siezed by France turned out to be crewed by Chinese and had no drones or weapons on board. A Croatian citizen were arrested regarding the drone near Frankfurt airport. Three Germans were arrested regarding the drones near Oslo.
Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing? Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
Please show me where Russian politicians openly talk about flying drones around European airports? I've seen Putin and others ridicule the very notion - and it really is ridiculous. Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland, and which had literally been duct-taped together from the remains of Russian drones and placed for a photoshoot!
> Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing?
What could Russian military intelligence possibly have to gain from an arson attack on a COOP grocery store in rural Estonia? And yet, they were caught red-handed: https://english.nv.ua/nation/two-gru-arsonists-jailed-in-est... Many other Russian-sponsored terrorist cells have also been caught and are awaiting trial or have been sentenced, the most notable being a network that tried to smuggle incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes.
> Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland
Then how do they reach western Ukraine every night? It's much farther away than the distance Russian drones penetrated into Poland.
> Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia, and then please do tell about Russia's supposed expansion plans
Comparing European countries voluntarily joining a mutual defense pact to a foreign invasion is moronic. You could make a similar map for any major international organization: the closer a country was to Russia, the less developed it tended to be (no coincidence) and the later it joined. Has the Council of Europe been slowly expanding towards Russia and threatening them with human rights? Has Starbucks been fighting a shadow war to surround Russia with mediocre coffee?
Well, for some context, most new NATO members were previously under communism regimes and soviet influence in the past. After getting their freedom, the next step was to make sure they are safe from Russia.
Senior population remembers soviet union with all its warts (rightfully so) but fail to account the structures that governed the union and whole topdown integration no longer exists there.
Meanwhile anyone born in the last 40 years was raised with inferiority complex due to being economically behind and treat every word from west as gospel.
There is evidence of Russian drones entering Polish airspace. That has nothing to do with any ships.
> Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
NATO should do more to help Ukraine. They absolutely should.
>Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia,
That is countries deciding to join NATO in the hope it will protect them against Russia. No one forced them into NATO. Russia does not like it only because NATO prevents Russia from expanding. This is such a ridiculous talking point.
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household.
Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
The hybrid (heat-pump & heat-elements, both) water heater I installed 2 years ago has already paid for itself in savings. This design literally pulls the heat out of your conditioned space, providing both cooling and dehumidification (I live in a humid temperate rainforest so win-win). <3% of my annual electric usage goes to my water heater (typically 10%+).
During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
I assume balcony solar panels provide you with a power socket. How do you connect all the appliances in house to that socket(s)? Isn't it a lot of cabling?
Well, the person you are replying to is in a thread about Germany, mentions balcony solar and said "my little server turns it automatically on" (which is how you would construct that sentence in German instead of "turns it on automatically"), so my wild guess would be Germany. ;)
Germany has a pretty consistent climate. Doesn't really matter where you live. Of course, that's an oversimplification, but if you're new to Germany and wonder "oh, what's the weather going to be here?", the answer pretty much is "similar to the rest of the country".
You could then look at a map of France and think, ah, similarly sized country, probably also has a consistent climate, but that's not true. Southern France is very different from Northern France. But Germany's climate is pretty uniform.
Yes, there is a difference, you are right. I don't have hard numbers at the moment (typing from the phone) but from looking it up quickly, the sun's intensity varies from about 950 kWh/m² to about 1.200 kWh/m² between north and south Germany. So, what OP described will generally work in any part of Germany.
> Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
A more fitting title would be "Germany's citizens outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels". The current phrasing makes it sound like it's somehow a thing done by the government, which is not the case. If anything the government is one of the many forces slowing down this progress. And yes, I am aware of things like grid security and stability being a concern. I am not complaining.
Given that these things are usually hindered by the government's bureaucracy, maybe the best title would be "Germany's government removes obstacles preventing residents from outfitting..."
Electricity is so expensive in Germany, that these things pay for themselves in a couple of years - you are theoretically right, but as things are, these make financial sense.
Unless it is related to weapons or the project that will ultimately benefit big corps, project will not work out using central government policy. With revolving doors and sophisticated lobbing, at this point government seems just like different side of the same coin as big corp.
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
There's nits on your nits: most residents (citizen or otherwise) don't own their properties; and while these things do work with houses, they are intended for apartments.
Most of them are installed by tenants. Who also aren't all citizens, so you aren't wrong there. Maybe "Germany's resident's" would be more accurate, but of course some small percentage will be installed by landlords who actually reside abroad. You will never get that title to be 100% accurate
China also has 58 nuclear reactors and are currently building 30 more. [0] They are doing everything right to get rid of coal and also become energy independent.
It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
How fast has Germany's PV capacity expanded in recent years? In another subthread I wanted some estimate of how many hectares in Germany had PV on them, but the pages I visisted on the subject were outdated.
Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that.
Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator.
Overall, Germany is in a shit place for renewable energy
For many years I have been writing about how bad Germany is for solar panels because of, mostly, how far north it is. Specifically, the capacity factor for utility-scale solar in Germany has historically been about 10%, which is mostly because of the unfavorable latitude and cloudiness. You can see this quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali.... The capacity factor for utility-scale solar in China has actually also historically been about 10%, and I have no idea why that is. You are certainly correct that it ought to be much better, because China gets so much more sun. You can see that quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
However, Germany does not have a space problem. Germany is 357'114km² with "photovoltaic electricity potential" of about 3.0kWh/kWp/day according to Solargis (see above link), which would be a capacity factor of 12.5%. I'm not quite sure how they calculate that, but multiplying by the country's area, the solar constant of 1000W/m², and a fudge factor of 0.8, it works out to something on the order of 30–40 terawatts, electric. That's roughly 50% to 100% more than the entire world's marketed energy consumption, which is about 18 terawatts, about a third of it electric. Germany produced 488.5 TWh in 02024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany) which is 55.73GW.
Therefore, roughly 0.2% of Germany's land area would suffice to produce all of its current electrical consumption with solar energy, about 700km². This would also require something like 450 gigawatts (peak) of solar panels, which would cost about €45 billion at today's prices, roughly 4 days of Germany's GDP.
It is absolutely true that, if you put those same solar panels in the Mojave Desert, mounted with single-axis trackers, they would produce two or three times as much power. (California's average utility-scale solar capacity factor was over 29% last I checked.) So, yes, solar is much more expensive in Germany. But if you check out https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you will see that, in March 02023, solar modules cost three times as much as they do now. So solar generation in California then cost what solar generation in Germany costs now. (Except that, because of Biden's anti-renewable-energy tariffs, actual California prices were and are much higher than you would expect from Solarserver.)
To put this somewhat in perspective ("why is Germany not installing 700km² of PV panels right now?"):
Grid operators project costs of around €250 billion [1] (within 2045) for grid expansion alone, and NIMBYism is a big problem everywhere in Germany.
Battery storage to allow going full PV (1 week) would be at least twice that [2].
There is also plenty of "anti-green" sentiment in Germany generally and the current government coalition is in a somewhat precarious position, discouraging long-term investments like that.
Great idea! Want to learn more on the safety though...
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
Anti‑islanding detects the power frequency and constantly tries to shift it. If the grid is on, its frequency won't budge, so the anti‑islanding doesn't trip. If the grid is off, the frequency shifts and it shuts off. A second one would just make it shut off faster.
Curious: is anti-islanding an actual feature, or a necessary behavior of any power source that adds power to the grid? I can't imagine how a second power source would work at all if it weren't syncing to the main source's AC phase. So it seems that if you implement the syncing, you get anti-islanding for free (assuming you handle the case of a missing main source phase by not providing power at all).
This is a newbie question, and I look forward to learning how it's more complex than this.
If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes.
Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead.
Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-tied inverters: When there is nothing for them to sync to, they output nothing.
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase).
However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now).
Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 240V 40A clothes dryer. The island is definitely going to collapse at that point, and might do bad stuff on the way down.
Even in that weird non-existent corner case instance, it is a necessary function because a hypothetical microinverter is completely and utterly incapable of kickstarting a grid.
You could totally have half a dozen microinverters scattered around your household, connected to each other but temporarily not to the neighborhood distribution network.
A hypothetical microinverter is completely capable of kickstarting the "grid" within a single house. You can try it yourself: get a 2000-watt car inverter, connect it to a car battery, turn off your house's main circuit breaker, and plug a suicide cord (male to male) between the car inverter and one of your house's outlets. The electrical appliances in your house will work fine unless one of them starts trying to draw more than 2000 watts (or, as hedora says, unless you're powering only one phase of a split-phase system). This is dangerous: if someone turns the main circuit breaker back on while in this setup, the car inverter will probably be destroyed and may start a fire. But it's far from a technological impossibility. It's achievable even with redneck duct-tape-and-baling wire engineering.
The grid-tied microinverter cannot do this on its own. It is incapable.
A person can add other things to the scenario and the microinverter may elect to play ball, but it is simply incapable of kickstarting bloody anything on its own.
Are there any other wildly imaginative corner cases you'd like to explore that have nothing at all to do with balcony solar, as it is implemented in Germany?
I was rebutting your incorrect assertion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487471 about what hypothetical microinverters were or were not "utterly incapable" of. The comment you have just posted is irrelevant to that.
The design features of currently existing microinverters are irrelevant to hedora's point about what microinverters could be designed to do, except insofar as they constitute an existence proof. (Obviously something is possible if it's already being done, but the inverse is not true.)
Thanks, I think that answers my question. It seems like there is a lot of regulation to enforce a behavior that was already necessary for microinverters to work at all. But given the risk (utility worker electrocution during outages), I also understand why utilities are extra-conservative about it.
From what I remember, it turned out that the electronics were sufficient. Though the chance of issues (e.g. in case of a software but) were/are increased.
Well, it turned out that the micro inverter in question did not contain the necessary physical relay to show conformity with the claimed norms on electric safety (related to disconnect from the grid in case of grid failure).
They only had a software implementation and were forced to send all customers in Germany a free relay dongle to ensure safety.
Micro inverters pretty much all have automatic shutdowns in these situations. They can ‘boost’ the phase/voltage, but won’t replace it if it is missing.
That they shut off is important for a more obvious reason: The microinverters plug into a normal outlet. So the flow of power is invented to the normal situation, here the prongs of the plug are energized.
The body that writes the electrical regulations of course wanted a mandatory special plug and socket that had to be installed by a licensed electrician, which mostly makes balcony solar financially a non starter. Finally they relented after much discussion.
Is this a German thing? My balcony has spaced metal bars and I would hate to see the state of it if there were solid barriers keeping it cool, moist, and building up debris.
From my experience, there are different cultural aspects to privacy and sometimes, simple metal bars balconies are fitted with fabric to hide what's happening inside the apartment from the outside world.
I guess in many places where this is more culturally predominant, they install solid barriers on those balconies.
Usually those barriers leave a gap at the bottom for water and debris.
> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation.
so about 5yrs ROI
And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidizing installation):
> Weyland spent around $530 for his 600-watt-capacity system. While he’s happy with how his south-facing panels perform during balmy weather, such days are rare in northern Germany. He estimates that he’ll save around $100 in annual electricity costs and recoup his investment in about five years.
The article mentions the main motivation in Germany is also climate change and a feeling of independence, not so much economics
It's nice that it is both. You do something good and also save money. Everyone with a plug at their balcony is throwing money away when not installing some panels, if there is no roof installation already ofc.
Not an answer to your question, but I was amazed at how wildly varied the pricing was when I was getting estimates. This was a few years back and I didn't go with it at the time, so I forget what the exact estimates were. But I remember that the highest was literally double the price of the lowest for all the same equipment. All I'm saying is don't trust any pricing you get from folks online, and do get a lot of estimates.
Probably prices now are much lower than they were a few years ago, since solar modules are now at a historically low price that is one third of their price in early 02023.
I was pricing out using bifacial panels for fencing. It seems like it would cost about twice the price of cedar, but last twice as long (50 years) and have less upkeep.
I started looking at that to boost my roof solar capacity. It looks like it’s permitted by code where I’m at and now the only thing I’m unsure about is vandalism since my property is against a busy street. Seems like a great idea though.
It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.
Around here I have a backyard washing machine, a backyard grill, a backyard clothesline, and my neighbors have backyard childcare, backyard parking, and a backyard motorcycle. And actually inside my house I have a flush toilet and an oven.
Your assertion seems to imply that if instead I had to wash and dry my laundry at a coin-operated laundromat, eat at a cafeteria table with all my neighbors, and piss in a portapotty down the street, and my neighbor's kids were taken away to live at a boarding school, while he had to ride the bus to work instead of driving, that would be evidence of successful policy!
We clearly have radically different definitions of success. Yours seems not to be well thought out.
The problem with backyard furnaces was that the steel they produced was not just expensive but also inferior. If you could plug in a Tabletop Minimill that produced ingots of specialty precision steel alloys to your order, ranging from maraging steel to tool steel to nitinol, and which was also cheap to operate, that would not be an economic policy failure. That would be an enormous success!
Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; my household water pressure tank is decentralized because of collective action failure, for example, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487610. Others don't. We have to analyze the particulars of each case. I've written at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051 a bit about the particulars of this case.
> Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; ... Others don't.
That's correct, yes. I too prefer a decentralized washing machine to coin-operated laundromats which are very common in France where I live nowadays.
However I still believe that electricity generation has more in common with steelmaking than with laundry. Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI, they're largely enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value. The long-term solution in my view is nuclear which coincidentally the French do rather well, it's not all laundromats.
> Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI
That is clearly wrong. Even the worst-case embodied energy assumptions for solar panels estimate the cost of producing a square meter of solar panel area at 2000 kWh (the best cases are around 300, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph... ). A square meter of solar panel area produces an average of 200 kWh of power per year in Germany (which implies a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can get a multiple of that). This means that even in the worst case, the solar panel has amortized itself from the perspective of embodied energy after 10 years. On average it will be more like below 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years and require no maintenance if installed correctly.
30 years lifetime (if there are no heavy storms), 5-10 years to recoup energy, that's 3-6 EROI. Then you also need to include inverters which are energy-heavy. If we're talking of any meaningful scale, then you also need to include batteries because without them panels get shut down during sunny hours lowering the EROI even further.
In the end you're lucky if you get EROI of 1.5-3. That's an extremely bad deal. All other sources of energy, renewable or not, are in the 20-100 territory. The purpose of the energy production system is not to barely sustain itself but to actually produce usable electricity for everything else you want to do. It's the means, not the ends.
Solar panels have very solid benefits of course, you can buy them for your house to be more autonomous -- I would do that if I had a house. But from the energy/CO2 perspective what you're doing is buying a sort of "battery" that was charged with cheap coal-based electricity in China and shipped off to US/Europe. This makes sense in certain situations but presenting this as a green solution or as future of humanity is just delusional.
> Then you also need to include inverters which are energy-heavy.
Scientific publications say otherwise. It's quite hard to come by any numbers, but page 11 of https://www.wisdomlib.org/uploads/journals/mdpi-sust/2025-vo... says that typical solar inverters require about 15 MJ/kW of power for their production in total, which would amount to approx. 4 kWh per kW of inverter power. A solar panel square meter produces about 200-250 watts of peak power, so it needs inverter power that cost about 1 kWh to build. Let's triple that, because inverters have a typical lifetime of 10 years in contrast to the 30 years of solar panels. 3 kWh for the inverter is negligible when compared with 300-2000 kWh for the panel itself. So we can just ignore that.
Batteries are interesting. According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24, it takes about 35 kWh in total to produce 1 kWh of battery capacity. Let's say we'll need 250 Wh of capacity for our 250 WPeak solar panel square meter (the rule of 1 kWh capacity for each 1 kWp is a typical estimate applied when sizing solar installations for residential homes). That makes up about 8 or 9 kWh to produce this battery capacity. Admittedly that doesn't include the raw materials, of which the cell requires quite a few expensive ones. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good resource on that, so I resorted to asking ChatGPT for a rough calculation, and it came up with about 140 kWh for our 250 Wh LFP cell, which doesn't sound entirely wrong, as it assumed a cell weight of 1,5 kg and splitted that up into different materials. The weight matches what I would expect from personal experience with LFP batteries.
Basically, we can just ignore the inverter and must add about 150 kWh for the battery to our 300-2000 kWh for the panel. That does not substantially impact an EROI calculated from a 1000 kWh assumption for the panel alone.
And this is a calculation based on Germany. Again: weather conditions are far from optimal for solar in Germany. It's much better in many regions in China, where solar panels are made. They can easily achieve EROIs of 20+ with solar there, which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
> > This makes sense in certain situations but presenting this as a green solution or as future of humanity is just delusional.
> which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
State-run economies get delusional pretty easily, but in this case China is safely on the "makes sense in certain situations" side:
* keep electricity prices low
* invest heavily in nuclear
* install solar within reasonable limits (currently around 8% of the grid)
* for better or for worse they burn more and more coal every year
They certainly don't make insane green commitments and they don't say solar is the future of humanity. I don't like China much, but I don't see how they can fall into "delusional" category according to my criteria above, they have none of it.
Now Germany's policy is the complete opposite of China's, except for the "burning coal" part. Germany killed their own economy over high electricity prices because they wanted to go green, but then somehow they've got almost 2x CO2 emissions per capita compared to France.
If someone says "I sacrifice A to get B", but then never get the B and still lose A, and then insist that the plan was a great success -- he's certainly delusional, that's like the definition of the word.
Maybe you can explain in more detail what you mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value", but on my assumption that you're talking about EROEI and energy payback time, your assertion is profoundly incorrect.
> Just on an economic basis we can bound the energy payback time to about four years
If you use electricity prices to make that calculation, you need to take in account that solar panels are produced in China off cheap coal-based electricity. If you produce a panel in Germany it would take much longer to break even economically (if ever). That's what I mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world".
> we found a Fraunhofer report by Simon Philipps and Werner Warmuth with a more detailed estimate arriving at a 1.1-year energy payback time in Northern Europe, 0.9 years in Southern Europe
This article doesn't explain how they make their calculations and I struggle to replicate them. The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm. Measured (not projected) yield in Germany is 160-180 kWh per 1sqm per year. A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally. Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe. In the end you may get anywhere between 10 and 100 kWh per 1sqm per year (would love to see some real measurements by the way, not projected ones).
So my view is very simple: these balcony panels make sense economically because German economy is cooked. However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment. Which by the way could be a reasonable price to pay for autonomy in case of power failure but these balcony setups can't run when the grid is off.
> A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally.
Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
> Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe.
That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
And clearly, we are discussing the energy break-even here, as indicated by "The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm."
> However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment.
As I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is.
In addition to this, as I've described in another posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45490555) there's the psychological side of things, where cheap and easily profitable balcony panels for everyone are a gateway drug for "normal people" to get actively involved in the field of renewable energy and must not be underestimated in their ability to open the minds of people for other, more efficient actions to get closer to a carbon-neutral energy economy. Since those activities tend to be heavily inhibited by broad refusal that's often not based on factual arguments, but simply on inertia in people's minds ("we've always done it the other way") and a certain lazyness to actively grapple with new technologies and developments, this effect is at least as important as the actual impact on the energy grid. Just like on the stock market, the raw numbers are only half of the story. Psychology is the other half.
> Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
> That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would. This is a fundamental tradeoff with solar: it's either too small to make any difference or you never get your projected EROI because you have to shut them down during the very time they produce maximum energy.
> I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is
You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do. Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
I'm extremely sceptical of all these "concrete calculations", not because they're mathematically incorrect but because they are detached from real life. It's like when they sell you a timeshare cottage on a ski resort and mathematically it's profitable, but in reality it's a huge liability.
> No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
„which are even worse“ is an assumption you make, you do not have any data to back that up. From what I regularly see, they are not worse at all. People without sun on their balconies do not buy balcony solar kits in the first place. Also there’s the fact that people can spend time to meticulously optimize every single panels’ location (which they usually don’t when someone places 30 panels on a roof in a single day, it’s just about getting them up there quickly). If you are interested in numbers, browse https://www.reddit.com/r/Balkonkraftwerk/ - it’s German language but Reddit does quite well with auto-translation as far as I know. Every month, people post their yield numbers for comparison there.
> No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would.
You are equating the time during which a home solar owner cannot use his own solar power with the time during which there are negative electricity prices. This is grossly wrong. In 2024, Germany had 457 hours of negative power prices (see https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/03/bundesnetzagentur-457-...). That’s roughly 5% of the year. Typical home solar power usage if no battery at all is installed is about 50%. If we talk about batteries, which are increasingly getting common in balcony solar installations due to significant price drops, it’s more like 80-90% of power that the owner can use directly.
> You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do.
The panels are the exact same panels used for large-scale solar installations. These are tested and guaranteed by the manufacturer for 30+ years. Nobody doubts that they’ll reach that lifespan in most cases.
The inverters are a negligible amount of kWh invested, as I pointed out in the parallel threads’ posting. So you can easily buy one or two replacements over the 30 year timespan without impacting the EROI of the panel at all. Also, a lifespan of 30 years does not mean that the panel fails after 30 years. It just goes below a defined point of efficiency (80% of original peak power). You can very well use it for another 10 or 20 years, you just have to accept that it produces only 80% of the original output.
> Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
That’s not what I see, because it is surprisingly hard to dispose of solar panels in practice. They do not fit into the typical „dumpsters“ people use to dispose their regular trash. You would be able to dispose of them for free at the next recycling center in Germany, as they are mandated to take them, but most cars cannot be used to transport solar panels as they are too large, so it’s not trivial to get them there. From what I observe, people therefore simply sell or donate the panels to the next renter/owner when they move, which is obviously a good idea as they are usually installed on a balcony or garden house or whatever and you usually buy the matching installation equipment for a particular situation which you wouldn’t be able to use at your future home anyway.
I find it quite interesting that you did not object to my second argument about the psychological impact/use of this technology.
This is a strange analogy. The policy saves people money on their power bill. The backyward furnaces are considered a disaster because, among other things, they produced low quality steel, and diverted labour from agriculture and other things, none of which is the case here - people pay for solar panels and install them once, and then achieve savings.
1) The biggest challenge to renewables seems to be not capacity, but storage: wind and solar can't be relied upon all of the time, and often provide peak power out of sync with peak demand. Within reason, hyper-local generation either removes the need for storage altogether (as generated electricity is immediately utilised by household appliances) or allows easy local storage to be added via a few KWh of battery in the basement.
2) Houses that can mostly power themselves also reduce demand on the electricity grid, assuming that large spikes can be avoided.
3) I like the future vision of all people and their dwellings being energy-independent, and this is the start of a path towards that.
4) Don't fall into the trap of only ever accepting an optimal solution. Local generation might be somewhat less efficient economically (although with private investment rather than governmental/corporate investment being used here, and with no apaprent shortages in solar panel supply, I'm not so sure about the comparison?) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't add some meaningful benefit, or that it shouldn't happen.
Would you also agree that production of usable energy makes most sense at scale?
With that I mean energy like heat and motion? Because so far it just hasn't been possible to generate electricity at home in a meaningful way. Unlike heat, which everyone largely generates at home.
I would argue that there has been a technological leap, where electricity generation has become possible at home now through a combination of lower prices, ease of installation and feasibility to tie in to the rest of the electrical grid. Banning this new possibility would be a shortcoming of the policy.
This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.
I do see it as the result of policy applied from the top, the policy that resulted in 2x household electricity prices compared to the US (which amounts to 3x difference if you adjust for median household income).
I replied in another thread but I still remember how in my childhood all the ordinary people had to grow potatoes. The state didn't order them to, it just created food shortages that's all. You can say it was voluntary, "not so much a policy applied from the top".
This is assuming people don’t want to go net zero, and people not understanding that going there requires change, which will be costly. I‘d argue there is a majority in Germany supporting the transition to green energy, accepting higher prices as a result.
I don't think that this is comparable. People who struggle with their electricity bills can not afford balcony solar. It has a ROI of a few years with a (low) but comparably large one time upfront cost.
Co-generating boilers have been tried before. It used a Stirling engine rather than a turbine, for 1kWe output. Whisper Tech (of New Zealand) provided the Stirling engine technology, and had their own line of CHP for marine applications.
This comment is so laughably wrong, yet at the same time not funny.
Let's do some napkin math:
* For the whole package people report 200-300 Euro prices. Let's make it 300.
* To get to say 8GW of capacity you'd need 10 million of these units
* The price of that ends up being 3 billion
* With a capacity factor of 12.5% it will produce electricity like a 1GW source that is constantly producing at full capacity
Now let's take a look at the "economical" production at scale model.
* Hinkley Point C currently under construction with a 3.2 GW capacity
* Estimated costs right now in the 50 billion Euro ballpark or 15-20 billion per GW
This is at least 5x more expensive on construction costs alone. The opportunity cost in the lost 15 years of no return on investment during construction, running cost per year difference, cost differences when it's time to scrap both things in around five decades etc. is an exercise left to the reader.
tl;dr sorry but you literally have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm aware of such calculations and they are in disagreement with fundamental limitations of these technologies. Nuclear has EROI of 20-80, solar has something like 3 if you account for inverters and batteries.
The fact that they forgot how to build reactors (France got them at 1.5B per GW adjusted for 2011 prices) and that China burns more and more coal to maintain the solar bubble doesn't change much long term. I don't think the current situation around solar is sustainable.
I could be wrong of course but hopefully we'll live long enough to see the outcome. In the meanwhile I heavily bet on the nuclear being the future.
Solar EROI is not 3. To see that this cannot be the case:
* last year around 600GW of solar was deployed, or 0.6TW
* Imagine a 12.5% capacity factor (which is low)
* Imagine their capacity will degrade linearly to 80% over 20 years (I don't know if this is completely true but it's a rough approximation), thus their average output is 90%
* Imagine they will stop producing electricity after exactly 20 years (which is not true, they will continue to work unmaintained for decades)
They will thus produce total electricity of
.6 * .9 * .125 * 24 * 365 * 20
11826TWh
If their EROI was 3 it would mean it took 3942 TWh to produce them.
China used a total of 9852TWh of electricity in 2024.
I would strongly presume China did not use 40% of its electricity to produce solar panels.
I've got 6x 440W panels literally lying flat on the lawn. They produce at least enough (200W) to power all my computers, my Starlink, my fridge, and some LED lighting by about 2 hours after sunrise and until 2 hours before sunset, even if it is completely overcast and/or raining. When there isn't a cloud in the way they produce 2000W-2400W from 11 AM to 3 PM, usually enough (at this time of year, spring conditions) to fill my 6kWh battery by noon if I don't need to use it for heating (4kW output portable air conditioner, using 900W) in the morning, leaving the electricity free for cooling in the afternoon. Otherwise the battery fills in the afternoon. If I don't need heating at night then the battery powers everything from before sunset to after sunrise with typically 2-3 kWh left in the morning to make coffee and breakfast (I use about 1kWh in the kitchen per day) and run some heating until solar generation (and the direct sun heating) pick up.
The solar panels (JAM54D40-440/GB if anyone is interested) cost me the equivalent of US$390 plus tax for all six. The Pecron E3600LFP I use to control them (combined 3kWh battery, 2x 1200W MPPT controllers, 3600W inverter, AC charger) cost ~US$1500, and an extra 3kWh battery US$800. And $200 for 2x 30m 6mm^2 cables. That's it.
I just did this last month. Results so far indicate the panels will pay for themselves by March. I bought the battery unit primarily as a UPS because of the terrible electricity reliability where I'm living, and a $450 petrol generator to charge it in the event of the multi-day outages I get in big storms (most recently 40 hours in April). It was looking like having about an eight year payback period just via time-shifting night rate power to peak times, but adding the solar panels looks like reducing that to about three years.
Only if you have batteries in between because the sun isn’t shining 24/7 in Germany (and elsewhere).
The costs for batteries are as nearly always out of the debate when news papers/portals are glorifying this German balcony subsidy scheme (costs for the public due to power feed-in which isn’t mentioned at all in this article). In the grist article the battery issue is mentioned only in one sentence.
The power feed-in is from the perspective of the power grid operator company sometimes called as power backfeed secretly which needs extra infrastructure.
Decentralisation is the way to go for energy. Instead of having huge powerplants and fat power lines having a large percentage of the needed energy produced locally is ideal.
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Wow that is pretty good, lines up pretty nicely with the approx monetary break even as well. Impressive!
Wonder if there is anything that can be done to lengthen the life of the panel as much as possible. I've read elsewhere that solar panels have a theoretical lifespan of 25 years with the panels slowly degrading and not failing all at once. I dont know if these specific panels are different but I wonder if the panels are kept clean or something if that would maximize the lifespan?
Degradation is more or less solved. Producers guarantee a maximum of .4 % power degradation per year for 25 or even 30 years. That may be offset buy rising energy costs alone. May be not if someone manages to producer cheaper batteries.
Right now owners of older rooftop photovoltaics in Germany swap functioning modules for newer ones with better efficiency.
Even if some small percentage of older modules fails it is probably not the fault of the cells but of connections in the module due to moisture. It is a system. In theory you can take the cells and build new modules. But that is too expensive compared to buying new modules.
Efficiency has improved somewhat, but also, the cost to manufacture PV is enormously lower than it was then, which means that it's using much less materials and energy to produce. Therefore the energy payback time should be much shorter.
How much shorter depends on the fraction of the energy cost in the first place then. Price is not even an upper bound for energy which is cheap in China, and also production is probably subsidised.
Intensive investigations of Chinese "subsidies" from the US Department of Commerce have come up with embarrassingly little.
The current €0.100/Wp price level (12¢/Wp) combined with the US$0.08/kWh given above does give us an upper bound of 1500 hours of full sun for the energy payback time. At a Californian 29% capacity factor, that's 7 months of operation.
But in fact not 100% of the cost of the solar module is the cost of energy; there are some labor and raw materials costs as well, as well as capital costs and, astoundingly, some profit. So 3 months is probably a better estimate.
Process energy will still be a lot cheaper than .08 US$/kWh in China. I doubt they process glass with electric ovens. OTOH that is primary energy then, which kind of supports your argument. Still other emissions in the silicon supply chain that cause global warming are also relevant. If I find the time, I‘ll look for recent LCA.
I'm delighted to see Fraunhofer's report! I'll read it carefully.
You are probably right about the glass. Processing glass in electric furnaces has been a well-established technology for many generations, but it is more expensive than fossil-fuel-fired furnaces, and is used for making more expensive kinds of glass. But the glass in solar panels is an especially cheap kind of glass.
Coal is probably the cheapest form of energy.
https://www.coal-price.com/ says that currently in China coal is on the order of US$100 per tonne. Coal has up to 33MJ/kg, so that works out to 0.3¢ per megajoule, or 1.1¢ per kilowatt hour, or more if the US$100/tonne coal isn't the best anthracite. You probably can't literally run a glassmaking furnace with a coal firebox, because of the contaminants from the coal, but you almost certainly can't run it on cheaper energy than that. If 100% of the cost of the solar panels were coal energy instead of electric, that would extend my upper bound out from 7 months to a bit over 4 years.
This seems to be in rough agreement with Fraunhofer's more informed estimate that you cite.
> [The solar panels are] connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home.
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
What is the real throughput of panels mounted vertically? I have put solar on my roof plus batteries and it reduced significantly my dependence on gas and cost of heating bills, but they're mounted on two sides so they see the sun from early-mid morning to mid afternoon, with peaks roughly mid day depending on season. I've always been skeptical about vertically mounted ones but people say they work, so not sure what to think.
I hope the US can have more of this. I never thought solar on most resi roofs made any sense. The cost is high, lots of risk from leaks but building a patio with a pergola or other shaded structure? Sign me up. The Us should be fighting to lower the red tape to get these kind of systems in place.
I wouldn't do this in my place. Having a balcony already makes your interior less bright and "closed". Blocking sunlight (even compared to semi-opaque balustrades) would make it worse, for a final energy gain that is quite small compared to central electricity production.
Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.
> Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany.
Genuinely interested what you mean by this - could you expand, please?
(It seems like the success of this scheme would mean that there is a meaningful group of people who are willing to take such an approach in Germany, whether it is characterised as libertarian or otherwise?)
This is cool. One annoying thing with much of San Francisco is that renting means you can't put things on the outside of the building usually (not a law just common lease language) but I have a little solar panel that I use to charge a phone that I can leave outside. This is wonderful. Power from the sun and no consumables!
A typical phone battery has a capacity of about 13.5 Wh. Assuming a converter efficiency of 90%, it takes 15 Wh (0.0015 kWh) to charge your phone from an outlet. Assuming an electricity cost of $0.39 per kWh in San Francisco, that's 0.58 cents ($0.0058) every time you charge your phone using the solar panel.
haha it's not the savings. It's the accessibility! This phone is out on a balcony by a herb garden. The big annoyance with electric devices is that they need to be connected to an outlet. PVs have saved this.
We have our blinds on PVs which is very convenient. No charging required and no wires required. Same thing applies here. The PVs allow battery recharge for places where power cables are inconvenient. The phone is a convenient tailscale device with a battery that can webcam!
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs”
That's a shame, and makes the whole thing feel performative, especially for a country that nixed nuclear.
Total energy need is not equal to total electricity need. And electricity is a lot more expensive then heating energy. So the cost savings can still be significant.
It's clear that hackernews is a DIY crowd and loves this idea. I'm pro letting people do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel good.
HOWEVER, I have to point out how incredibly silly this is. There is a reason why historically we have pooled our resources under the government to produce and manage energy infrastructure centrally.
Let's say these 500,000 individuals instead pooled their 1,000 euro (including installation & time) and funded one industrial-scale solar development.
You could generate a renewable 600MW+ (a 4X factor on what these randomly placed individual units will ever deliver in reality) for that money. And efficient centralized battery storage also becomes an option there.
Then your fellow citizens can spend time creating surplus value in the field they are actually experts in and also you don't have a 3rd world hellscape of outdated balcony solar units to look at out your window for the next 30 years.
There's a funny comment downthread that says "It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward."
Everyone replying disagrees, but I think it's a perfect analogy: just like the backyard furnaces, these small-scale installations are inefficient, provide a negligible portion of total energy needs (<1% of total energy needs if everyone in Germany did it, from TFA), look ugly and - this is the most important - provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
Actually, it is pretty common for homeowners to first install a balcony solar power plant and eventually "upgrading" to a full-scale solar power installation on the roof. The first is very easy and cheap to do and can be done on a weekend, the latter is costly, requires dealing with bureaucracy and partially-sleazy system sellers, and thus requires overcoming way more substantial hurdles, for which one must muster the motivation first.
Balcony solar power plants are sort of a gateway drug into actual, practical participation in the renewable energy sector. They are easy to install, cheap, have a clear and fast way to profitability, and provide significant gamification value (people who buy these kits tend to start with constantly monitoring their energy generation and usage in apps afterwards). That "ice breaker" effect should not be underestimated. It can pave the way to way more substantial actions (or to the acceptance of actions taken by others) that people wouldn't have considered otherwise simply due to inertia of the status quo.
> look ugly
That is YOUR taste. I consider most balconies with solar panels to look futuristic and cool. Garden houses with solar panels on the roof also look way cooler and more modern than without them.
> provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
You're wrong about this. There are a lot of people who still think solar power is only about environmental virtue-signalling and it can never compete with good old dinosaur juice. If everyone adopts balcony solar, it'll help convince these people they're wrong. At least the ones who are merely misinformed rather than dug into an ideology.
And yes, 1% of German energy is a ton of energy; but that is an incredibly optimistic forecast of if _every_ German did this. There are 85 million Germans; they could do a lot of things with their combined efforts. Backyard furnaces produced millions of tons of steel; seems like a very apt comparison.
I actually have solar of my own. It powered my entire life (off grid!) for years. That still doesn't mean I think individual small-scale solar is a meaningful solution to the climate crisis.
The biggest risk around climate, in my opinion, is the risk that people and governments think "we're doing something" when they are not. In this case, balcony solar has a very short payback time (a claimed 5 years for one guy's install! That is preposterously short for any investment!) because of the strange way that residential power is priced. If people really paid for the power and the grid infrastructure in relation to the real costs, balcony solar would never pay itself back, but essentially nobody understands that. Instead, they see the large amount they're saving and mentally that magnifies the impact of what they're doing. From the various posts I found, an ideal, un-shaded install produces between 200 and 500 kWh per year, depending on orientation and size. Obviously any sort of shading would drop that off a cliff. Compare that with the 38 MWh (38,000 kWh) per year of primary energy that the average German consumes...
Your total energy needs figure today is completely irrelevant. Half of the so called needs are just for entertainment. Now excuse me I have to step in my SUV and drive to lake Garda Italy for the weekend at 200 km/h.
Balcony solar is limited to 700-800 watt for safety reasons. There's also a lobby to get ppl to need an electrician for installation, which is bullshit. Rising energy prices (I paid minimum 50 bucks/Month) and sneaky corporate tactics (they give you 12 ct/kwh then after like half a year make it 60 ct/kwh) makes ppl want more price independence, which is understandable
It's only bullshit if you're certain that the electrical installation passes muster. I've seen many installations that are downright dangerous, mostly in older homes and cheap apartments. There's a reason for the 800W limit, that's a little over 3A and shouldn't cause any fires in even the flimsiest of wiring. But erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea when it comes to electrical safety.
Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical?
It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of scale? Why are individuals having to take responsibility for their own energy generation? Are we doing our own sewer and water supplies next?
Why not approach the problem from all sides? There are big renewable projects in Germany as well, of course, but they take time to build, the grid needs to be adapted to handle them and there are many, many people/organizations who oppose all big installations that "block their view of nature" or whatever, so the big projects take even longer. By the way, this (nasty neighbours) would be a big issue for Balkonkraftwerke as well if they had not added them to a list of privileged things you are allowed to equip your house with (without permission process).
Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this?
Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity.
Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil (and it's fresh!). Same principle. Slightly higher yield.
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not.
In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation.
Batteries are even more egregious than solar, why install batteries .one. .at. .a. .time. behind switchboxes where they can only be used individually rather than a suburban installation that allows them to be used in aggregate?
I can only imagine how badly the numbers stack up somewhere suboptimal for solar like a German balcony. What if everyone instead gave their 1000 euros to a state organization that built a big solar farm that everyone shared?
Oh wait - that's exactly how the state is meant to work!
The subsidy question is interesting, but in Germany these balcony panels are ~ €600 unsubsidized (depending on the exact kit; see my numbers elsewhere in this discussion) and still pay back in 5 years. The economics work with and/or without government help.
The fact the economics of DIY make sense, is the evidence of the market/state failure. (whether they really do make sense without fanciful efficiency calculations, I leave to you).
I think you need to make some better arguments to convince. Your argument only makes sense when wholesale cost of solar panels is significantly cheaper than retail. The better the economics of scale (i.e the smaller the difference between wholesale and retail) the more favourable "DYI" becomes, because the person had home does not need to cover the overheads that are necessary for large scale installations (financing, management, transmission, planning...). It's the same reason that hiring a vps to run all your compute is not necessarily cheaper than buying your own pc.
It makes sense for two reasons: firstly there's limited economies of scale in solar panels: they more or less make the same amount of energy per unit area and per dollar regardless of the size of the installation (rooftop is usually more expensive for installation but these systems have near zero installation cost). Secondly, because the generation is local you're not paying for any margin, co-ordination costs, or transmission costs. This secondary effect is already enough to offset the increased cost of rooftop installation in many cases.
(And maybe you can consider this a market failure, in that it doesn't fit some naïve idea of an efficient market, but you're always going to be paying for someone to make and take on the risk of the big, centralised version of things)
Where I live, in Argentina, every house has a water tank on the roof, which is filled from the water main through a float valve, like a toilet tank. Many houses need a pump to drive the water up to the water tank because the water main has such low pressure. This is somewhat expensive, and the pumps, float valves, and water tanks fail sometimes, which is inconvenient. And the tank is not really that high up, so the water pressure at the faucet is not that high, and it's somewhat variable, which is inconvenient when it changes the temperature of the shower.
Some other places I've lived, such as various places in the US, instead have a large shared water tank for an entire neighborhood, town, or even city—a so-called "water tower". If you've been to the US, you may have seen these. Making this work involves several expenses:
- Larger-diameter water mains to reduce head loss when water demand is high.
- Highly responsive repair crews to respond rapidly to water main breaks, because the higher-pressure water with a high flow capacity can be very destructive.
- The construction and maintenance of the large water tower, which is very dangerous if done badly.
- A high-powered pump to get water up the water tower in the first place.
However, these expenses turn out to be significantly smaller per person than the expenses of small per-house water tanks and water pumps. And they provide better service. (Also, because people are stupid, in the US they build many of their houses out of wood, so they need fire hydrants, which require the larger water mains anyway.)
So, the fact that people in my neighborhood Argentina are spending more to get worse water service is a failure of coordination.
Of course, people in the US can still put water tanks in their houses if they want to. In earthquake areas, it's even recommended to have a store of potable water that isn't dependent on the water main. But, because they have succeeded in collectively building excellent municipal water systems, they generally don't need to.
The claim that plantain is making is that people actually choosing balcony solar panels is a symptom of a similar failure of coordination. To me that seems plausible but not necessarily correct, for reasons I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
People are entitled to do as they want, even if it's not profitable. I am just pointing out that if the economics of this add up, people have been seriously let down by their governments.
According to the article, the economics of balcony solar pay off in less than ~5 years. That's really pretty good compared to approximately any other point in the history of solar power. The payoff is small, but the investment is also small.
Now, sure: That quick payoff is only possible because electricity in Germany is very expensive, but there's reasons for that, too: Unlike some nations, Germany isn't sitting on a ton of high-quality fossil fuels.
They do have lots of lignite, and they do mine it and use it, but lignite is so low-energy that transportation becomes a serious financial burden: A train full of lignite can cost more to move around than it can produce, Joule per Joule. They've solved some of that problem by putting power plants right next to the mines (which is smart: build transmission lines instead of rail lines!), but their domestic fossil fuel resources are not a matter of policy. They're limited to whatever they have in the ground.
And for reasons that must make sense to someone, they've completely phased out their domestic nuclear power. (I'm not interested in discussing whether that's good or bad, but it remains fact.)
As far as I can tell, electrical production and distribution in Germany is comprised of a mixture of private entities (eg, companies with profit motive) and public (government-operated) entities -- similar to how it is where I am here in the States, and also where you are in Australia.
And quite clearly: The private entities are obviously interested in maximizing their potential profit. They are, after all, principally in the business of making money.
It's easy to say that it's a governmental failure that ultimately allows balcony solar to have such a quick return... but private enterprise is also involved, so they get to share the blame as well.
If it is profitable to do solar power at utility scale, in Germany, then: Why isn't more of it being done? If the answer is "just rent a few thousand hectares at a few hundred euros per year and cover it all with solar," then why does the private sector not cash in on all the easy money of utility-scale solar power?
That seem to be the conclusion when you start with the assumption "vertical scaling is always the best option". When you don't start with that assumption, maybe you reach a different conclusion.
The fact that balcony solar has such short payback periods really emphasizes the scale of the failure. Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Balcony solar is a whole lot like Uber, a way to side step onerous regulators, landlords that won't permit/invest in rooftop installations, planning approvals, transmission bottlenecks (eg. SuedLink [1] being forced to use underground cables) etc. The German government tolerates it because it keeps voters happy and helps reduce dependence on foreign gas.
At the end of the day though balcony solar is better than nothing, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
> Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.
Exactly! Wind expansion has been going great as-well.
I guess the more fundamental question is why these expansions haven't led to savings for energy consumers and why the economics of these micro-systems are so attractive.
It may be actually better (in the welfare-economics sense) to build the micro-scale setups because the economies of scale may actually be inverted by cheap solar panels. See my analysis in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
That page, although it was written only four months ago, is citing LCOE figures from 02021, when mainstream solar panels cost €0.25 per peak watt. Now they cost €0.100 per peak watt—see https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Power electronics and batteries are also enormously cheaper now. Also, note that the LCOE numbers it cites are for the US, where most of the costs stem from the US government's anti-renewable-energy policies such as punitive tariffs, policies that are not in effect in Germany.
That page also undermines its credibility by citing the hypothesis that the low cost at the time (which it acknowledges was already down to 36% of the number in 02012) was because the "massive wave of imports" was "subsidized by China’s central bank"; if that were the case, you'd expect that once China owned the world's solar market, the prices would have gone back up to reflect the true costs of manufacturing the panels, so that China's central bank could stop hemorrhaging money in these subsidies. Instead, the prices have continued to drop. They've dropped as much in the four years since that report as they had in the nine years before it. And, if you read the Department of Commerce filings justifying the "anti-dumping" tariffs, you will find that the arguments being made about "subsidies" are transparently ridiculous; the supposed "subsidies" include the fact that Chinese panel manufacturers pay their workers less than Turkish electronic assembly workers, and the fact that they have good public infrastructure to use.
It also incorrectly claims that solar panels need to be replaced after 25–30 years (that's just the warranty period) and that doing so would add US$20–30/MWh to Lazard's US$36/MWh LCOE, which is an obviously an arithmetic error that's off by orders of magnitude.
But its central claim, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility-scale solar, is actually true. The reason for this is mostly that rooftop solar requires much more labor and enjoys poorer economies of scale. You have to pay someone to design custom racking for your particular roof and a custom inverter and battery storage system for your house, pay someone to climb up on your roof and possibly die, pay for permitting and inspection, etc. You can find a more detailed breakdown of "turnkey installed cost" in SEIA's Solar Market Insight Report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight....
However, all of these factors are completely the other way around for balcony power plants. You don't climb on the roof; you walk out onto the balcony. You don't design custom racking; you buy an off-the-shelf retail product. The same thing for battery storage, if you buy a system with battery backup. Instead of spending thousands of dollars, you just hang the solar panel off your balcony like a potted plant and plug the plug into the outlet. The engineering is being done at the factory for a mass-market product, not for your house or for a single utility-scale solar farm. So you're spending less in engineering and permitting and construction costs than a utility-scale solar farm would, not more.
There is one way in which balcony power plants are worse than rooftop solar: they are at terrible angles, so they don't get much sun. But that just means you get less power, maybe two or three times less than you'd get in an optimally-designed utility-scale plant. That matters much less now that solar modules are so cheap.
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
Because there is always a good amount of loss in transmissions.
For solar, the best thing for grid and consumers is to have it very very close to consumption.
Ideally, a home with a good capacity battery, coupled with solar panels, and a smart grid connected controller that charges the batteries based on grid conditions of demand and supply, would be a great system. Costly, but good for the grid.
The transmission losses are trivial. 5-10% max. It makes no sense to isolate batteries behind meters. Sharing batteries on a neighborhood or suburban level would make far more sense. We are meant to be a society, not libertarians living in proximity.
Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
Plus the time getting the material, driving to the hardware store another time to get something you forgot, doing the registration, plus the time needed for planning/ calculation of economical feasibility/ decision making. Even at a very moderate 50 € per hour rate (for the typical Gamer) the material cost is the smallest part of the project. Treat it as a hobby, but don’t tell me it is an investment.
You get everything you need shipped from Amazon. You open the box and install it. These things are designed to be set up by amateurs. It’s half a dozen screws per panel. To hardest part is lifting the panels outside the balcony.
As with many things, the hardware store is probably going to be rather expensive and transport is a hassle (most people do not have a car with enough space to transport solar panels). So you order this stuff from specialized companies who will deliver it to your doorstep in one more or less convenient shipment. Same for pretty much any bigger, more expensive things needed when building or extending a house. Hardware stores are convenient if you quickly need something but that's mostly it, IMO.
Founder, CEO, serial entrepreneurs, who have pivoted from micro-services to blockchain to ai bill their time out to themselves at $100,000 per hour. ROI - its all in the grindset.
Solar power is fundamentally different from traditional power plants because it's modular. Since the panel is the basic unit, a network of rooftop systems is as effective as a single large installation. A rooftop installation makes perfect sense.
Paying contractors to climb on rooftops one at a time and cable up a million distinct houses is clearly not comparable to an industrial installation. Similarly the generation from a balcony on a bad angle, and from walking around Germany, typically shaded, makes no sense.
You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
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).
For context, a hectare (10000 m²) directly facing the sun receives 10 megawatts of sunlight at 1kW/m². The city of Kiel is at 54°19' north, so at the equinox a hectare near it receives about cos(54°19') ≈ 58% of that: 5.8 megawatts. If you were to cover the whole field with horizontal solar panels with a mainstream 22% efficiency, the peak electrical power generated that day would be 1.28 megawatts. But you'd need 2.20 peak megawatts of solar modules to do it, because the modules are rated based on directly facing the sun and getting 1kW/m² of sunlight, which they could never do in this situation. According to the prices on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... those modules are currently 0.100€/Wp, so that's 280 kiloeuros of solar panels. This is about an order of magnitude more expensive than the land under them.
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.
This isn't a government failure. The government is correctly pricing the true cost of industrial land use: the loss of farmland and natural space.
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.
That could start happening if Germany's electrical energy consumption were to grow 100× or so, yeah. That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but no, cheaper forms of energy tend to lead to more energy usage, and solar energy is cheaper, so we might see a lot more energy usage. But we're talking about problems we'll have in 20 years after we've solved global warming.
It happens already. Lease for green land (probably wrong terminus) and arable land went up by more than 30% in ten years [1]. PV is arguably a very small factor of influence yet. But the pressure is real.
That page doesn't say anything about PV. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... says that 17 million hectares are used for agriculture in Germany, 48000 hectares are used for golf courses, and (as of 02021) 32000 hectares were used for photovoltaics, which would be 0.2% of the agricultural area. I'm having a hard time finding current figures, but I doubt photovoltaics are more than 2% of the agricultural area yet. I don't think that's why land prices have risen 30%.
Thanks for looking up the numbers, and it wasn’t my intention to exaggerate the influence of PV. I just wanted to point out there is a lot of pressure and it may be a sensible policy to use up rooftops first instead of arable land (even though the influence of PV on land lease rates might be negligible today).
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.
Obviously it won't happen anywhere from air conditioning. But, for example, atmospheric carbon capture (putting the CO₂ back in the ground) could use a lot of energy.
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.
So by bringing up shading and suboptimal angle you're already admitting that for an unshaded balcony these things make sense? The overhead of hanging one of these over the rail of your balcony is pretty minimal, compared to industrial scale installations. There is plenty of overhead with finance, management, billing, land use, and utility profits. That's why it makes sense.
The cost of solar power is close to independent of scale, so the benefit of doing those industrial scale plants is often smaller than the one for repurposing some bit of underused land.
From your source, it's "at least 4 times more expensive", while at the same time it doubts the correctness of the numbers on large-scale plants and thinks it's too low.
Besides, it's all numbers from 4 years ago, when people weren't all putting solar panels on their balconies. And the report about gains from scale mention things like the lack of tracking in small scale installations, that the large-scale ones haven't used for many years now. So propose that your numbers are all wrong.
This is exactly right. Germany has failed to provide low cost electricity at scale and has now incentivised placing panels everywhere, even on those beautiful balconies we once invested in. It is not surprising that you are being downvoted by the solar stasi.
'Industrial scale' projects are also happening and they are quite easy to find on Google Maps, for instance around Berlin there are some pretty big areas covered in solar panels:
(interestingly most of those seem to be located in former East Germany - probably because land ownership isn't fragmented as much as in former West Germany due to the forced farmland sequestration after WW2).
It's mainly corruption, ignorance and incompetence. Germany has a strong fossil-lobby, because of industries and ancient home-tech. Around 15 Years ago, Germany had a strong solar-industry too, until the government basically buried it and sold it out to China, because of "failures" happening. Till today, there are forces trying to feed on nuclear-power and cheap Russian gas, while simultaneously sabotaging all renewables and electrification. It's so bad, they are willing to destroy whole industries for this BS.
That’s the thing about statistics - it is only somehow valid at some uncertain date. I know 3 not registered installations. One guy has big photovoltaic installation and installed balcony power plant to cover his special energy needs at sunrise. Another guy works from home and has two balcony power plants to cover his home office needs. Third guy didn’t like batshit crazy registration website and left the installation unregistered, but running.
This highlights a sad fact: renting is becoming the new long term standard for the younger generations. The buying market is out of reach to 95+% of the population, and so people resort to small hacks like this rather than install full solar sets. Meanwhile landowners and real estate funds are getting richer and laughing at them. Totally dystopian.
This would be very cute if it was some 3rd world island country grasping at the straws to improve their quality of life...doing this.
But you're fucking Germany bro....where's your massproduced precision reactors and turbines everywhere..the planet needs work...what the f.. are you guys even doing..a rising standard of living means 10-100x more energy you know that right?
This whole attitude feels like clapping for a new garden tomato in the middle of a famine... go put some fucking tractors on the field lol but like seriously though.
That's because they've been in an energy crisis for the last 50 years, so much advancement was by improvement of efficiency. Because of the dramatic cost reductions of photovoltaic modules, that energy crisis is over now.
No regard for aesthetics of buildings for pitiful power generation. The German state has completely failed to provide users with cheap electricity and it continues to miss-step with incentivising this nonsense. Shame on them.
there is nothing lol about it, if you commonly connect anything larger without additional precautions to it you end up in an endless number of safety hazards
and guess what if you do take extra steps you also can have larger solar systems
sure non of this steps are practical for rented out apartments, but quite viable for owned apartments and houses
I think they might be laughing at 800 watts to charge a laptop or small fridge. Most laptop chargers are a fraction of that. Full sized fridges might use slightly more power than that to spin up the compressor, but their steady state energy usage is generally less than that, and their average energy usage (including the time when the compressor is entirely off) is like a 20th of that.
800W is enough to run 2x console gaming setup (~200W console + <200W for Monitor+misc. which is normally more then enough).
Even for PC gaming where GPU power draw has gotten unhinged 800W you can get you a 5060 setup (~600W) + monitor working, or something like a framework desktop based gaming system (~400W) + monitor.
It costs the state nothing to remove regulations preventing the installations and people who buy one see ROI of 15-20%. It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
> It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
On the side of the grid, balcony solar means grid maintenance is supported by less revenue (your utility bill pays for the grid, balcony solar expenses don't).
On the side of the producer, it means manageable production means are only amortized when balcony solar isn't producing (this isn't a small factor in a grid where electricity costs frequently reach zero). That increases the cost of electricity when the sun doesn't shine. Another aspect of this is that
These factors mean that balcony solar would be unprofitable if power was metered depending on real whole-system costs (e.g. market prices and/or a subscription for the grid). That it is profitable for some actors now just means that the cost system isn't aligned with the billing system. This isn't bad per se (people prefer to have predictable, stable energy costs), but can't be sustained in a system where this imbalance can be arbitraged.
They pay for themeslves when compared to your bill prices. They absolutely don't pay for themselves when compared with actual market prices for electricity generation.
Your bill is priced that way so that you can have predictable price for what you consume. That means sometimes markets electricity at zero, but you'll pay the full contract price. Other times, electricity is _much_ more expensive than your contract, and, likewise, you'll pay a fixed price.
That fixed price is not competitive with balcony solar because it pays for services that balcony solar doesn't provide. That means that on average, your solar panels produce electricity when electricity is cheap for your utility provider, and when they don't, electricity is on average (but not always) more expensive.
The logical consequence of this is that your contract is going to become more expensive, because you use your solar when it would be profitable for your utility, and you draw from the grid when it's unprofitable to them.
Another alternative would be the end of fixed cost contracts, where balcony solar users would have to pay market price + subscription for their electricity. If that was the case, balcony solar users would probably spare cents during sunny weekends, and get hammered during winter workdays when there is no wind.
edit: just checked the data, in August, Germany's prices at noon hit 0€ 17 days. On the other hand, prices at 18h soared above 100€/MWh every single day, and above 150€ 10 days in the month. In Sepetember, prices at noon hit zero 14 days.
Another (wind-related this time) example, market electricity prices this weekend were negative most of the time (with a tiny 4€ peak) for 40h straight.
Perhaps as a consumer i don't want the risk of these fluctuating prices. See what happened in Texas…
That said, I do have 2kWh of battery for my balcony solar (it cost only a few hundred euros and prices are coming down even further), so I can spread the usage of the generated power over a longer timespan, not just during peak sunshine.
Of course, balcony solar is only for small installations. For home owners, you'll probably want something like 10+ kWp of solar panels and 10+ kWh of battery. Both of which are no longer very expensive(§). Once enough households have this, we only need those gas power stations for those rather rare periods where there is neither wind nor sun. We can also use EVs as batteries for the grid once V2G finally arrives (that's something the big utilities are stalling).
I am not blaming you as an agent in this system, trying to optimize your bill. You probably made the right choice for yourself.
What I'm saying is that the consequence of your action will be to rise the price electricity for those without a balcony (that includes industrial users), which is a very bad systemic outcome. This outcome should have been avoided by system-wide policymaking, not by a selfless act from you.
> that's something the big utilities are stalling
V2G is an extremely complex thing to set up in reality, you don't need a conspiracy to explain why it's not around the corner. Just like you don't need to involve big oil to explain why fusion power is likely not happening tomorrow.
Aside from that, that would probably require a complete change in the way Germany subsidizes its energy sector, and probably harm to some private companies that benefits from these private companies. I don't really see it happening soon, but who knows?
Market price + VAT + a subscription paying for the grid and utility's benefits, yes.
I believe that already exists in Nordic countries, I had heard of it in Sweden ([1] says 10% of the population uses it) and Norway ([2] quotes 75% of the population).
> One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
Easy: The most expensive energy prices in the world.
The infrastructure investments needed to handle renewables are massive and are effectively passed down the consumer, who to be fair is ideologically on board with this.
thus the downvotes on your post (predictably since Berlin timezone coming live) and this balcony thingy as a crumbs-off-the-table for the non-roof-havers
It's fitting that solar installations are also very popular in third world countries where the government can't provide reliable / affordable power to their citizens. Godspeed, Germany.
I'm in Germany and keep seeing these, I always wonder what a 400w poorly oriented panel getting like 3 hours of sun a day is good for. If they weren't basically free thanks to tax reduction and other tricks I assume no one would get them
> installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give savings of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill, but there are lots of variables that come with that claim. It depends on which direction the balcony faces and whether the panels are shaded part of the day.
My german electricity bill is around 1200 euros a year. Sign me up for a one-time purchase of 426€ to save ~360€ every year if I had optimal conditions -- call it 50% effective and it's still earned back in under 3 years. The thing lasts, what, a decade? More?
Yeah so depends on your cost per kWh, and usage time versus production time. My 800W of balcony panels can theoretically produce 3-4 kWh per day (they peak at about 550w of actual production), but they generally produce a lot less than that. This is because my usage during production time is both less than that and also very spiky (my power usage is often 0w or 100-200w base load, with 2kw spikes as the compressor in the refrigerator kicks on, or some other device kicks on). So the savings for me isn't 3 years payoff, it's probably more like 6. But yes, these panels will product for 25-30 years. So yeah, they can pay for themselves very quickly depending on your usage patterns.
I'm in the US, and over here we also have some other complicating factors (here we have 2 sets of breakers that are 180 degrees out of phase and so the solar panels can only feed into one half of the breakers without extra complications. I only sort of understand this, someone else can explain better), so solar panels plugged into the balcony that don't backfeed straight to the grid can only cover a subset of the usage. In Germany you have 240v power so I would assume you would hit payoff very quickly.
Have to also consider the opportunity cost of that upfront cash. Those numbers sound worth anyway, but the 5 year break-even mentioned in the article is more questionable, and that's with subsidies.
(I'm too late and can't edit anymore, but I just noticed upon re-rereading that it says "couple of 300W panels" in the quote and not just "a 300W panel". My math (though done with a 450W panel for an example sales price) is likely off in the wrong direction. Sorry about that.)
"Poorly oriented panel" can equally well be described as "generates most of its power in the evening, when you have gotten home from work and want to use electricity".
It's better to get power at a useful time, even if that means the panel only generates half as much as it could, because storage costs far more than panels.
A 400W half decently oriented panel (i.e. south facing balcony, 60 degree angle) is sufficient to run your AC to cool your 50sqrm apartment during summer for free.
In the summer the optimal angle where I live (35.5º S) is 12º. Panels lying flat on the lawn are losing only 2% from that. Just now, near the equinox, panels lying flat on the lawn lose around 18% at noon.
I'll find a way to prop them up at 50º for winter when the time comes for that (April or May), though that's for sunny conditions. In our typical overcast in winter flat on the ground is probably still fine to catch the most diffuse light. I'll experiment when the time comes.
Right. I mentioned the suboptimal 60 degrees because many people hang it from the balcony (90 degrees) and the tilt it a bit, but usually not too much. From what I've seen 60 degrees seems like a good average number.
Yeah, in northern Germany vertical and 60º are pretty much equally good/bad in winter (75º would be ideal), but 60º will be getting 70% more power in summer than vertical, and is near ideal in spring/autumn.
Solar is cheap, non-peak-efficiency installs get to be the priority once you get the first 40% or so of production in solar.
This kind of thing just knocks the edges off of production and transmission costs. You get to the point where you're not trying to squeeze peak efficiency any more and you're just trying to fill in spaces wherever works reasonably well.
That's mostly true, but you're mistaken about the reason they're basically free: it's because the costs of manufacturing them have been dropping dramatically for 20 years, thanks to (in large part Chinese) manufacturing innovations, not because of things like tax reduction.
Maybe these can pull 700 watts on a sunny day? And you’d need a battery to store it. Would likely make 50 cents a day or less in electricity, on perfect days. The cost for a battery, panels, and install would be ~1000 euro (or more if it’s a bureaucratic mess).
I just did some modelling with the help of claude (which can write 200LOC+ numpy code faster than I can)
300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.
I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.
But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.
Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
I built one in Utah which is the only part of the US where it's currently legal, so I can give you the numbers.
- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ each for $670 total
- 1x EcoFlow Stream Microinverter for $257.
- Various cables, MC4 crimping kit, etc.. about $150
Grand total was $1077, I set them in direct sun on my patio and have generated 6-8kWh per day. At Utah energy prices (0.12 where I live), they will pay off in about 4 years. Somewhere like California with 4x the energy prices as here, it would probably pay for itself in <1 year.
My 1kW southern facing setup produces a little less than three kWh a day, about 1000kWh a year. A have a battery too so I manage to use most of that energy myself.
I use a battery -- 6kWh, 3600W inverter, with 6x 440W panels -- and don't feed power into the house wiring, but simply power the appliances in the same room as the equipment: Starlink, Mac Mini with 32" monitor, 16" i9-13900HX laptop, half a dozen small SBCs (5-15W each), fridge, espresso machine, air fryer, microwave, toaster, kettle, 4kW (output, 900W electricity) portable air conditioner, dehumidifier (250W). some LED lighting.
At the moment (spring) in half-decent weather all the above stuff is 100% off-grid. I'm still using grid power for hot water heating, dish washer, clothes washer -- all of which I do for free in my daily "Free Hour of Power" -- and for intermittent incidentals such as the water pump (e.g. runs for 15 seconds when I flush the toilet) and lighting in usually non-occupied rooms such as toilet, bathroom, and bedroom -- which together means I'm paying around 10c-20c per day over and above the fixed daily charge.
Rephrasing that to be more understandable because I didn't get this as it was: "Making sure no one buys expensive electricity from coal or gas plants when the grid is full of cheap renewable energy and almost-free stored energy."
I'm frankly still not sure what you're trying to say even if I understand the sentence now, e.g.: what free storage?! Isn't germany's projected storage capacity by 2050 somewhere between negligible and tiny?
That's like saying the cost of taking an additional bite from your food is very low once you have already bought it, if I'm understanding the continued use of marginal correctly in context?
When I buy food, the marginal cost of a bite from the food is very close to the average cost of a bite, because if I eat 5% more food this week, I have to buy 5% more food next week.
Contrast this with the case of listening to music on my stereo: if I listen to 5% more music on the stereo, I don't have to buy 5% more music, and I don't have to replace the stereo 5% sooner. The marginal cost is near zero: just the small amount of electricity the stereo uses, plus a tiny amount of wear and tear. Maybe I only listen to music three hours a week and the stereo cost me $313 and lasts for 20 years, so the average cost per hour is $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.
Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller.
These storage systems are generally warrantied as 5000-10000 cycles with 85% capacity remaining in 20 years time.
Guaranteed money today is better than saving a few cycles to maybe make money in 20 years time. Now also factor in discounting the risk etc. and the calculation is given.
But the business case is of course calculated on having the entire construction cost be amortized with profit over a chosen period. With some days making more money than other.
What batteries do are extending the time renewables flood the grid with cheap electricity and thus force nuclear reactors to throttle down, gas peakers to shut down etc.
Or these thermal plants can bid negative ensuring they don’t have to turn off while hurrying on their own demise.
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason
But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
> 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant.
See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid):
While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine.
But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
No, their market is not dependent on it. Generation of power from stored thermal energy is significantly different from directly using solar: it is completely dispatchable. As such, it serves a role even in a situation where most solar energy (or most solar + wind) is used directly. It enables solar to be used in places, like at high latitudes, where it is otherwise strongly disadvantaged by seasonality (something batteries cannot fix).
Long term storage of this kind reduces the overall cost of providing steady solar/wind output in Europe by half.
They are also addressing markets where the need is for heat. If you are going to make heat from the solar energy, storing it as heat is much cheaper than storing it beforehand as electrical energy and then converting it to heat later.
Generally speaking, steam circuits have large thermal masses, resulting in ramp-up times measured in hours, so most thermal energy is nowhere close to "completely dispatchable". Completely dispatchable thermal power is internal combustion engines (diesel or Otto) and open-cycle gas turbines, and Standard Thermal is not targeting temperatures high enough to operate those machines. Adding Standard Thermal to a baseload coal plant will not make it dispatchable; you will still have a baseload plant, not a peaker. It just won't consume coal.
I agree that it would make solar usable in situations where it would not otherwise be usable, and high latitudes are a good candidate.
For reasons like these I do not think that they will result in a cost reduction.
Standard Thermal has been bending over backwards to store their heat at the high temperatures I mentioned, resulting in a lot of engineering challenges that a lower-temperature thermal store (say, 400° or below) wouldn't have to deal with.
For the most part, process heat is lower in temperature than 400°, so I think that isn't their market either.
Batteries would handle the higher frequency components of the supply-demand mismatch curve, so steam sources wouldn't have to dispatch faster than on an hours timescale.
Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.
Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine.
Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500.
I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
Not a bad legacy for Robert Habeck (along with the wind reforms), the leader we needed but didn't deserve [1][2]. Interestingly he's recently dropped out of politics and taken a teaching role at UC Berkeley.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwVR5JF8Ok
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxnnVPO9GFU
I'm not German nor do I live there, but I would have thought the legacy of Habeck would be more negative due to his opposition to nuclear.
Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had. The plants barely added any value to the market. When Habeck became Minister, most Nuclear plants were already gone, and the last remaining were phasing out, lacking nuclear fuel and permits. Habeck even gave a permit for the last plants to run some more months, squeezing out even the last parts of fuel as much as they could, just so they could serve as an additional supply in a problematic winter, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end.
Right at this moment Germany's electricity mix has 364gCO2eq/kWh carbon intensity, France is at 21. That is because 37% of Germany's production comes from gas and coal.
Even from an environmental standpoint, France is doing much better than Germany and that is thanks to nuclear.
Also, by closing operating power plants, Germany weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Still not Habecks legacy. This was decided under Merkel.
Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions and effect on the water temperature in rivers (every summer more and more plants need to shut down because of this), etc. Even if this would be done right, there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance. In the end I would say it is always a bad idea to rely on only one technology to a large degree. Only a well done mix makes you resiliant.
> Only a well done mix makes you resiliant.
I agree on this point, me not being anti-Nuclear doesn't mean I am anti-wind or solar. Every country has different circumstances, I live in a landlocked country with mild mountains, temperate climate and modest rivers. In our case nuclear energy seems like the most reliable and scalable option. For countries with huge coastline off-shore wind absolutely makes sense, simialrly with solar.
> Besides, CO2eq are often wrongly measured with nuclear energy, ignoring building emissions.
I think this point is overestimated. Based on a brief search, studies show nuclear carbon intensity around 6-12g, and the building emissions just around 13% of total lifetime emissions [1].
> there are again and again longer periods where Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance.
Valid point but the 2022 French nuclear "disaster" hasn't repeated at that scale so far. In recent years France is a net exporter to Germany. I can imagine that as with many problems in renewables having technical solutions the water temperature problem is also solvable technically.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/article...
How strong correlation is there with energy exports from Germany and the status of France nuclear reactors? From a casual look, exports seems to be correlated with weather and access to excess energy, rather than demand from neighboring countries. I would like to see some support that "Germany exports energy to France because their reactors are often in maintenance", rather than Germany export energy to France because windy/sunny weather is producing excess energy.
Looking at Denmark, their export and imports have little correlation to neighboring countries demand or supply. They will try exporting if the wind farms produce excess energy, and they will try importing energy when demand exceed supply. Neighboring countries demand will mostly only have impact on export price.
> Also, by closing operating power plants, Germany weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most.
Ironically that was France which needed to shut down a lot of its nuclear reactors in 2022 and 2023 due to repairs. So according to your own logic France "weakened European energy production at the time when we geopolitically need it the most."
Here in Switzerland the reason given for the "energy crisis" was also mostly France as Switzerland usually imports a lot of energy from France.
Looks like that maintenance did a LOT of good. In 2024, France’s net electricity exports (gross exports - imports) reached ~ 89 TWh, a record.
France's total nuclear generation was ~ 361.7 TWh in 2024. It is expected to be even above that in 2025.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
France is currently the nation that exports the MAXIMUM electricity in Europe.
> Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had.
In 2011 ~25% of Germany's electricity came from their nuclear reactors [1]. Germany closed their last nuclear reactor in 2023.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/noland1/#:~:tex...
The current state wrt to nuclear in Germany reflects a decades long consensus in Germany that spans the majority of the population, scientists, intellectuals, politicians and even energy companies.
Any opposition you do hear on this from within Germany is usually opportunistic. People are against the Greens so they just take the opposite position on their policy. A good example of this is Markus Söder (CSU) who flip flopped on this multiple times.
Realistically speaking there is no serious politician or party with a pro-nuclear position in Germany that has a plausible plan for leveraging nuclear power at meaningful scale in an economical way. Any such plan would realistically invite massive opposition because nobody wants nuclear facilities in their vicinity.
russians paid good money for this consensus! Best Chancellor money could buy. It was so successful Germany became a proxy paying French NGOs to torpedo French Nuclear program!
Anti-nuclear lobbying by German foundations in France and Poland https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00217...
Edit: Actually should be plural - Chancellors. Merkel, big cog in NordStreams, went on some podcast last week to blame Poland for the war in Ukraine. See if only Poles didnt object so much she would placate putin with even more money.
The anti-nuclear movement in Germany started in the 70s. The last nuclear power plant was built decades ago. In my opinion the decision to not invest into nuclear and scale it up further made the end of nuclear power inevitable.
Recent governments merely organized a shutdown that was effectively decided in the last century at the end of the cold war. The importance of Merkel, Fukushima etc. in these discussions are completely overrated imo.
As an aside Germany got fuel for nuclear reactors from Russia.
Germany's nuclear power plants were shut down by the governments before him. What do you think he should have done differently?
Well most of them were, but not all. Notably the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shutdown on 15. April 2023, while the last coalition was in power. At that time there was a big discussion whether the shutdown could be postponed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a measure to curb rising electricity costs in Germany, but ultimately it was decided to go through with the shutdown. It was a largely symbolic move, but carried a lot of emotional weight since it put last nail in the coffin for nuclear energy in Germany. Hence people now blaming the Ampel government (and Habeck in particular) even though it wasn’t their decision to shut down power plants in the first place (with people of the party who made the decision openly criticizing them as well). Just to add a bit of context as German…
The plan to shut down nuclear power plants was done under the premise of a stable supply of Russian gas. This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock (at that time nuclear power was even classified as sustainable by the EU btw.), he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable. In my opinion this was the worst political decision of German politics since WW2, unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Those 3 plants had been running on "deferred maintenance" as the plant shutdown was planned years ago. Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
This was one of the biggest factors in the shutdown. Even if the plants stayed open, multiple reactors needed maintenance (and thus shutdown of those rectors).
Remember, they kept the open even longer then the planned shutdown (what was already extended before).
And the issue with the prices was not nuclear. By the time those plants shutdown, market prices already stabilized to pre-war levels. I remember this clearly as my renewal of my electricity contract came up, and ironically, my electrical price was even 2 cent/kwh lower then my 2021 contract.
The biggest issue for the German industry was not nuclear energie, it was the gas. And not because of power generation but because gas is used in several chemical reactions, with basf moving their production to the US. And thus more costs because supply chain changes. The LNG that we import is more expensive then the ultra cheap Russian gas we got.
And THAT is a issue for the German industry. And even more so with the US pushing to be the sole EU supplier for LNG (aka to replace Russia and use their leverage on the EU).
Anyway, a lot of your opinion is based upon the wrong conclusion.
Meanwhile, Dutch coal and gas plants are running overtime for electricity exports. Obviously to compensate for the German and Belgian nuclear exits. (see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/5y/monthly)
On top of that, NL govt is investing 10B EUR to prepare the construction of several new nuclear power plants, less than 300km from one of the abandoned German ones (Emsland). In conclusion the nuclear exits of BE and DE are some of the most stupid and hypocritical decisions in EU energy policy. Both countries will continue to depend on nuclear energy (from FR and NL). The only difference is that it is now produced <200km outside of their borders, in neighbouring countries.
Nuclear is the answer to no problem we face currently. It’s expensive, slow to build new plants (decades). It’s also not flexible in the way it’s useable.
Solar + battery storage on the other hand is super fast and easy to build, costs virtually nothing and leaves no toxic waste which can’t be recycled.
Nuclear fuel is also mostly only available from Russia, which no one wants as a trade partner.
Solar has indeed become very cheap, battery storage less so. The price of storage is still a problem.
> Those 3 plants had been running on "deferred maintenance" as the plant shutdown was planned years ago.
They had > 95.4% unit capability factor in 2022 per https://pris.iaea.org/pris/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsUnitCapab... . It doesn't sound like they were being run into the ground, rather things were operating very efficiently.
> Keeping the plants open will have resulted in a ton of money to maintain the safety of the plants going forwards.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc... stated LCOE "associated with the long-term operation of a nuclear power plant generally falls in the range US$ 30-40 per MWh, for typical refurbishment costs for Light Water Reactors and a lifetime extension of 20 years".
> They had > 95.4% unit capability factor
That is not the issue. Let me give you a example. Belgium decided to extend the life on several nuclear reactors, that originally had plans for decommissioning.
So they started to do actual deep maintenance for the extended life. Then they ran into issues of cracks in the concrete, issues with cracks in metal storage tanks, and a whole lot of other issues.
Reactors down for a long periode for the repairs, AND a ton of extra costs. These costs of those repairs, i can not find them no matter where i look. Its interesting how hidden those are.
For the 2025 extension, the initial estimated 1.5 billion for the life extension. And still the whole issue about the reactors issues their full fix cost price is unknown. In other words, they did a patch job and for the next extension, they need to do a major maintenance / repair.
The extension of the German reactors was estimated at 3B+ if i remember correctly. And that does not include if any issues are found.
That is the problem... This type of deferred maintenance start to stack up over time, when you have a phase out time for reactors. So issues becomes a big black money hole when you already committed to the extension.
> The extension of the German reactors was estimated at 3B+ if i remember correctly. And that does not include if any issues are found.
https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german... is for restarting the German reactors, with buckets of < 1B EUR and < 3B EUR for quicker restarts.
> the worst political decision of German politics since WW2
Except the shutdown had no negative effect. There was no supply shock and prices keep trending down since (Though that of course doesn't mean because of). Let's keep it real. I can probably name worse German political decisions from this week.
"Except the shutdown had no negative effect."
Three things here:
* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
* I would have dig deeper on that, but regarding the timeframe when the shutdown occurred, there wasn't a big effect on gas prices. That happened before due to the war with Ukraine and the reliance on Russian gas in general. [1] The idea once was to use cheap gas from Russia and at the same time build out renewables. The latter didn't happen, resulting in the mess Germany is right now.
* There were multiple tax reductions and I think some are in the talks now. Those were independent (and before) the nuclear shutdown.
* Probably. Nuclear should have been shutdown after gas, coal etc. I am with you on that. But the ship had already sailed long ago, before the last three plants were shut down.
[1] https://www.iwh-halle.de/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/...
Fair enough on the immediate consequences.. but shutting down these plants was a long term decision, so the long term consequences are still consequences. It is certainly true that no one predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine when Fukushima happened but Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas was well understood at the time. Which I raise only to point out that the bad things that did happen were foreseeable, the German energy system was subject to systemic risks and those risks were made worse by these choices.
It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
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Wait, so Germany's shutdown of three nuclear plants resulted in the EU wide energy crises and EU wide poverty? Seems almost untrue...
> This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock
There was nothing to mitigate. The nuclear plants deliver electricity, which was never a problem in Germany.
> he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable.
That's a lie. They even prolonged the usage for some months to appease the fearmongers. But without fuel, there was a limit on how they could run anyway.
> unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.
Ah, you're from the conspiracy-bubble...
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> The fearmongers are the Greens who believe that nuclear reactors will generate 3 headed fish.
Nobody believes that, WTF?
> In the meantime, we increased energy production through coal
Partly true, but not really. Coal is also used for other energy-forms than just electricity. Nuclear Plants cannot cover those areas. In the grand scale, it might have been better to first reduce coal-usage and transition to purely electric usage, while phasing out of nuclear slowly and use the save money for building up on renewables.
But that was never an option with all the sabotages from the fossil anyway. Nuclear in Germany was never a real option, it always has been fossil vs electric, with nuclear being a minor source for electricity, weaponized by the fossil lobby against the renewables.
>Nobody believes that, WTF?
Why do you think Germans voted against nuclear? It was because of fear of events like Chernobyl/Fukishima etc. Then 2022 was the final blow, with documents saying that nuclear reactors didn't produce much energy and needed maintenance anyways. Kind of like getting rid of working trains to ride bikes instead. Why not. It's healthier :)
In the meantime, the world laughs at us. Literally the whole world.
You keep on mentioning the lobby of fossils, which obviously had an impact.
However, with Merkel the change was happening. At exactly the speed it was needed: 5% every couple of years, or so.
Now the only lobby I see is the one of fear that there is no tomorrow. While the countries just next to us, without even bothering China all the time, don't give 2 cents about it.
They keep on buying gas, uranium and fossils.
We on the other hand can finally build 800W solar panels on the balconies without bureaucracy. Thank God.
EDIT: with Merkel, we reached an increase of 5% per year for energy generated with renewables. Which is and was really good.
If you really think literally the whole world is laughing at Germany you are living in a fully isolated echo chamber.
Alright probably Brunei doesn't care ;)
Grid power and LNG use wasn't very fungible. e.g., if you have a gas furnace, electricity costs being low doesn't help you unless you replace the gas furnace with electric. In the short term, very expensive.
Same goes for alot of industry, there also were industrial processes that BASF et al. were running that just required LNG as a reagant.
I would say the main political crisis of the moment isn't one about being right but about consistent plans. The plan for a Green economy is pretty clear since more than a decade and revolves around Smart Grids. Without these no decentralized energy, no storage etc. Indeed that's something that was done right and proofs actual long-term plans are worth it.
The irony is, at this point even many environmentalists don't oppose Nuclear anymore. But there's still the lack of a coherent plan. Where should the fuel come from? How is EOL of a power plant handled? How is it paid? The answers changed a lot in the last decades.
Apart from this the last 5 years were a PR disaster for the Greens. Protesters (Last Generation) have been connected to them although the LG is even protesting against the Greens. When there were these massive floods the Greens actually lost votes instead of gaining those.
Well, I like the guy but compare the electricity prices in Germany to other European states, and also to China and the US. It’s about $0.15 kWh in the US vs $0.40 kWh in Germany. I personally think this is absolutely insane, but I don’t blame Habeck but the poor renewables transition execution in Germany. It is currently a failure in terms of electricity consumer prices.
Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 per kWh. Can anyone confirm?
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-industrial-power-...
> Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 per kWh. Can anyone confirm?
Yes, it is in the ballpark of $0.08/kWh. It varies a little bit across regions. Also in some places the price is only half during the night. But as you consume more power, you may see the price rise to $0.12/kWh.
In 2024, cost of renewable + storage was 0.52-0.88 CNY/kWh($0.08-$0.12). Advancement in storage is expected to drive that cost down by more than 50%.
Interesting watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWR_7K6UIkE
The average wholesale price for electricity in 2024 was close to 0.09 €/kwh.
The consumer price is about 0.3 €/kwh currently, depending on the deals you are getting. The difference between wholesale and consumer price is made up of transmission costs, taxes and markups of various middlemen.
Shutting down nuclear power had 0 impact on electricity prices, as wholesale prices are set by the most expensive producer needed to satisfy demand. That is usually a natural gas turbine. All producers get paid the rate that this marginal producer demands.
I got a “expensive” renewable only energy plan and it’s 31,4 cents per kilowatt hour in Germany. Conventional ones should be cheaper. So no idea where you got 40 cents from.
Even if power plants magically worked for free and all schemes for cross-financing renewables were cancelled, German electricity prices would still be $0.19/kWh (€0.16), using the numbers from [1]. The German electricity network is great and very reliable, but also very expensive
1: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/
It's just absolutely mind-boggling how the "But Nuclear!" refrain persists as a mind worm in this community. Every story on renewables, every single one, has a giant sub thread up near the top of the discussion screaming, again, about the clearly-must-be-important-because-everyone-says-so hypocrisy behind opposition to nuclear power.
It really just doesn't seem in good faith. It's been going on for a decade at least. Every win, every positive story, every bit of evidence that just maybe this part of the climate puzzle is actually being solved[1] gets met not with celebration, but with indignant tut-tutting that it was done with boring stuff and not Nerd Friendly power.
When does it stop?
[1] Doesn't take too much Googling to find coverage claiming that ~90% of new electricity generation capacity globally is renewable. This problem is solved folks. It's time to start looking at the higher hanging fruit.
I guess that depends on who you ask. There definitely is a lot of opposition to the Green Party, but that's hardly directed at Robert Habeck specifically.
Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.
Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence.
Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) )
Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]
If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.
0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...
I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.
France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.
People barely use A/C in France by the way.
> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy
Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.
Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now).
I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.
And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
> And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years.
Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.
The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.
Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
On short sightedness: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-5...
"Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe." There are certainly different opinions on that. Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend.
Only 13% of gas is actually used for electricity ("Stromversorgung"): https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz... most of it was used as cheap energy source for chemical plants and other industry.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
That statement is plain wrong: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times.
You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.
You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting.
The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.
> It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work
It’s far from obvious to me.
There are literally no exemple of one ever running and some of the technological challenges are still open questions at the moment.
I generally think proponents of renewables are overselling the idea and significantly minimising the challenges they pose at scale. They definitely have a place in the energy mix but I don’t personally believe they are the solution.
Mostly renewable has already been achieved, 100% renewable is on track and economically feasible.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_AustraliaThe long term strategy is H2:
https://h2-global.org/the-h2global-instrument/
And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest. But H2 is only viable once renewable production exceeds demands during long stretches of time. Otherwise it is always better to use the energy directly or use short term storage (batteries) which are also growing exponentially: https://battery-charts.de/battery-charts/
Sorry, you are all emotion and provide wrong statements. What I wrote directly contradicted your statements and proved them wrong, but now you say they are missing the point? Reducing fossil fuel consumption by 50% within 10 years is an achievement. There are always things that could be done in a better way. But let's be real here.
And yes Germany imports electricity from France: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
That is kind of the point of having an integrated grid.
But 19TWh. While producing 470TWh. 4%. That is not ... a lot. And in 2022 Germany exported 5.5TWh and had to restart coal plants when the French nuclear plants were in trouble. So what? That what a grid is for.
H2 has been the alleged long term solution for decades while barely progressing at all. Even in aviation where it’s seemingly the only solution we have, it’s stagnating.
If you look at who is pushing H2, you will see that it’s mostly fossil fuel companies who want to prop up gas because as you rightfully pointed out "And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest."
> So what? That what a grid is for.
It’s going to be hard to reach net zero while burning coal and if the actual solution is importing nuclear energy from somewhere else while pretending it doesn’t happen, it would be simpler to just straight up go for nuclear.
This is all propaganda of the nuclear lobby.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2]
> How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this.
Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage.
Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators.
> At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage.
We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy.
> Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6]
> With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business.
[1] https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...
[2] https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor...
[4] https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re...
[5] https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/
[6] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/rus...
You should look at what a proper planned all-in nuclear project looks like before commenting..
See Hualong One nuclear project that's operating at ~90% capacity and is ~1/3 of the price of solar, and 2/3 price of wind when comparing the same operation % capacity and taking into consideration the max life length of each technology.
Renewables have huge hidden costs as well.
Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.
That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.
Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.
The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.
I find that people with strong, pro fission feelings, but no hard numbers, often preface their opinions on the matter with phrases like 'honestly' or 'objectively' or 'non idealogically'.
Concentration of power production is just one of the problems that renewables / distributed power generation systems solves.
I agree with this but going on as if either fission or solar is the One True Electricity Solution is ideological. Every technology has tradeoffs.
Nuclear and renewables do not like to share a grid. Their attributes do not complement each other at all, despite their differences, because fundamentally both of them are not dispatchable. In practice what happens is either nuclear has enough subsidies to survive or renewables completely wreck the economics of it by supplying way cheaper power most of the time.
Both forms of generation want to be paired with something dispatchable, either gas turbines or energy storage. A mix of renewables and nuclear is a mix that is weaker than the sum of its parts, not stronger.
solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house
In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.
That's why I think we should end up with:
- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating
- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating
- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now
I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines
Solar farms aren't really any worse for the grid than other types of power plants that can't be located near cities.
yes, they are worse for the grid, depending on how you define worse.
One interpretation is that solar adds variability to the generation side of the equation and managing that variability is currently a question without a clear answer.
this is false.
Power line capacity is designed around the maximum power that must be delivered. Solar power by itself reduces the mean, and possibly the minimum as well, but never the maximum.
Are we expecting peak a/c loads on cloudy days or something?
In some places the annual peak demand is for summertime cooling, but in others the annual peak demand is for wintertime heating. It's too strong to say "never [reduce] the maximum" as the parent post did, but there are substantial regions where solar power can't reduce the needed power line capacity.
You do not, ever, need base load power. Base load power is by definition power generation that does not follow the demand curve because it is uneconomical to do so. In this way it is entirely similar to solar and wind in that it cannot, by definition, fill the entire demand for power and it needs to be completemented by dispatchable power sources.
You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.
The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.
> Nuclear technology is a dead end.
You should look at CO2 / kWh in Germany vs. France
You can also decide to look at countries which went 100% renewable and have even better CO2/kWh rating than France (Iceland, Norway, Albania for example).
Iceland has massive volcanoes and a small population.
Norway has lots of hydropower and a a small population.
Not super familiar with Albania but they seem to be in the same situation as Norway.
France already implemented hydropower wherever it was possible years ago, so that's not an option.
Also France seems to have pretty much the same CO2 / kWh than Norway.
Yes, situations are different I agree :) my point was just that you can pick and choose what you want to look at. We'll see how things evolve, but it's not very fair to compare the situation of France which did their switch to low carbon energy many years ago, to Germany which is currently doing it. When we have more countries with finished transition to full/mostly renewable, we can compare again.
In the last 90 days France's CO2 footprint is at 78% of Iceland's.
Also, what lessons learned in Iceland, Norway or Albania should we apply in central Europe? We don't have their geothermal and hydro potential (all your examples are not solar+wind but hydro primarily).
> The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
I‘m sorry but this is just absolute nonsense.
Nuclear energy is the most dense energy type humanity ever produced. To put it in one line with coal and oil is not serious. Not to mention it’s far less hazardous to human health, again compared to fossil fuels. Here is a basic comparison:
> With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235. Related to one kilogram, uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal.
https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/fuel-comparison/
edit: typo
Who really cares about density? The biggest thing that means is that blowing up two or three substations can cripple an entire country’s grid. Distributed energy generation and storage is actually quite strategic for national security.
It’s also massive cherry-picking to just look at refined fuel. For example, H how many tonnes of ore do you need to mine and process to produce that 1kg of uranium (at least 2.5 tonnes, that is 2500 kg from one random source from a quick google).
But to use your metric, I did work out and find it interesting that the solar panels on my roof, per kg of silicon have produced over 1,400 kWh of electricity (multiply your figures by 0.3 to take into account efficiency from kWh of heat to compare) so far. I estimate almost 28 kg of silicon in my whole array, which has generated over 38 MWh so far, and I expect they will generate at least three times that over their life.
So 4000-5000 kWh(e) per kg of silicon sure comes in a hell of a lot of better than the 2.4 odd for coal or 4 for mineral oil (assuming your figures are correct).
> Who really cares about density?
Everyone. If you don’t, then you need to scale. Case in point with renewables. It’s also not cherry-picking, but a well-known fact in physics. Do yourself a favor and look at the source link I posted above.
The thing about blowing up things I will just skip, because it’s not serious. If things go that far, there will be far greater problems than just that. Besides, if that’s your worry why don’t use SMRs then? Russia does.
To your 4000-5000 kWh point, you are not burning silicon here, are you? And a PV is not energy fuel, it’s a device composed of many different materials. I don’t understand your point and I can’t say more than that - my reply to GP was about fossil fuels and nuclear anyway. Not sure why you decided to jump into renewables here.
this website is filled with people who believe that the future source of energy is entirely renewable energy. That is false, as many european countries show.
I live in a part of Canada with mostly nuclear energy and i am thankful that my electricity rates are low. This helps me reduce emissions via heat pumps and EVs. I don't need solar panels and most people do not either.
You are correct, the future is mostly renewable energy where feasible, with a combination of nuclear and hydro.
It is very negative amongst large parts of the population, but he also has a very vocal fanbase.
Most Germans would view that as a positive thing. Pushing for nuclear power at this point would be utterly stupid.
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Mind sharing that documentation or spelling out what you mean by that or are you not going to consider different views on that anyways?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5-cWq1Lr4
https://youtu.be/-XItDbFSYBE
But to be fair ... it's a general problem with Die Grünen.
https://youtu.be/DbzRY9VF2zE?t=724
Reality is just a nuisance.
According to his Instagram, he is currently working in Copenhagen: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOFwjUfDXdp/
Thanks for the update! I wonder if he changed his mind on the Berkeley offer [1]. Part time role though so maybe he just hasn't relocated.
1. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/habeck-gastdoz...
Copenhagen, then California was always the plan afaik. Berkeley is just not until next year.
How out of touch do you have to be with reality? 2+ years of recession and he was the leader we needed? He literally ruined us all
He has been well received among left-green voters, civil servants and alike. He communicated without the usual empty political phrases, that alone brought him sympathies. He also managed the Ukraine crisis well, for instance, he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines had been destroyed. I'd say he embodied the values, policies and mannerism of his electorate better than anyone else.
And yet I agree with you. Economically, he disappointed through and through. Same for climate change, which ironically is at the heart of the Green party he belongs to. For example, to more conservative voters, he's will mostly remembered as the politician who wanted to bring a central planning approach into their homes, forcing everyone to install costly heat pumps, with their own money, without much regard to their specific household situation. All to achieve no effective carbon emission reduction.
But to his left-green electorate, he remains sacrosanct, his critics are dismissed, often as far-right.
>he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines
The very same pipeline he helped to cover that their own ally destroyed
Also what the hell is your argumentation? "Actually the people who voted him, liked him" no shit. The very same people are more in favor of war than the average Nazi back in the 30s
I made no argument, merely tried to explain why he is viewed favourably by some. I could have left out the second and last paragraph, that was more about me showing that I didn’t agree with his performance either.
The leader we didn't deserve?
Sorry but Merkel reached almost 50% of energy production with renewables. Germany was already a leader in 2021-2022 with almost 45-50%.
The idea was to grow "sustainably", and in fact it was functioning.
Even the "original" GEG comes from Merkel who was slowly pushing for a change.
Then somehow someone decided they had to restrict and punish and this was our "undeserved" Habeck and friends.
There was no need at all to disrupt the country into what it has become today.
Literally everyone said that. Only the Scholz/Greens government didn't see that.
EDIT: in fact, if we just reverted the commits to pre-2022 we'd be already in a better situation. No new changes. Just start from what was working. And well, keep the new solar panel stuff for balconies. It seems a nice idea (which a lot of countries are doing anyways, so nothing so innovative here).
What his enemies (CDU/AfD) don't mention is that even they wouldn't have been able to undo the stop.
But being in the opposition must be a fun thing since you can say the most beautiful sounding things and never have to actually deliver anything.
AfD even goes a step beyond raw stupidity because they want to destroy all the wind turbines. So not just stop the ones already delivering energy, but destroy them. They just don't realize that we need every bit of energy we can get. They have some donating friends which are against wind turbines, because of the looks.
It was close to funny how Elon Musk held back his disagreement with the AfD regarding their wish to destroy the wind turbines.
I'd go so far as to say that the only reason why Germany has the political and societal problems it has now are only due to the constrain in energy.
That and the long running demographic issues (that one is global).
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He had a pretty unfortunate card dealt to him with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Germanys dependence on Russian gas, especially in its industry.
I think the move away from nuclear energy in Germany was a mistake, but one which was decided on way before he came into office. Doubling down on nuclear would have cost a fortune (old reactors weren't maintained well enough to run for longer due to phase out decision after Fukushima & not enough new engineers in Germany). He was in a lose lose situation, I think he did pretty well overall, but was blamed for old decisions (Altmaiers abandonment of German solar industry, heating reform by CDU+SPD) and had bad handling of reports on him in the news.
He is on of the few politicians who follow his beliefs about what needs to be done, less so about what is popular. He also made sure Germany had enough gas. He had nothing todo with the pushback of nuclear energy (that was the CDU/Merkel). Nuclear energy is not cheap.
All politicians follow their beliefs. They just become more problematic the more interventionist they are. And Habeck was extremely interventionist. On top of that he used his position of power to go against private citizens under the excuse of free speech. He filed 805 criminal complaints, in some situations just for being called an idiot online.
Nuclear energy pushback in DE was a result of the fear caused by Chernobyl in 1986. Refreshed by the Fukushima incident. The CDU was not brave enough to go against that fear. And Habeck just continued that approach even in difficult moments for the German industry. Nuclear is not cheap, but it’s stable, predictable, does not generate CO2 and if well planned, also provides self-reliance for the country using it.
>All politicians follow their beliefs No they don't they, a lot them will do whatever is needed (change their minds at will) to stay in power. If you ever listened to Habeck, there are simple rational arguments why it did not makes sense to continue running the nuclear plants for longer. There was anyway no easy affordable way to just let them run for many years (contracts). At the end nuclear was only contributing 1.5% to the overall energy production.
Phase out of nuclear was agreed upon after Fukushima, long before Habeck had anything to say.
And just to be explicit, because I see people lie about this very often: this decision was made by the conservative party (CDU) while the Greens were not part of the government.
Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom).
When the conservatives got back into power a decade later, they started to roll back the nuclear exit. But during the panic after the Japan tsunami this policy became unpopular so the conservatives reversed course and stuck with the disastrous Green policy.
But make no mistake, if the Greens did not make it into government, the Atomausstieg would never have happened.
Subjects to read for details:
* “Atomkonsens” 2000 and “Novellierung des Atomgesetzes” 2002, Kabinett Schröder,
* “Laufzeitverlängerung deutscher Kernkraftwerke”, 2010, Kabinett Merkel II
* “13. Gesetz zur Änderung des Atomgesetzes“ 2011 post-Fukushima, taking back the 2010 extensions
Merkel (CDU) pushed it after Fukushima, because "oh it's dangerous", which wasn't rational, but she knew people wanted it
It was agreed upon under completely different circumstances, namely a stable supply of Russian gas. I cannot believe that people do not get this into their head.
And after a decade of planning the shutdown, stopping contracts, deferring unneeded maintenance, ... you can't just say "actually, never mind, keep them running". The plant operators themselves said it wasn't really possible or only at extreme costs.
And the politicians loudly screaming about it are mostly from parties that are responsible for the "we'll have russian gas, it's fine" policy, and didn't use the decade+ of being in power beforehand to do anything about extending nuclear, but rather often also strongly insisted the shutdown had to be done. Right until the point they weren't in power anymore and they started to blame the Greens for the consequences of their own policies.
Sure, and the reactivation of old nuclear power stations would have been instant and cost nothing. Exactly what was needed in 2022. /s
Three nuclear reactors were still running in 2022, and shutting them down was not inevitable.
That none of the energy companies went "oh, yes, totally, give us a few billions of the special budgets for dealing with the consequences of the war and we'll happily keep them running" should tell you something about the viability of that.
That post is some dangerous half-knowledge and simplifications stated as fact.
Yes, Habeck is an interventionist, but his biggest interventions were a direct response to... you know, the war in Ukraine. What did anyone expect? When Putin turned off the gas, was Habeck supposed to just let the free market sort it out while factories shut down and people froze? Those price caps and the Uniper buyout weren't pre-planned. I'm sure he would have preferred to have never been in that situation in the first place.
And the reactor shutdown argument never gets old, does it? The decision to ditch nuclear power was made in 2011 by Angela Merkel. Habeck was just the guy who had to turn off the lights at a party that ended a decade earlier. Remember all those predictions of nationwide blackouts in April 23? Funny how the lights are still on.
The claim about coal usage was true for about five minutes in the winter of 22. It was a temporary panic move to save gas, and since then, coal consumption has dropped to a historic low. It's also funny how renewables—the actual backbone of our energy system, which were on the rise long before Habeck, are framed as a "gamble." The upsides and downsides are very well understood by now. There was never any gambling involved but I guess let's just frame a strategic, well understood, decade long move to renewables as a snap decision gamble.
Look, no one's saying his term was perfect. And yes, the man has charisma, which is apparently a bad thing now?
But calling his term a "disaster" while ignoring the reality of the crises he faced—coming out of COVID, the energy war, is just strange.
> "That post is some dangerous half-knowledge and simplifications stated as fact."
That's... putting it mildly. To call a spade a spade: The post you replied to consists of nothing more than anti-Green crankery. The kind of tedious, intellectually dishonest click-bait crap you see disseminated in the Springer-Presse, e. g. ze WELT-Plus-Commentariat, or media of even less repute.
thank you two for providing important context, although it is not popular
The depth of the parallel-world narratives on display here have been wild.
There was no strong push way from nuclear energy, just a continuation of Germany's general nuclear energy path.
Studies also showed that this had no negative effect on electricity prices.
Core voters of the green party are mostly highly educated people[1]. There are not many more women than men in their voters[2]. I hear the first time about public employmemt, and haven't seen any statistics about that.
Regarding energy he certainly didn't gamble on energy. He gave everything for a transition away from gas and coal and invested in renewable storage systems (short and long term storage) backed by scientific institutions continuously evaluating, planning and simulating the transition of Germanys energy system including related sectors until 2045/2050 [3]. Thanks to storage a renewable energy system can be reliable while highly dynamic. He reduced the time needed to create wind turbines massively as well.
He also prevented a complete crash of the economy and infrastructure caused by the dependency on gas of Putin which greens have not been a fan of, because of ecological issues as well as the danger of Putin which only the greens recognized before Putin started the war on Ukraine.
Rising debt to invest into the future and infrastructure was then plan of the greens, but they got blocked (and medially attacked for it - claiming it was not needed) by the current government which then realized this plan (at least from a high level perspective) with the help of the greens in the opposition, because a simple majority isn't enough for increasing debt.
I am not aware of active acceleration of a decline of the industry beyond the decline which was already in the system for years and the situation we were in due to COVID and the war.
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/chart...
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2021-09-26-BT-DE/chart...
[3] https://langfristszenarien.de/enertile-explorer-de/index.php
sources for:
> dependency on gas of Putin which greens have not been a fan of, because of ecological issues as well as the danger of Putin which only the greens recognized before Putin started the war on Ukraine.
https://x.com/i/status/1497948385495687169 (captured from election debate 2021)
https://euractiv.de/news/baerbock-kritisiert-einigung-zu-nor...
Thats a lot of historical revision if you blame a dude who was minister for 3.5 years about decisions made 20-30 years ago. Same for your last paragraph. Nothing even close to that happened in the years he governed. Maybe you should start showing recipes because it looks like your grievances are personal in nature and everything but factual.
More like 3.5 years, right? December 2021 through May 2025.
You are right. Corrected.
> it looks like your grievances are personal
Given the changing voting behavior in Germany, these personal complaints seem to be quite widespread.
It's fine to have those grievances if you can articulate them factual. Hell they are even fine if you can't. The only thing I am saying is that you don't need to make stuff up just to give those grievances weight or convey others to your sentiment...
> Given the changing voting behavior in Germany
therefore "the leader we needed but didn't deserve"
"removing all the bureaucracy here"
This is a bit strong, given that you still need to register with the Marktstammdatenregister and get a permit from your landlord (relevant bc homeownership rate < 50%).
I think the high electricity cost has as much to do with the relative success of this than the reduced friction.
On the technical side you are also limited to 800W max and if you want a battery things get complicated quickly. I will still get one probably but it is far from no bureaucracy at all and plug and play - at least not when you want a battery.
Marktstammdatenregister is online and very easy to do, Allowance from landlord is more of a formality now as they can't really deny it. Of course some try but the law is pretty clear here.
A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
> A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Part of that is because our method of pricing is different than it is in the rest of the world.
It doesn't matter if you got a 3x50A or 3x200A three phase service, only during construction (because a 3x200A uplink will obviously be a decent bit pricier), the monthly fee is the same and very low (I think ~15€ a month). All other costs are rolled into the per-kWh price, making it appear much more expensive than in other countries. On top of that we have a ridiculous tax load because large industry is exempt from a lot of things and consumers gotta pick up the slack.
In contrast, Italians for example pay fees based on capacity which means a home there will usually have 3x10A uplink, something greatly troubling EV adoption and moving off of natural gas [1].
Additionally, Germany is one pricing zone whereas ENTSO-E, the European Commission and the Northern German population would rather like to have two or three pricing zones, given that there is a serious lack of North->South transmission capacity, but our "beloved" Bavarian prime minister Söder plus his green counterpart in BaWü Kretschmann both try to prevent that as much as possible because it would send prices in the south skyrocketing [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1ksqrq1/t...
[2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/energiepoli...
Yep in a lot of ways it's a failure of the electricity market.
It's absolutely bonkers how much I pay for electricity while I sit in the shadow of a giant onshore wind farm in Brandenburg. Transmission losses are nothing at this distance and the turbines cover the towns needs many times over.
But because of the lack of regional and dynamic pricing (and tax burden) we pay ridiculous rates.
I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
Maybe balcony solar is just a tax minimization play, in that the energy you get from panels isn't burdened by excessive network charges, consumer taxes etc.
> I think if folks could financially benefit from renewable projects in their neighborhoods, suddenly citizens opposition would fall apart.
That's actually happening already in some places - in Thüringen, nearby residents of a windmill get a share of the income [1], and the local municipality also gets a sizable amount... in small Mühlenfließ (Brandenburg) with less than 1000 souls living there, the 16 windmills provide 200.000€ a year in taxes, 10% of the municipal budget [2].
Unfortunately, you need politicians with a backbone to present such plans to their voters, and in rural areas many simply are afraid of far-right terrorism up to and including death threats [3], on top of "alternative" media and even supposedly democratic politicians riling people up against renewable power sources.
[1] https://www.gruene-thl.de/klima-energie/buergerinnen-und-kom...
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/windkraft-g...
[3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/region-muenchen-windrae...
More and more "Energiegenossenschaften" are also founded, I think. At least here in the South-West near Freiburg it feels like every second larger village or community has its own Energiegenossenschaft. They are working on getting solar on every roof, pushing water and wind turbine projects forward and are really working on making the switch to renewables happen. I'm looking to get into some of them to fund the cause. :-)
Some good points, i have a few thoughts to add.
Norway: yes, they are doing fine (80% EV, btw, so it seems you can actually use EVs in colder weather... I think the nordics are actually way ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes to sustainable energy creation, with norway getting about 90% last year from Hydro - super impressive. https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Norway
France: I think they might turn around, because their low prices are tied to massive subsidies (that are scheduled to end in part end of 2025). And, France has the weather and sun to be even more successfull. That would however mean a decentralization of the power grid and probably storage solutions (batteries, hydro or h2), something thats complicated and not sexy to sell to the public - one of the reasons Germany is so far behind. Our grid is stuck in the past and enough company lobby politicians to keep it that way.
US: it is probably less of a pricing issue and more a topic of resiliance and stabilizing the power grid. It looks like rolling blackouts in the US get more, especially during the summer months (where solar could directly be used for the AC). https://urbanclimate.gatech.edu/current-projects/blackout-tr...
I think it would especially make sense to run your AC on if you have a flexible plan - i remember so many stories of people suddenly having to pay thousands during peak times in summer.
California, Texas and most of the rust belt does have enough solar to easily get by, especially if you add a battery backup.
Norway gets most of its wealth from fossil fuel. While it's not Saudi Arabia nor Venezuela, and they invested in long term sustainability, it's not fair to everyone else to say that they are at 80%EV because they are forward thinkers, but because they have the money to do that.
It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Australia started at a similar point with mineral wealth in the 90s and decided tax cuts for the middle class were a better idea (under Howard/Costello).
> It took forward thinking to dump their wealth into a sovereign wealth fund.
Such a proposal can be adopted much more easily if the population is rather small and homogenous.
100 % agree. They somehow figured out early that its better to sell to the others and stay renewable themselves.
Yes, like any other argument about Norway, the situation must and shall be considered to be that they are smart and progressive and forward thinking, rather than rich. It's "not" that they have money to burn to do the new fancy thing. It must be forward-thinking policies!
There's a small amount of truth, I'll admit. I guess you can say that Norway's policies are easily a lot smarter than Saudi Arabia's policies. But what is always done is comparing Norway's policies to, say, Spain or France and declare Norway a progressive forward-thinking nation with great and working policies. In reality the opposite is true because France and Spain can't just fix big problems by showering them in money.
also France and Spain (and Italy, Germany, UK etc etc) they have bigger population, far more diverse one, far more decentralized issues etc etc.
Yes, but you have to somehow insinuate that this is a bad thing without ever clearly stating a thesis of why it's a bad thing.
Otherwise people might think investing in green energy, EVs and heat pumps is a good idea with good return on investment and positive externalities and should be done by any competent government.
Any competent government with infinite money they can just dig out of the ground, and dump into the sky via its customers, a small, mostly-homogenous law-abiding population and military cover, at least until recently, mostly provided by the US taxpayer.
Easy.
Norway: 5.50 million people. Finland: 5.6 million people Sweden: 10.57 million people.
All these 3 together have slightly more population than NRW in Germany, and they have way more money.
So: almost same population, way more money and way more resources to generate energy (unless we want to consider Coal again... then we'd win).
The sooner we stop considering the Nordics as the model example the better it is for all of us in EU.
They are great countries, but very specific.
While we're on the topic, Finland gets around half of its energy from nuclear. It doesn't have the luxury of fjords for hydro like Norway and Sweden, or easily tapped geothermal like Iceland.
You can see a nice live graph here. Wind isn't blowing at the moment, so the fossil fuel co-generation plants had to kick in.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
I mean, in Germany, issue number 1 is the grid, especially in Bavaria. Politicians were just asleep or did not care.
For example, there is a super interesting agri PV installation in the Hallertau, where they grow most of the hops for beer. The farmer built and payed it himself and its a commercial trial instead of a public testrun.
He lost about 20 percent of the hop compared to the non-pv areas; however, the money from the solar panels easily covered that and made a profit. In addition, he used about 30 to 40 percent less water with no impact on the quality of the hop, which is one of the biggest issues in that area, as it runs out of water in summer.
The Hallertau would be ideal for generating large quantities of power; however, due to not having a modern power grid, he is unable deliver more power to the grid. (article in German here: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/pilotprojekt-hat-erfolg...)
you would think that this is a simpel fix, and it would be in the political interest to decentralzie the powergrid and create local storage solution (or at least in the local power companies interest), but it seems like nothing is moving forward for about a decade now.
Personally, i think agri pv has a huge potential as enables the farmers to have additional income while keeping the field open for farming. Its also an easier sell than wind or hydro (especially because you have the farmers on your side, and with them their lobby), but it needs grid upgrades and storage capacities. It baffles my mind that our politicans are willing to throw millions at nuclear, but everything besides that needs to have a strict business plan or it is not even tried.
To add to this, I know person a farmer who wanted to use part of his farmland for solar panels. The project failed. Reasons: lack of power grid connection, no one wanted to takeover the costs for added capacity; and local resistance from residents. „I want to see the nature in front of my home“ is all what’s needed to fail consent.
i don't understand those nimbys. With solar, its crazy! The soil will regenerate and you'll probably get more nature than before, especially if the farmers use sheep to mow it. That's why we can't have nice things.
To be honest, I do understand some people preferring pastures in front of their home. But we can't have nice things if individuals are capable of blocking projects for that. Personal preferences should not be a valid reason to block projects. Unmitigated negative externalities are reasonable objections, but even then, you have people "finding" this one protected snail type living there and - boom - project can't be realized due to environmental protection laws. There needs to be a re-balance of the commons, but try getting that through legislation.
FWIW, that "blackout tracker" link is garbage. First, because it's five years old: if the data showed that growth someone would have updated it.
But also because it's wrong! There's one outlier bad data point, in 2020, and they draw a line straight through it. Take that one year out and it looks awfully flat to me.
oh, thank you, I'll see if there is a better source.
And it barely works out in Germany. I did the math for my small city flat with a small south facing balcony and got a realistic payback period of 6 years.
The issue is not solar per se, but that tiny installations are not very efficient. It'd make much more sense to bolster funding for building sized installations.
I think you should be better off.
I did a small installation at my parents house with two panels at south-southwest-orientation with a 600 W inverter for around 800 Euro.
Turns out those two panels have created over 1.1 MWh since the late summer of 2023. With cost dropping heavily, your ROI should be much sooner.
The other aspect of this is the reduction of demand on the grid - which potentially reduces infrastructure costs ( or reduces the rise ) and hence shows up in a reduction in electricity prices ( if not absolute, against where they would be ).
A building sized thing has much higher installation costs. And you can't DIY it, it's not just plug and play.
That is true and it is where the regulation and bureaucracy comes in. I vouch for making building installations low friction and better subsidized.
Security will make this never as simple as balcony plug and play but there is a lot of room for improvement.
If you break even in Germany in 3 years, you'll break even in France in 4. Maybe faster, given the differences in climate.
Balcony solar is likely to make this worse, given Germany has low/zero electricity market prices when the sun shines.
Balcony solar production means Germans don't buy solar from their utility when utility costs are low, and they do want to buy some when utility costs are high.
Unsurprisingly, fixed contract prices are bound to be an average of electricity price at different times. With balcony solar, the times where it costs the least will be weighted less in the average, so contract price is bound to go up.
Germany needs more battery storage, full stop. It is rapidly declining in cost, it is fast to deploy, and it will soak up excess low carbon energy (both domestic and imported from interconnectors) versus curtailment as more generation comes online.
> Germany’s solar industry calls for 100 GWh 2030 grid battery target
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-industry...
> German battery storage hits 22.1 GWh in [2025]H1
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r...
> PV curtailment jumps 97% in Germany in 2024
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/03/pv-curtailment-jumps-...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/
Yup. Flexibility should be the thing that’s subsidized. However, I would advise against "balcony" battery subsidies, and I assume balcony solar is an electoral strategy more than an energy strategy.
Lots of residential batteries being installed, as mentioned in the link https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r... above.
> By the end of the first half of 2025, Germany’s official registry of energy installations recorded nearly two million battery storage systems in operation. This figure, now unofficially but safely surpassed into July , includes a gross power capacity of 14.535 gigawatts (GW) and a usable storage capacity of nearly 22.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh).
> Photovoltaic home storage systems constitute the majority of these installations, with 1.967 million small battery storage units (up to 20 kilowatts) accounting for 11.5 GW of gross power and almost 18.3 GWh of usable capacity.
> Small photovoltaic home storage units made up the bulk of new additions, with 251,948 systems providing 1.34 GW and almost 2.7 GWh. In the medium segment, 2,418 new systems added 117.7 MW of power and 160 MWh of capacity.
> The expansion of battery storage is driven by increasing demand, highlighted by 389 hours of negative wholesale electricity prices in the first half of the year. Germany has also significantly expanded its solar power generation, with approximately 107.4 GW of photovoltaic capacity installed and over 7 GW added in the first six months of 2025.
The future of electrification is distributed, broadly speaking. Distributed assets can be orchestrated to optimize for both cost and grid stability ("VPP" aka virtual power plants). Get generation and storage as close to the load as you can.
I pay 13 cents a kWh here in Canada. I got a 7.8kw system on the roof, payback will be 6-7 years, then I get $1000 of free electricity a year for the life of the system.
I’m in a tight valley where it snows a ton
Also got an interest free loan from the gov to cover the outlay.
That is definitely a factor. But depending on your energy usage and how smart your home appliances are, you can save a lot more than 10%. I.e. if you run all your washing and most of the heating of the water tank during your own generation times you can potentially save quite a lot more than 10%.
Electricity costs 24c per kwh in France and I just checked and can get it for 23c. So it's not true any more. Once you factor in that one is financed by the state and the other is not, it was likely never true. Germany's expensive electricity is a myth.
In the US the price varies a lot by state [1].
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
> Too bad my balcony faces east
This is not necessarily a disadvantage. If you have a contract with pricing based on the 15-minute intervals of the day-ahead market ("dynamischer Stromtarif"), then the electricity price spikes in the morning and evening. Typically with such a contract, you also get this higher price for injecting power back into the grid. And the price will almost always be lower than a traditional contract outside of these spikes.
A vertically oriented panel is also ideal for this scenario, because the sun will be low above the horizon when the panel is producing power in the morning.
edit: after looking into a bit more, it seems in Germany you may not actually get dynamic feed-in pricing. Too bad. I assumed that this was the case, because it works like that here in Belgium.
So all we needed from the Greens was 1 law to simplify the installation of (small) solar panels.
We got the full package and started the deindustrializion instead.
Seems like a good deal :)
What exactly do you mean by "deindustrialization" here?
What would the opposite have looked like?
> If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years.
Where are you getting these figures from? Is it realistic to expect it to cover 5-10% of your usage?
It's relative to my cited bill of about 70 euro, obviously.
7/30 ~= 22 cents. Or about half a kwh per day here in Germany. Per day. I think that should be feasible with a well positioned panel. You might do better on sunny days. But if you balance that against all the lesser days, I don't think it's a strange average. All back of the envelope of course. If you get six sun hours on your 800w setup, you get almost 5 kwh. That's sort of the upper range probably. Maybe on really well positioned panels you might get 10 sun hours in the summer months. Or 8 kwh. I think few people would get that.
But an average 0.5kwh per day is fairly modest and adds up to about 7 euro per month. Probably too conservative but that was on purpose. I think the official figures project higher yields.
Since setups are capped at 800w, the percentage depends on your monthly usage. Easier to work in absolute numbers. I think most people could shave between 7 and 20 euros per month off their bills depending on how much sun they manage to get on their panels.
Thank you for elaborating.
But this assumes that you consume the power as it's produced, right? Otherwise you need a battery as well.
I imagine, for example, that the power produced during weekdays while at work would go mostly unused.
Any chance you could post a link to the sort of setup you mean or like?
I’ve searched but the deluge of crappy systems that aren’t what you mean is overwhelming results.
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/SUNNIVA-BIFAZIAL-Complete-Inverte...
"SUNNIVA 920 W Balcony Power Station BIFAZIAL Full Black Complete Socket TSUN 800 W Inverter, PV Solar System, 2 x 460 W Glass/Glass Solar Modules, Includes 5 m Cable, Bluetooth WiFi, Complete Set"
Literally the first result that comes back for "balcony solar panel kit". 239 Euros with 4.2 star rating and > 200 purchase in the last month.
I can't vouch for this brand or kit but that's what comes up on top on amazon.de. Looks like some Chinese manufacturer, as you would expect. Plenty of pretty positive reviews in German with a few deployment photos. There are indeed a lot of solar panel related products on Amazon. It seems to be a popular product category.
You might get different results from outside Germany.
> You might get different results from outside Germany.
100% this.
Thank you. This is exactly what I was after.
Not obvious that this is "good" for the environment overall, though.
And how that would be bad, specifically?
Considering Germany is still getting 30% of the electricity from the fossil fuels[1], I wonder how that would be a net negative for the environment.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Never assume.
These are millions of systems imported from China, they are inefficient (because they are small and often installed in poor conditions), useful life is uncertain, they will have to be disposed of afterwards.
So is this whole chain better than using the grid? I don't know but I can't assume anything just because "it's solar".
Some people laugh at the 800W output. However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less.
Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.
To be sure, when talking about solar panels, 800W is the nominal/nameplate capacity. That's how much it generates when conditions are perfect and the sun is shining straight down on them. Most of the time an 800W installation will produce rather less than that.
You'd need rather more panels (and/or some combination with batteries) to hit 900W output constantly. (on the other hand, do you need 900W constantly, or is that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
panels up to 2000W is legal, the 800w limit is actual net input, you can even battery in-between (or use it directly)
Nominal capacity is not the maximum, there are plenty of zones where panels perform way above for most of the day.
Germany is definitely not one of those zones
> Some people laugh at the 800W output
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
Your watts can go much farther than you think.
The awesome part is you can circumvent the 800W. First you can legally install 2000W solar panels, making 800W output much more likely. The 800W is only how much you can feed back into the grid. Second you can install one or more batteries and feed devices from them, further increasing the usable energy.
Can we generate 2 kw, charge batteries and ensure only 800 is fed back at any time?
Yes, that is exactly what is happening. 2000W solar panels feed the battery, up to 800W are allowed to be fed back into the grid/house network. Keep in mind you could also plug a 3000W device directly into the battery, meaning you could power a lot more than that if it is not connected to the grid. If you have devices that need little power for a long duration or high power for a short duration they can be fed with 100% solar that way. Depending on your use case that can save further money.
yes
Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all? I'd think it would be pretty hard to keep people from importing solar panels from Vietnam or Thailand—although of course you'd probably have to put it somewhere that surveillance drones could see it, if you want it to get any sun. (In that case, if you have a rooftop, maybe you could put it under a frosted-glass skylight.)
If anything, I'd expect the prices to be lower. Do you have a local Indonesian equivalent of eBay like we do here in Argentina? Or, just eBay?
I assume "electricity capacity of 900W" means that the wires from the transformer (and in the walls) are only rated for 4 amps at 230VAC. This means that you can't really run a 2000-watt air conditioner at all. Whereas, with an 800-watt solar panel charging a battery, you can run a 2000-watt air conditioner 40% of the time when the panel is in full sun. Washing machines and refrigerators are an even bigger difference, since they usually have huge peaks of current draw when they start up their motors, but relatively low average power. So the solar panels may actually be a much bigger boon than simply comparing 800 to 900 makes it sound like. A single car battery can typically source 6000 watts for brief periods of time.
https://www.tokopedia.com/ is the Indonesian Amazon. You can get everything it seems, also grid-tied inverters, but the prices are higher than in Europe from a quick check. Probably import taxes.
Thank you very much!
> Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all?
The state's power company seems to stop approving grid-connected solar panel system due to oversupply. It's fine if it's not connected to the grid.
What do you mean by 'that price'? Are there heavy import tariffs or another artificial reason why you can't order from the same chinese manufacturers as germany does?
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
Some countries with state gas or utility monopoly will ensure legislation blocks solar power. Example Thailand has huge solar potential but cheap gas, so they block solar panel installations
Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.
Surely you can do what you want within your own home, so long as you don't hook it up to the grid?
I'm also not sure if this fits with the price restriction they mentioned. Prohibitions can't be bypassed by paying a higher price, unless it were to refer to bribes
The systems in the article are hooked up to the grid though.
They're hooked up in an extremely safe and responsible manner, but it's understandable that there are regulations about what can be hooked up, and simply not surprising that they haven't been updated to say "yeah, this is ok".
A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.
It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.
The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.
They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.
But in that case the regulations would only have to apply to plugging in something that doesn't do that. There shouldn't be any forms or approvals or fees for someone who buys a product that does.
I agree there shouldn't be, but I don't think it's surprising that in many places there are. It takes active work for the regulator to look at the product and say "this design is sound, we're sure it won't kill anyone".
It takes active work to do that but not to manually approve zillions of individual installations?
The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.
Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.
Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.
Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.
"Need."
If you want the rules that exist and the rules that ought to exist to get closer together, do you not need to reckon what they ought to be?
Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.
Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.
The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.
They're actually actively subsidized in Germany to make them artificially cheap.
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
By definition, only the end customer pays VAT. But also on grid power in Germany. So no subsidy here.
That's sort of my point. You are essentially getting to parity to a grid operator, who does not pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
This is a good point.
Yes true, vat exception is an advantage.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
Thank you very much! Yes, it's more than a book, it's a whole intellectual movement, although maybe not a very lively one anymore.
Panels etc. have become really cheap now: https://www.globus-baumarkt.de/p/schwaiger-balkonkraftwerk-8...
That's 0,38 Euro/W of panel power, including inverter and cable. And there might be a solid price uptick on that because of the shop that's selling it. Wholesale from specialized shops is probably much cheaper...
Just for the record, that seems to be an 860Wp "Schwaiger Balkonkraftwerk 860 Wp Wifi fähig" for €325, "inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.", but not including "Versand- & Lieferbedingungen + 99,99 € Versandkosten". So it's €424.99, which is €0.494 per peak watt, about five or ten times the wholesale price of just the solar module.
Yes, but you could also just drive to one of the roughly 2.000 home and garden markets and just take one of the sets home with you in your car. Or get yourself cables and an inverter and buy the cheapest panels you can find, maybe even used ones.
The thing is: Prices are falling fast and that's great for everybody.
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
Indonesia gets a great deal more sunlight than Germany, almost twice as much: https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
Legality can be a funny thing. Governments can make anything they want illegal. Here in Argentina it's illegal to import used capital equipment that hasn't been refurbished by the original manufacturer or to import maps that say that the Malvinas Islands aren't part of Argentina. In Thailand it's illegal to step on paper currency because the king's face is on it.
What are your most high powered appliances there?
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
Heating is always the culprit (or cooling but that's less of an issue in our area).
But one thing to realize is that the industry was just lazy and none of this is actually "needs" a full electric line.
- You don't need actual heat for washing clothes if you using washing detergent. There are no real simple "machines" available as far as I know, except simple camping washing machines
- A rice cooker can work from as low as 250w. I have a "cooking" option in mine drawing 500w taking no longer than the usual 2000w plate (better isolation, optimized heat transfer, ...) to get water cooking.
- Heaters are difficult, I've tried a lot of electric options and they all draw a lot of power when you heat something like 20°C over the outside temperature. However ex. "Ecomat 2000" (small ceramic heater) can easily heat a average room at 450 watts.
One way to get warm and way lower wattage is heating blankets. From 50 - 100w usually on for 50% you get very far with little power.
Not sure if that helps anyone. But I spent a lot of time researching efficient caravan alternatives.
Ergo. 800 watts can be a lot.
Most powerful draw is going to be on heating and cooling things which can also be done using gas. Is Indonesia using a lot of gas (or even wood) or they just not cooking?
Kerosene cookers are still very popular in Indonesia, or gas from portable bottles. I've not seen gas refrigerators, but maybe some people also have them.
Germany is using gas or oil for heating too. Heat pumps are gaining popularity, but most heating is still fossil fuels.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
800 Watt balkony power stations are generally listed at low hundreds of euros, not thousands; cheap enough to be a no-brainer and sold in budget shops like Lidl.
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).
Balcony solar panels isn't necessarily a bad outcome. It's enormously more resilient to natural disasters and warfare than centralized power stations, it's potentially more responsive to individual power needs than an electric regulator, and it may not even be inefficient—while solar panels in a utility-scale solar farm will have a higher capacity factor than balcony solar panels, that only saves you money on solar panels, but requires transmission, distribution, metering, and utility-scale storage capacity between the solar farm and the apartment, all of which are costly. At some price point, putting up a solar panel costs less than running a power line to your house.
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.
> it's getting harder and harder to justify the efficiencies of centralization.
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.
Well, there really are economies of scale involved in building solar farms. Accidental deaths per installed megawatt are orders of magnitude lower than rooftop solar. A single-axis solar tracker can rotate hundreds of square meters of solar panels. 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. A FLIR image can identify failing solar cells so you can queue them for replacement or repair, and a lawsuit against a maker of faulty solar panels is much more feasible if the potential damages are €60 million rather than €600. Etc.
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.
> Accidental deaths per installed megawatt are orders of magnitude lower than rooftop solar.
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.
Are deaths per megawatt really better if one looks at total infrastructure deaths from transmission wires and the like?
I think the answer is that they are, because there aren't that many infrastructure deaths.
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.
There are definitely economics of scale. They are just not visible in Germany due to outdated building and policy practices.
> 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 installations discussed in the article switch off power generation if mains power goes away, both for technical and safety reasons. If you want mains-independent power, more devices are needed, which seems to cost about as much as a typical balcony solar panel installation (which is still needed, of course). I doubt many German deployments are like that, so it doesn't really improve resiliency of electrical power.
People are still paying $10K’s for rooftop solar in the 10KW range in the US.
The numbers you quote suggest there’s going to be a black market for diy house-scale solar soon.
I'm imagining autonomous intercontinental narcosubs full of solar panels navigating upriver and mooring under trees on a rainy night, met by hard-boiled crews of heavily tattooed solar panel installers with gold teeth toting AK-47s, who load the illicit panels into a beer delivery truck.
What a ridiculous take. I have one of these systems and a 2kWh battery attached to it. It reduces my electricity bill by about half and will pay for itself in less than five years. I sacrifice nothing of my balcony, the panels hang outside.
Can you break down the costs and subsidies you had? Genuinely curious
Not OP, but I installed a "Balcony solar" 1.4kWp panels 2.4kWh battery system on my parents garage. The only subsidy was the tax free purchase of the components (we did file for an additional tax break with the city, but they had already run out of funds for that because it is so popular). You also save a lot of money on installation costs.
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
A kW of panels produces about 1000kWh a year in a sunny location in Germany. Electricity is around 30c/kWh. A 1kW+2kWh batteries and inverter set costs about 1k€ shipped from Amazon.
Not the person you are replying to but my four panels with about 2000W cost me about 370€ shipped including an inverter and cables.
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).
900 wp systems cost around 300 EUR including inverter and fixation but excluding labor and produces 150-200 EUR in electricity savings.
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.
Noone is forced or economically has to do this.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody here is in any need to buy solar panels. It's just worth it and it fits the culture.
I don't think you understand how this works. People voluntarily do this. No one is forced to. Public power providers exist and work. Balcony solar is added and helps save some cost because you don't buy those 800W from the public utility provider.
People are forced to do it by high household electricity prices which are the direct result of the government policy failure.
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.
Nobody is forced. It makes economic sense, so people do it. It’s how the economy is supposed to work.
Exactly, like growing potatoes made economic sense to my parents' generation.
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.
France has changed permitting laws to allow small-scale solar, i.e.: balcony solar, the difference is that the nominal output is much lower (350W vs 800W for Germany) which, by policy, makes it less attractive.
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 could allow 2000W, or 4000W, instead of only 800W, but you seem to be missing Alexey's point.
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.
The 800W are to prevent fires. You can’t just arbitrarily raise those limits.
What do you mean about preventing fires? 800 watts at 240 volts is only 3.3 amps. Are you saying there are German houses where you could plug a solar power system into an outlet whose wires would pose a fire risk if they carried 4 amps? Because I think the minimal rating for a German residential outlet is 16 amps, which would be 3520 watts at 220 volts.
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.
That's 3.3 amps behind the breaker. So if your wiring is set up for 16 amps you can now draw 19.3 amps before the breaker kicks in. That's within the safety margin. But if you allow PV to feed in more you exceed the safety margins and can cause the wiring to overheat.
Hmm, I guess you're right. If your oven is plugged into a different breaker than the one where you plug in the solar panels, that doesn't happen, but most people won't know which outlet is on which circuit. Thank you for explaining!
caveat - 20 amps on a b16 breaker will take a very long time (minutes to hours) to trip; in practice, you may never see it tripping during normal usage, but yeah your walls will get a bit warmer.
No, I didn't miss the point, I know they were talking about electricity prices. My counterpoint is that France is not seeing balcony solar not only because electricity prices are lower but due to policies which limit it.
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.
I can easily afford my power bill. I still have a Balkonkraftwerk.
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.
This is a ridiculous take. Germany did not screw up their energy policy, they had a transition plan that ended up not working due to one of the partners in that plan starting a war and believing that they had Germany by the short hairs to stop them from interfering.
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.
Well, Germany made an assumption that their „partner”, which already was starting wars, would at least keep them far enough from their home turf. It backfired spectacularly and we can blame German government for that.
Not much to disagree about generating energy at home though.
The 'handel durch wandel' policy was always predicated on the fact that economic pressure would be a strong tool to force russia to abandon its policy of expansion. It did not work. I don't blame the politicians so much for trying as I do for not realizing way earlier that it clearly wasn't working. The revolving door to high positions in the russian oil industry should have been forbidden to them and obviously they should have known better. But hope springs eternal and I can see why they fell for it, even if I think it was dumb (and I already thought so at the time, but I'm more of a pessimist I guess).
Hah, that was a sloppy typo, of course I meant 'wandel durch handel'... serves me right for posting before my first tea.
Yes they thought that dependence would be codependence and make Russia less willing to start wars etc.
I share your take on the gas policy failure. It was hard to prevent because Russian gas was so cheap. How could the German government have forced companies to buy more expensive gas elsewhere?
> How could the German government have forced companies to buy more expensive gas elsewhere?
By not building the gas pipelines.
You mean by not letting private companies build the pipelines?
Do I have to erect the monument to the tomb of the unknown balcony?
These panels are heavily subsidised. My brother got it almost completely financed by the state of Berlin a few years back.
These are mostly limited time and budget offers, not generally available for everyone in Germany all the time.
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We don't remove comments. Comments that are sufficiently bad get flagged by the community, and if there are enough flags, a comment is killed, which happened to that one.
The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.
Russia gas is suicide. Especially considering that Russia plans war against the Europe and even already started act on those plans.
This is satire... right?
1.) Russia is already sending drones to border countries.
2.) Russian politicians openly talk about such possibility.
3.) Russian interest in expansion is no secret.
War with Russia is a real possibility. Considering NATO is not reliable anymore (due USA being less then reliable partner) , considering China seem to low key support Russia, it is not even crazy from the Russian side.
>War with Russia is a real possibility
No it is not because of 3 reasons:
1. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO 2. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO 3. Russia has no resources to wage war on NATO
War with russia is mostly hawks' and chicken littles' of the media wet dreams.
If anything has become clear in the last couple of years is that Russia doesn't act rationally, and their government lies as soon as they open their mouths. E.g trying to explain Russia's actions with 'reason' is just a waste of time.
Also: "if you want peace, prepare for war" has never been more true than now, as sad as that is.
Hey, I find you from another topic (about speed of js/rust calls, im really curious about best effective way of wasm 3d app with additional raycasting, etc)
However I couldnt ignore this topic since im from Voronezh, Russia. Totally agree about government’s lies and impulsiveness, however:
- when they say “X is what totally not gonna happen” actually they introduce X event to the news so 99.99% it is gonna happen later
- impulsiveness huge, they got a lot of people in jail for labeling “svo” as “war” and in last months all the government refers to the conflict as to “the war”. However(!) they kinda translate will of the nation, some basic russians, trying to create narrative that will make average russian proud and happy and from the other side praying for any luck in war (actually they need not luck but supply chains, that ones are corrupted as hell, and that shit going for three centuries at least, nothing new)
So, about prep to a war I’m afraid you’re right, I don’t think it’s reasonable to stay at Russia at all for now at least for 6 years. Also it’s risky to stay in Poland and Finland. For Baltics not that risky but really depressing though. h o w e v e r
- russia had a deal for nato not to get close to its borders, that was violated in a really bad manner, the neighbor just stopped all communication from 2020 and at beginning 2022 declared cancellation of other deal of not to place any atom weapon nearby.
- USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”. So there is nothing else this country can do if it doesn’t want to give up. The reasoning is pretty clear and emotional, stand for national security, do not became another India for UK. But the whole thing is messy, and smells like a slavs genocide. Russia became isolated, people are really angry and tolerable to constant violence threats, that is just insane turnaround since 2018 world cup that was hosted in Moscow.
> russia had a deal for nato not to get close to its borders
This deal doesn't exist, at least anywhere on paper. There is an obligation related to the reunification of Germany that no NATO troops are stationed on the territory of former East Germany which has been honored by the reunited Germany.
Countries are also not forced into NATO, they ask to join.
> USSR, and Russia asked to get in NATO a few times and got pretty rude responses “no way”.
As far as I have read, Russia wanted to 'skip the queue' ahead of smaller countries. When this special treatment was denied, Russia suddenly didn't want to join anymore.
I honestly don't think the Ukraine invasion was that irrational.
Russia had previous success (with managable pushback) annexing Crimea (and the Chechen wars before).
Things just went south really hard this time and now they're kinda stuck, just like France/Germany in WW1 or the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Writing off a lost war effort is also much harder for a totalitarian regime, because you are not gambling with your re-election: It's literally your life on the line, or your whole career at the very least (kleptocrat network & favors), so doubling down is kinda the most rational approach from the decision-makers PoV.
I mean yeah... in a sense it's also not quite irrational for Russia to attack a NATO country (like one of the Baltics) if Russia is convinced that the rest of NATO (or at least the US) isn't coming to help. It would still be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
The Ukraine War became irrational the day after it started.
The entire war was planned as "It will be over in 3 days, we will accomplish all our objectives trivially, it will be a massive gain". There was never even an idea in the Kremlin that it would be anything other than a milk run, no contingency plan for if Ukraine fought back at all.
Russia did not even take control over hundreds of billions of dollars of cash reserves in foreign banks that they expected to be part of their war chest, and which were frozen early on.
Then they failed to take Hostomel airport, failed to be welcomed by the population, and their invasion column was an abysmal, laughable even, execution on whatever plan they had.
From that moment on, there was no "Success" option. It's geopolitical sunk cost fallacy.
Russia did not plan on losing over 4000 tanks! Russia did not plan on throwing away most of their Soviet inheritance and outright emptying all the storage yards for old tanks! They did not plan on causing the outright or near extinction of several entire types of Soviet military vehicle! They have lost 8000 IFVs! They definitely did not plan or want to lose several irreplaceable strategic aircraft, including multiple EWACS type aircraft that they didn't have a lot of in the first place, and again, irreplaceable.
Russia did not plan to have 30% of their fuel refining infrastructure damaged by a neighbor without a serious air force! Russia did not plan to have an attempted coup that was well on its way to Moscow. Russia did not plan on having most of its industry hampered by foreign export controls and limits.
Russia most certainly did not plan on having to beg and trade North Korea for a few million artillery shells, and they did not plan on having the Flagship of the Black Sea fleet sunk by a country who scuttled their navy months earlier!
If Ukraine rolled over and willingly submitted to total control today, including the actual populace (instead of resisting), Russia would still be utterly fucked for decades to come.
Russia is still by far the biggest country in Europe, with tons of natural resources and support from the biggest industrial manufacturer on the planet. It has an industry that is now fully oriented to produce military goods in war-time quantities that it can't easily spin down.
Russia does have resources, it has the desire, and importantly the state it depends on (China) has a very strong motivation to have Nato distracted when it acts on its plans for Taiwan.
Except you cannot involve in any way NATO in taiwan. Only the USA
That assumes NATO would fight Russia. USA can not be trusted anymore to keep their obligations.
Who the fuck needs USA? EU has 4 times the population and infinity times the industrial capacity ...
On drones: there is no evidence of that. The supposed "drone ship" that was siezed by France turned out to be crewed by Chinese and had no drones or weapons on board. A Croatian citizen were arrested regarding the drone near Frankfurt airport. Three Germans were arrested regarding the drones near Oslo.
Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing? Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
Please show me where Russian politicians openly talk about flying drones around European airports? I've seen Putin and others ridicule the very notion - and it really is ridiculous. Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland, and which had literally been duct-taped together from the remains of Russian drones and placed for a photoshoot!
Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia, and then please do tell about Russia's supposed expansion plans: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:History_of_NATO_enla...
War with Russia is only a real possibility because the US and EU want it.
"The Ukraine" is offensive, please refrain from using it. Wikipedia covers some of the history behind the use of the definite article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine#English_defini...
I wasn't aware, thank you for explaining - I'll try to use the correct form from now on.
Well, for some context, most new NATO members were previously under communism regimes and soviet influence in the past. After getting their freedom, the next step was to make sure they are safe from Russia.
Thats why we are perfect soil for this FUD.
Senior population remembers soviet union with all its warts (rightfully so) but fail to account the structures that governed the union and whole topdown integration no longer exists there.
Meanwhile anyone born in the last 40 years was raised with inferiority complex due to being economically behind and treat every word from west as gospel.
There is evidence of Russian drones entering Polish airspace. That has nothing to do with any ships.
> Consider what NATO have to gain - stirring up anti-Russian sentiment, garnering consent for massive expenditure on an "EU drone wall" and continued money laundering in the Ukraine.
NATO should do more to help Ukraine. They absolutely should.
>Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia,
That is countries deciding to join NATO in the hope it will protect them against Russia. No one forced them into NATO. Russia does not like it only because NATO prevents Russia from expanding. This is such a ridiculous talking point.
They're really pushing it hard in the media here
It's being pushed hard in the UK too. Some of what the tabloids spout is just totally unhinged.
It's got to the point where the media/gov could claim Russians eat babies, and many would believe it.
They deported and abducted enough kids in Ukraine, so close enough.
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household. Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
The hybrid (heat-pump & heat-elements, both) water heater I installed 2 years ago has already paid for itself in savings. This design literally pulls the heat out of your conditioned space, providing both cooling and dehumidification (I live in a humid temperate rainforest so win-win). <3% of my annual electric usage goes to my water heater (typically 10%+).
During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
How do you connect that?
I assume balcony solar panels provide you with a power socket. How do you connect all the appliances in house to that socket(s)? Isn't it a lot of cabling?
The solar panels are connected to a converter which is connected to the normal grid with a standard plug.
Yes, but where do you live?
Well, the person you are replying to is in a thread about Germany, mentions balcony solar and said "my little server turns it automatically on" (which is how you would construct that sentence in German instead of "turns it on automatically"), so my wild guess would be Germany. ;)
Germany isn't that big, but the difference between Freiburg and Hamburg is very significant in this case I believe
Germany has a pretty consistent climate. Doesn't really matter where you live. Of course, that's an oversimplification, but if you're new to Germany and wonder "oh, what's the weather going to be here?", the answer pretty much is "similar to the rest of the country".
You could then look at a map of France and think, ah, similarly sized country, probably also has a consistent climate, but that's not true. Southern France is very different from Northern France. But Germany's climate is pretty uniform.
I moved from Hamburg (north) to close to Munic (south) and the difference is huge. I can see the blue sky, for example! So much better here.
Yes, there is a difference, you are right. I don't have hard numbers at the moment (typing from the phone) but from looking it up quickly, the sun's intensity varies from about 950 kWh/m² to about 1.200 kWh/m² between north and south Germany. So, what OP described will generally work in any part of Germany.
Point taken! Scanning comments rapidly to move on to actually doing some work today - has its drawbacks.
Austria
> Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
A more fitting title would be "Germany's citizens outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels". The current phrasing makes it sound like it's somehow a thing done by the government, which is not the case. If anything the government is one of the many forces slowing down this progress. And yes, I am aware of things like grid security and stability being a concern. I am not complaining.
Given that these things are usually hindered by the government's bureaucracy, maybe the best title would be "Germany's government removes obstacles preventing residents from outfitting..."
Insisting that every improvement must be framed as something bad about government is how USA government became downright horrible.
That title reads like a good thing about the government, not a bad thing.
It's like you're saying "the outcome is good, but because it was achieved through deregulation, it is inherently bad".
Electricity is so expensive in Germany, that these things pay for themselves in a couple of years - you are theoretically right, but as things are, these make financial sense.
In my city, you could get financial support if you installed a "Balkonkraftwerk".
Unless it is related to weapons or the project that will ultimately benefit big corps, project will not work out using central government policy. With revolving doors and sophisticated lobbing, at this point government seems just like different side of the same coin as big corp.
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
Nitpick: Not every house owner is a citizen though.
There's nits on your nits: most residents (citizen or otherwise) don't own their properties; and while these things do work with houses, they are intended for apartments.
Most of them are installed by tenants. Who also aren't all citizens, so you aren't wrong there. Maybe "Germany's resident's" would be more accurate, but of course some small percentage will be installed by landlords who actually reside abroad. You will never get that title to be 100% accurate
For this you do not need to own the property / house / flat, though.
Meanwhile China projected to add ~300GW of solar capacity in 2025. Germany renewables capacity for 2023 was 165GW.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
China also has 58 nuclear reactors and are currently building 30 more. [0] They are doing everything right to get rid of coal and also become energy independent.
0 - https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors...
China is also 30 times larger in area than germany.
It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!
Inner Mongolia is so far from populated areas that China build 2000 km electric power lines, as long as a car drive from Munich to Sicily.
The Messina Strait Bridge doesn't actually exist. Perhaps you are driving a hovercraft.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/wnyt5nPeiETVsEpP9
Ferries don't exist.
I imagined them.
Yes, but until recently, Germany produced more electricity than China did.
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
How fast has Germany's PV capacity expanded in recent years? In another subthread I wanted some estimate of how many hectares in Germany had PV on them, but the pages I visisted on the subject were outdated.
You're not getting his point.
Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that.
Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator.
Overall, Germany is in a shit place for renewable energy
Germany uses millions of hectares to grow biofuels. They would be better used for solar panels, but NIMBYs prefer endless monoculture.
Pretty bad place for fossil fuel extraction, too.
For many years I have been writing about how bad Germany is for solar panels because of, mostly, how far north it is. Specifically, the capacity factor for utility-scale solar in Germany has historically been about 10%, which is mostly because of the unfavorable latitude and cloudiness. You can see this quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali.... The capacity factor for utility-scale solar in China has actually also historically been about 10%, and I have no idea why that is. You are certainly correct that it ought to be much better, because China gets so much more sun. You can see that quantified at https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....
However, Germany does not have a space problem. Germany is 357'114km² with "photovoltaic electricity potential" of about 3.0kWh/kWp/day according to Solargis (see above link), which would be a capacity factor of 12.5%. I'm not quite sure how they calculate that, but multiplying by the country's area, the solar constant of 1000W/m², and a fudge factor of 0.8, it works out to something on the order of 30–40 terawatts, electric. That's roughly 50% to 100% more than the entire world's marketed energy consumption, which is about 18 terawatts, about a third of it electric. Germany produced 488.5 TWh in 02024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany) which is 55.73GW.
Therefore, roughly 0.2% of Germany's land area would suffice to produce all of its current electrical consumption with solar energy, about 700km². This would also require something like 450 gigawatts (peak) of solar panels, which would cost about €45 billion at today's prices, roughly 4 days of Germany's GDP.
It is absolutely true that, if you put those same solar panels in the Mojave Desert, mounted with single-axis trackers, they would produce two or three times as much power. (California's average utility-scale solar capacity factor was over 29% last I checked.) So, yes, solar is much more expensive in Germany. But if you check out https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you will see that, in March 02023, solar modules cost three times as much as they do now. So solar generation in California then cost what solar generation in Germany costs now. (Except that, because of Biden's anti-renewable-energy tariffs, actual California prices were and are much higher than you would expect from Solarserver.)
To put this somewhat in perspective ("why is Germany not installing 700km² of PV panels right now?"):
Grid operators project costs of around €250 billion [1] (within 2045) for grid expansion alone, and NIMBYism is a big problem everywhere in Germany.
Battery storage to allow going full PV (1 week) would be at least twice that [2].
There is also plenty of "anti-green" sentiment in Germany generally and the current government coalition is in a somewhat precarious position, discouraging long-term investments like that.
[1] Source for grid costs (this is what grid operators are planning, so take it with a grain of salt): https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023...
[2] Battery cost is just assuming full power for 1 week at 50 €/kWh (IMO quite optimistically).
To put the 700 km² in context, that's approximately 30% more than what is currently (not historically) used for lignite mining in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-three-li...
Holy shit, I had no idea.
Great idea! Want to learn more on the safety though...
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
Anti‑islanding detects the power frequency and constantly tries to shift it. If the grid is on, its frequency won't budge, so the anti‑islanding doesn't trip. If the grid is off, the frequency shifts and it shuts off. A second one would just make it shut off faster.
Curious: is anti-islanding an actual feature, or a necessary behavior of any power source that adds power to the grid? I can't imagine how a second power source would work at all if it weren't syncing to the main source's AC phase. So it seems that if you implement the syncing, you get anti-islanding for free (assuming you handle the case of a missing main source phase by not providing power at all).
This is a newbie question, and I look forward to learning how it's more complex than this.
If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes.
Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead.
Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-tied inverters: When there is nothing for them to sync to, they output nothing.
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase).
However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now).
Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 240V 40A clothes dryer. The island is definitely going to collapse at that point, and might do bad stuff on the way down.
Even in that weird non-existent corner case instance, it is a necessary function because a hypothetical microinverter is completely and utterly incapable of kickstarting a grid.
You could totally have half a dozen microinverters scattered around your household, connected to each other but temporarily not to the neighborhood distribution network.
I could have that; many homes in the world do have that. And when the grid dies, the microinverters all die with it.
Possibly you have misunderstood.
Can you elaborate? Which part is it that you think I may have misunderstood?
What problem (or solution) is the concern, here?
A hypothetical microinverter is completely capable of kickstarting the "grid" within a single house. You can try it yourself: get a 2000-watt car inverter, connect it to a car battery, turn off your house's main circuit breaker, and plug a suicide cord (male to male) between the car inverter and one of your house's outlets. The electrical appliances in your house will work fine unless one of them starts trying to draw more than 2000 watts (or, as hedora says, unless you're powering only one phase of a split-phase system). This is dangerous: if someone turns the main circuit breaker back on while in this setup, the car inverter will probably be destroyed and may start a fire. But it's far from a technological impossibility. It's achievable even with redneck duct-tape-and-baling wire engineering.
The grid-tied microinverter cannot do this on its own. It is incapable.
A person can add other things to the scenario and the microinverter may elect to play ball, but it is simply incapable of kickstarting bloody anything on its own.
Are there any other wildly imaginative corner cases you'd like to explore that have nothing at all to do with balcony solar, as it is implemented in Germany?
I was rebutting your incorrect assertion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487471 about what hypothetical microinverters were or were not "utterly incapable" of. The comment you have just posted is irrelevant to that.
The design features of currently existing microinverters are irrelevant to hedora's point about what microinverters could be designed to do, except insofar as they constitute an existence proof. (Obviously something is possible if it's already being done, but the inverse is not true.)
Furthermore, unsafely plugging your house wiring into a cheap generator or car inverter isn't a "wildly imaginative corner case", it's a common enough practice that there are YouTube videos warning people against doing it, because it's unsafe and in most places illegal, and also explaining how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjpS1vfGio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiicSQZqGd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIhzy6hfvyM as well as safer approaches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydRveyXkf4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmmhOXsIRjw
Thanks, I think that answers my question. It seems like there is a lot of regulation to enforce a behavior that was already necessary for microinverters to work at all. But given the risk (utility worker electrocution during outages), I also understand why utilities are extra-conservative about it.
> Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on?
Yes. This is Germany we are talking here. I doubt any other country has higher (and more annoying) safety standards.
Well of course but the manufacturers of the micro inverters sure try to cheat:
https://www.heise.de/news/RelayGate-Deye-Solar-Microinverter...
From what I remember, it turned out that the electronics were sufficient. Though the chance of issues (e.g. in case of a software but) were/are increased.
Well, it turned out that the micro inverter in question did not contain the necessary physical relay to show conformity with the claimed norms on electric safety (related to disconnect from the grid in case of grid failure).
They only had a software implementation and were forced to send all customers in Germany a free relay dongle to ensure safety.
It's called "NA Schutz"[1] and is required for all german micro-inverters by VDE-AR-N-4105:2018. Which in turn is national law following EU directive.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netz-_und_Anlagenschutz
Micro inverters pretty much all have automatic shutdowns in these situations. They can ‘boost’ the phase/voltage, but won’t replace it if it is missing.
That they shut off is important for a more obvious reason: The microinverters plug into a normal outlet. So the flow of power is invented to the normal situation, here the prongs of the plug are energized. The body that writes the electrical regulations of course wanted a mandatory special plug and socket that had to be installed by a licensed electrician, which mostly makes balcony solar financially a non starter. Finally they relented after much discussion.
These microinverters do not output anything if they do not detect the grid.
> What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something?
Well, I hope that any competent electrician will measure if there's still any voltage on the circuits after pulling the breakers.
[flagged]
The solar panels are on the sides of the balcony, where the safety barriers are usually opaque /solid.
Is this a German thing? My balcony has spaced metal bars and I would hate to see the state of it if there were solid barriers keeping it cool, moist, and building up debris.
From my experience, there are different cultural aspects to privacy and sometimes, simple metal bars balconies are fitted with fabric to hide what's happening inside the apartment from the outside world.
I guess in many places where this is more culturally predominant, they install solid barriers on those balconies.
Usually those barriers leave a gap at the bottom for water and debris.
https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8025956-5559700-solar-power-ba...
Why not. Your decision.
AP News had a great article about this. We really need more states to adopt this beyond Utah.
https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy...
> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation.
so about 5yrs ROI
And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidizing installation):
> Weyland spent around $530 for his 600-watt-capacity system. While he’s happy with how his south-facing panels perform during balmy weather, such days are rare in northern Germany. He estimates that he’ll save around $100 in annual electricity costs and recoup his investment in about five years.
The article mentions the main motivation in Germany is also climate change and a feeling of independence, not so much economics
It's nice that it is both. You do something good and also save money. Everyone with a plug at their balcony is throwing money away when not installing some panels, if there is no roof installation already ofc.
That's way overpriced. An 800W solar system is easily under US$1000 now.
200-300 EUR without installation is the current best price in Europe + shipping:
https://geizhals.de/?cat=bmsesbk&xf=1601_780.50*1200~1603_2&...
In the US? Where do you buy it from, and are we talking about a system that feeds power back onto the grid?
Not an answer to your question, but I was amazed at how wildly varied the pricing was when I was getting estimates. This was a few years back and I didn't go with it at the time, so I forget what the exact estimates were. But I remember that the highest was literally double the price of the lowest for all the same equipment. All I'm saying is don't trust any pricing you get from folks online, and do get a lot of estimates.
Probably prices now are much lower than they were a few years ago, since solar modules are now at a historically low price that is one third of their price in early 02023.
You do it yourself. No one will install such a small system, it isn't worth it to them. That's only 3-4 panels.
I was pricing out using bifacial panels for fencing. It seems like it would cost about twice the price of cedar, but last twice as long (50 years) and have less upkeep.
I started looking at that to boost my roof solar capacity. It looks like it’s permitted by code where I’m at and now the only thing I’m unsure about is vandalism since my property is against a busy street. Seems like a great idea though.
It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.
Around here I have a backyard washing machine, a backyard grill, a backyard clothesline, and my neighbors have backyard childcare, backyard parking, and a backyard motorcycle. And actually inside my house I have a flush toilet and an oven.
Your assertion seems to imply that if instead I had to wash and dry my laundry at a coin-operated laundromat, eat at a cafeteria table with all my neighbors, and piss in a portapotty down the street, and my neighbor's kids were taken away to live at a boarding school, while he had to ride the bus to work instead of driving, that would be evidence of successful policy!
We clearly have radically different definitions of success. Yours seems not to be well thought out.
The problem with backyard furnaces was that the steel they produced was not just expensive but also inferior. If you could plug in a Tabletop Minimill that produced ingots of specialty precision steel alloys to your order, ranging from maraging steel to tool steel to nitinol, and which was also cheap to operate, that would not be an economic policy failure. That would be an enormous success!
Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; my household water pressure tank is decentralized because of collective action failure, for example, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487610. Others don't. We have to analyze the particulars of each case. I've written at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051 a bit about the particulars of this case.
> Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; ... Others don't.
That's correct, yes. I too prefer a decentralized washing machine to coin-operated laundromats which are very common in France where I live nowadays.
However I still believe that electricity generation has more in common with steelmaking than with laundry. Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI, they're largely enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value. The long-term solution in my view is nuclear which coincidentally the French do rather well, it's not all laundromats.
> Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI
That is clearly wrong. Even the worst-case embodied energy assumptions for solar panels estimate the cost of producing a square meter of solar panel area at 2000 kWh (the best cases are around 300, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph... ). A square meter of solar panel area produces an average of 200 kWh of power per year in Germany (which implies a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can get a multiple of that). This means that even in the worst case, the solar panel has amortized itself from the perspective of embodied energy after 10 years. On average it will be more like below 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years and require no maintenance if installed correctly.
30 years lifetime (if there are no heavy storms), 5-10 years to recoup energy, that's 3-6 EROI. Then you also need to include inverters which are energy-heavy. If we're talking of any meaningful scale, then you also need to include batteries because without them panels get shut down during sunny hours lowering the EROI even further.
In the end you're lucky if you get EROI of 1.5-3. That's an extremely bad deal. All other sources of energy, renewable or not, are in the 20-100 territory. The purpose of the energy production system is not to barely sustain itself but to actually produce usable electricity for everything else you want to do. It's the means, not the ends.
Solar panels have very solid benefits of course, you can buy them for your house to be more autonomous -- I would do that if I had a house. But from the energy/CO2 perspective what you're doing is buying a sort of "battery" that was charged with cheap coal-based electricity in China and shipped off to US/Europe. This makes sense in certain situations but presenting this as a green solution or as future of humanity is just delusional.
> Then you also need to include inverters which are energy-heavy.
Scientific publications say otherwise. It's quite hard to come by any numbers, but page 11 of https://www.wisdomlib.org/uploads/journals/mdpi-sust/2025-vo... says that typical solar inverters require about 15 MJ/kW of power for their production in total, which would amount to approx. 4 kWh per kW of inverter power. A solar panel square meter produces about 200-250 watts of peak power, so it needs inverter power that cost about 1 kWh to build. Let's triple that, because inverters have a typical lifetime of 10 years in contrast to the 30 years of solar panels. 3 kWh for the inverter is negligible when compared with 300-2000 kWh for the panel itself. So we can just ignore that.
Batteries are interesting. According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24, it takes about 35 kWh in total to produce 1 kWh of battery capacity. Let's say we'll need 250 Wh of capacity for our 250 WPeak solar panel square meter (the rule of 1 kWh capacity for each 1 kWp is a typical estimate applied when sizing solar installations for residential homes). That makes up about 8 or 9 kWh to produce this battery capacity. Admittedly that doesn't include the raw materials, of which the cell requires quite a few expensive ones. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good resource on that, so I resorted to asking ChatGPT for a rough calculation, and it came up with about 140 kWh for our 250 Wh LFP cell, which doesn't sound entirely wrong, as it assumed a cell weight of 1,5 kg and splitted that up into different materials. The weight matches what I would expect from personal experience with LFP batteries.
Basically, we can just ignore the inverter and must add about 150 kWh for the battery to our 300-2000 kWh for the panel. That does not substantially impact an EROI calculated from a 1000 kWh assumption for the panel alone.
And this is a calculation based on Germany. Again: weather conditions are far from optimal for solar in Germany. It's much better in many regions in China, where solar panels are made. They can easily achieve EROIs of 20+ with solar there, which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
> > This makes sense in certain situations but presenting this as a green solution or as future of humanity is just delusional.
> which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
State-run economies get delusional pretty easily, but in this case China is safely on the "makes sense in certain situations" side:
* keep electricity prices low
* invest heavily in nuclear
* install solar within reasonable limits (currently around 8% of the grid)
* for better or for worse they burn more and more coal every year
They certainly don't make insane green commitments and they don't say solar is the future of humanity. I don't like China much, but I don't see how they can fall into "delusional" category according to my criteria above, they have none of it.
Now Germany's policy is the complete opposite of China's, except for the "burning coal" part. Germany killed their own economy over high electricity prices because they wanted to go green, but then somehow they've got almost 2x CO2 emissions per capita compared to France.
If someone says "I sacrifice A to get B", but then never get the B and still lose A, and then insist that the plan was a great success -- he's certainly delusional, that's like the definition of the word.
You mean energy payback time? Just on an economic basis we can bound the energy payback time to about four years, and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45488310 we found a Fraunhofer report by Simon Philipps and Werner Warmuth with a more detailed estimate arriving at a 1.1-year energy payback time in Northern Europe, 0.9 years in Southern Europe: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Maybe you can explain in more detail what you mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world and not by their long-term value", but on my assumption that you're talking about EROEI and energy payback time, your assertion is profoundly incorrect.
> Just on an economic basis we can bound the energy payback time to about four years
If you use electricity prices to make that calculation, you need to take in account that solar panels are produced in China off cheap coal-based electricity. If you produce a panel in Germany it would take much longer to break even economically (if ever). That's what I mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world".
> we found a Fraunhofer report by Simon Philipps and Werner Warmuth with a more detailed estimate arriving at a 1.1-year energy payback time in Northern Europe, 0.9 years in Southern Europe
This article doesn't explain how they make their calculations and I struggle to replicate them. The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm. Measured (not projected) yield in Germany is 160-180 kWh per 1sqm per year. A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally. Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe. In the end you may get anywhere between 10 and 100 kWh per 1sqm per year (would love to see some real measurements by the way, not projected ones).
So my view is very simple: these balcony panels make sense economically because German economy is cooked. However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment. Which by the way could be a reasonable price to pay for autonomy in case of power failure but these balcony setups can't run when the grid is off.
> A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally.
Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
> Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe.
That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
And clearly, we are discussing the energy break-even here, as indicated by "The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm."
> However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment.
As I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is.
In addition to this, as I've described in another posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45490555) there's the psychological side of things, where cheap and easily profitable balcony panels for everyone are a gateway drug for "normal people" to get actively involved in the field of renewable energy and must not be underestimated in their ability to open the minds of people for other, more efficient actions to get closer to a carbon-neutral energy economy. Since those activities tend to be heavily inhibited by broad refusal that's often not based on factual arguments, but simply on inertia in people's minds ("we've always done it the other way") and a certain lazyness to actively grapple with new technologies and developments, this effect is at least as important as the actual impact on the energy grid. Just like on the stock market, the raw numbers are only half of the story. Psychology is the other half.
> Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
> That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would. This is a fundamental tradeoff with solar: it's either too small to make any difference or you never get your projected EROI because you have to shut them down during the very time they produce maximum energy.
> I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is
You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do. Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
I'm extremely sceptical of all these "concrete calculations", not because they're mathematically incorrect but because they are detached from real life. It's like when they sell you a timeshare cottage on a ski resort and mathematically it's profitable, but in reality it's a huge liability.
> No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
„which are even worse“ is an assumption you make, you do not have any data to back that up. From what I regularly see, they are not worse at all. People without sun on their balconies do not buy balcony solar kits in the first place. Also there’s the fact that people can spend time to meticulously optimize every single panels’ location (which they usually don’t when someone places 30 panels on a roof in a single day, it’s just about getting them up there quickly). If you are interested in numbers, browse https://www.reddit.com/r/Balkonkraftwerk/ - it’s German language but Reddit does quite well with auto-translation as far as I know. Every month, people post their yield numbers for comparison there.
> No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would.
You are equating the time during which a home solar owner cannot use his own solar power with the time during which there are negative electricity prices. This is grossly wrong. In 2024, Germany had 457 hours of negative power prices (see https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/03/bundesnetzagentur-457-...). That’s roughly 5% of the year. Typical home solar power usage if no battery at all is installed is about 50%. If we talk about batteries, which are increasingly getting common in balcony solar installations due to significant price drops, it’s more like 80-90% of power that the owner can use directly.
> You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do.
The panels are the exact same panels used for large-scale solar installations. These are tested and guaranteed by the manufacturer for 30+ years. Nobody doubts that they’ll reach that lifespan in most cases. The inverters are a negligible amount of kWh invested, as I pointed out in the parallel threads’ posting. So you can easily buy one or two replacements over the 30 year timespan without impacting the EROI of the panel at all. Also, a lifespan of 30 years does not mean that the panel fails after 30 years. It just goes below a defined point of efficiency (80% of original peak power). You can very well use it for another 10 or 20 years, you just have to accept that it produces only 80% of the original output.
> Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
That’s not what I see, because it is surprisingly hard to dispose of solar panels in practice. They do not fit into the typical „dumpsters“ people use to dispose their regular trash. You would be able to dispose of them for free at the next recycling center in Germany, as they are mandated to take them, but most cars cannot be used to transport solar panels as they are too large, so it’s not trivial to get them there. From what I observe, people therefore simply sell or donate the panels to the next renter/owner when they move, which is obviously a good idea as they are usually installed on a balcony or garden house or whatever and you usually buy the matching installation equipment for a particular situation which you wouldn’t be able to use at your future home anyway.
I find it quite interesting that you did not object to my second argument about the psychological impact/use of this technology.
This is a strange analogy. The policy saves people money on their power bill. The backyward furnaces are considered a disaster because, among other things, they produced low quality steel, and diverted labour from agriculture and other things, none of which is the case here - people pay for solar panels and install them once, and then achieve savings.
Hard disagree here.
1) The biggest challenge to renewables seems to be not capacity, but storage: wind and solar can't be relied upon all of the time, and often provide peak power out of sync with peak demand. Within reason, hyper-local generation either removes the need for storage altogether (as generated electricity is immediately utilised by household appliances) or allows easy local storage to be added via a few KWh of battery in the basement.
2) Houses that can mostly power themselves also reduce demand on the electricity grid, assuming that large spikes can be avoided.
3) I like the future vision of all people and their dwellings being energy-independent, and this is the start of a path towards that.
4) Don't fall into the trap of only ever accepting an optimal solution. Local generation might be somewhat less efficient economically (although with private investment rather than governmental/corporate investment being used here, and with no apaprent shortages in solar panel supply, I'm not so sure about the comparison?) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't add some meaningful benefit, or that it shouldn't happen.
Would you also agree that production of usable energy makes most sense at scale?
With that I mean energy like heat and motion? Because so far it just hasn't been possible to generate electricity at home in a meaningful way. Unlike heat, which everyone largely generates at home.
I would argue that there has been a technological leap, where electricity generation has become possible at home now through a combination of lower prices, ease of installation and feasibility to tie in to the rest of the electrical grid. Banning this new possibility would be a shortcoming of the policy.
What a strange take.
This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.
I do see it as the result of policy applied from the top, the policy that resulted in 2x household electricity prices compared to the US (which amounts to 3x difference if you adjust for median household income).
I replied in another thread but I still remember how in my childhood all the ordinary people had to grow potatoes. The state didn't order them to, it just created food shortages that's all. You can say it was voluntary, "not so much a policy applied from the top".
Coincidentally, CO2 emissions per capita in the US are also about 2 times that of Germany.
This is assuming people don’t want to go net zero, and people not understanding that going there requires change, which will be costly. I‘d argue there is a majority in Germany supporting the transition to green energy, accepting higher prices as a result.
I don't think that this is comparable. People who struggle with their electricity bills can not afford balcony solar. It has a ROI of a few years with a (low) but comparably large one time upfront cost.
With potatoes you only really pay with your time.
Yeah no. It would be if everyone had a steam turbine hooked up to their fireplace.
Co-generating boilers have been tried before. It used a Stirling engine rather than a turbine, for 1kWe output. Whisper Tech (of New Zealand) provided the Stirling engine technology, and had their own line of CHP for marine applications.
https://www.renewableenergyhub.co.uk/main/micro-combined-hea...
This comment is so laughably wrong, yet at the same time not funny.
Let's do some napkin math:
* For the whole package people report 200-300 Euro prices. Let's make it 300.
* To get to say 8GW of capacity you'd need 10 million of these units
* The price of that ends up being 3 billion
* With a capacity factor of 12.5% it will produce electricity like a 1GW source that is constantly producing at full capacity
Now let's take a look at the "economical" production at scale model.
* Hinkley Point C currently under construction with a 3.2 GW capacity
* Estimated costs right now in the 50 billion Euro ballpark or 15-20 billion per GW
This is at least 5x more expensive on construction costs alone. The opportunity cost in the lost 15 years of no return on investment during construction, running cost per year difference, cost differences when it's time to scrap both things in around five decades etc. is an exercise left to the reader.
tl;dr sorry but you literally have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm aware of such calculations and they are in disagreement with fundamental limitations of these technologies. Nuclear has EROI of 20-80, solar has something like 3 if you account for inverters and batteries.
The fact that they forgot how to build reactors (France got them at 1.5B per GW adjusted for 2011 prices) and that China burns more and more coal to maintain the solar bubble doesn't change much long term. I don't think the current situation around solar is sustainable.
I could be wrong of course but hopefully we'll live long enough to see the outcome. In the meanwhile I heavily bet on the nuclear being the future.
Solar EROI is not 3. To see that this cannot be the case:
* last year around 600GW of solar was deployed, or 0.6TW
* Imagine a 12.5% capacity factor (which is low)
* Imagine their capacity will degrade linearly to 80% over 20 years (I don't know if this is completely true but it's a rough approximation), thus their average output is 90%
* Imagine they will stop producing electricity after exactly 20 years (which is not true, they will continue to work unmaintained for decades)
They will thus produce total electricity of
.6 * .9 * .125 * 24 * 365 * 20
11826TWh
If their EROI was 3 it would mean it took 3942 TWh to produce them.
China used a total of 9852TWh of electricity in 2024.
I would strongly presume China did not use 40% of its electricity to produce solar panels.
> German regulations limit balcony solar systems to 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop.
That gotta be a big laptop!
Yeah, crazy.
I've got 6x 440W panels literally lying flat on the lawn. They produce at least enough (200W) to power all my computers, my Starlink, my fridge, and some LED lighting by about 2 hours after sunrise and until 2 hours before sunset, even if it is completely overcast and/or raining. When there isn't a cloud in the way they produce 2000W-2400W from 11 AM to 3 PM, usually enough (at this time of year, spring conditions) to fill my 6kWh battery by noon if I don't need to use it for heating (4kW output portable air conditioner, using 900W) in the morning, leaving the electricity free for cooling in the afternoon. Otherwise the battery fills in the afternoon. If I don't need heating at night then the battery powers everything from before sunset to after sunrise with typically 2-3 kWh left in the morning to make coffee and breakfast (I use about 1kWh in the kitchen per day) and run some heating until solar generation (and the direct sun heating) pick up.
The solar panels (JAM54D40-440/GB if anyone is interested) cost me the equivalent of US$390 plus tax for all six. The Pecron E3600LFP I use to control them (combined 3kWh battery, 2x 1200W MPPT controllers, 3600W inverter, AC charger) cost ~US$1500, and an extra 3kWh battery US$800. And $200 for 2x 30m 6mm^2 cables. That's it.
I just did this last month. Results so far indicate the panels will pay for themselves by March. I bought the battery unit primarily as a UPS because of the terrible electricity reliability where I'm living, and a $450 petrol generator to charge it in the event of the multi-day outages I get in big storms (most recently 40 hours in April). It was looking like having about an eight year payback period just via time-shifting night rate power to peak times, but adding the solar panels looks like reducing that to about three years.
I'm at 35.5º S.
Also a very big small fridge.
Better be safe for future AI GPUs
800 W. In a laptop. The heat output of a hot air gun or two.
Only if you have batteries in between because the sun isn’t shining 24/7 in Germany (and elsewhere). The costs for batteries are as nearly always out of the debate when news papers/portals are glorifying this German balcony subsidy scheme (costs for the public due to power feed-in which isn’t mentioned at all in this article). In the grist article the battery issue is mentioned only in one sentence. The power feed-in is from the perspective of the power grid operator company sometimes called as power backfeed secretly which needs extra infrastructure.
> > That gotta be a big laptop!
> Only if you have batteries in between because
Your laptop doesn't have a battery?
Decentralisation is the way to go for energy. Instead of having huge powerplants and fat power lines having a large percentage of the needed energy produced locally is ideal.
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
This is the next step to people realising that building the walls of buildings from PV panels makes sense.
And it can look good and match whitewashed or earthy buildings https://solarix-solar.com/en/solar-panels-on-the-facade
Has anyone done any studies on the co2 emission of manufacturing one panel like this? Curious how long it will take to offset.
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Wow that is pretty good, lines up pretty nicely with the approx monetary break even as well. Impressive!
Wonder if there is anything that can be done to lengthen the life of the panel as much as possible. I've read elsewhere that solar panels have a theoretical lifespan of 25 years with the panels slowly degrading and not failing all at once. I dont know if these specific panels are different but I wonder if the panels are kept clean or something if that would maximize the lifespan?
Degradation is more or less solved. Producers guarantee a maximum of .4 % power degradation per year for 25 or even 30 years. That may be offset buy rising energy costs alone. May be not if someone manages to producer cheaper batteries.
Right now owners of older rooftop photovoltaics in Germany swap functioning modules for newer ones with better efficiency.
Even if some small percentage of older modules fails it is probably not the fault of the cells but of connections in the module due to moisture. It is a system. In theory you can take the cells and build new modules. But that is too expensive compared to buying new modules.
> If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
Very important point that is often ignored.
Yes there are many studies that did life cycle assessment of them. This is a good source [1] that analyze about 400 of these life cycle assessments.
[1] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf
That is more than ten years old, efficiency of PV is much better today, which probably brings emissions down a bit.
Efficiency has improved somewhat, but also, the cost to manufacture PV is enormously lower than it was then, which means that it's using much less materials and energy to produce. Therefore the energy payback time should be much shorter.
How much shorter depends on the fraction of the energy cost in the first place then. Price is not even an upper bound for energy which is cheap in China, and also production is probably subsidised.
It wouldn't be an upper bound if energy were free, but it isn't. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e... lists China as US$0.08/kWh, but that's the residential price; industry pays a bit more. But it's a countrywide average.
Intensive investigations of Chinese "subsidies" from the US Department of Commerce have come up with embarrassingly little.
The current €0.100/Wp price level (12¢/Wp) combined with the US$0.08/kWh given above does give us an upper bound of 1500 hours of full sun for the energy payback time. At a Californian 29% capacity factor, that's 7 months of operation.
But in fact not 100% of the cost of the solar module is the cost of energy; there are some labor and raw materials costs as well, as well as capital costs and, astoundingly, some profit. So 3 months is probably a better estimate.
Process energy will still be a lot cheaper than .08 US$/kWh in China. I doubt they process glass with electric ovens. OTOH that is primary energy then, which kind of supports your argument. Still other emissions in the silicon supply chain that cause global warming are also relevant. If I find the time, I‘ll look for recent LCA.
I'm delighted to see Fraunhofer's report! I'll read it carefully.
You are probably right about the glass. Processing glass in electric furnaces has been a well-established technology for many generations, but it is more expensive than fossil-fuel-fired furnaces, and is used for making more expensive kinds of glass. But the glass in solar panels is an especially cheap kind of glass.
Coal is probably the cheapest form of energy. https://www.coal-price.com/ says that currently in China coal is on the order of US$100 per tonne. Coal has up to 33MJ/kg, so that works out to 0.3¢ per megajoule, or 1.1¢ per kilowatt hour, or more if the US$100/tonne coal isn't the best anthracite. You probably can't literally run a glassmaking furnace with a coal firebox, because of the contaminants from the coal, but you almost certainly can't run it on cheaper energy than that. If 100% of the cost of the solar panels were coal energy instead of electric, that would extend my upper bound out from 7 months to a bit over 4 years.
This seems to be in rough agreement with Fraunhofer's more informed estimate that you cite.
Found these slides from Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Energy payback time around one year (p. 8)
A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa...
Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).
Does importing a solar count against your countries co2 balance?
Maybe a most important benefit is it makes people MORE aware of their actual daily electricity consumption ...?
> [The solar panels are] connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home.
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
The microinverter gets the timing signal from the grid and certified microinverters kill the power if they lose mains power.
You are also only allowed to install a couple hundred watts yourself like this, anything above 800 Wp still requires a professional.
What is the real throughput of panels mounted vertically? I have put solar on my roof plus batteries and it reduced significantly my dependence on gas and cost of heating bills, but they're mounted on two sides so they see the sun from early-mid morning to mid afternoon, with peaks roughly mid day depending on season. I've always been skeptical about vertically mounted ones but people say they work, so not sure what to think.
You loose performance at noon/summer, when you are likely to produce over your demand anyway.
But during winter/rainy days, when you are limited to diffuse light, they deliver the same output.
The point is that panels are so dead cheap now, that efficiency of orientation is no longer an issue.
Approximately how much does a panel generate from diffuse light compared to direct sunlight?
I‘d say around 10%+.
Over a whole month, peak summer production here is 1.4MWh, winter is 0.14MWh.
Thanks. That's not great: I need more energy in winter...
I hope the US can have more of this. I never thought solar on most resi roofs made any sense. The cost is high, lots of risk from leaks but building a patio with a pergola or other shaded structure? Sign me up. The Us should be fighting to lower the red tape to get these kind of systems in place.
I wouldn't do this in my place. Having a balcony already makes your interior less bright and "closed". Blocking sunlight (even compared to semi-opaque balustrades) would make it worse, for a final energy gain that is quite small compared to central electricity production.
Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.
> Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany.
Genuinely interested what you mean by this - could you expand, please?
(It seems like the success of this scheme would mean that there is a meaningful group of people who are willing to take such an approach in Germany, whether it is characterised as libertarian or otherwise?)
This is cool. One annoying thing with much of San Francisco is that renting means you can't put things on the outside of the building usually (not a law just common lease language) but I have a little solar panel that I use to charge a phone that I can leave outside. This is wonderful. Power from the sun and no consumables!
A typical phone battery has a capacity of about 13.5 Wh. Assuming a converter efficiency of 90%, it takes 15 Wh (0.0015 kWh) to charge your phone from an outlet. Assuming an electricity cost of $0.39 per kWh in San Francisco, that's 0.58 cents ($0.0058) every time you charge your phone using the solar panel.
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings.
haha it's not the savings. It's the accessibility! This phone is out on a balcony by a herb garden. The big annoyance with electric devices is that they need to be connected to an outlet. PVs have saved this.
We have our blinds on PVs which is very convenient. No charging required and no wires required. Same thing applies here. The PVs allow battery recharge for places where power cables are inconvenient. The phone is a convenient tailscale device with a battery that can webcam!
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs”
That's a shame, and makes the whole thing feel performative, especially for a country that nixed nuclear.
Total energy need is not equal to total electricity need. And electricity is a lot more expensive then heating energy. So the cost savings can still be significant.
It's clear that hackernews is a DIY crowd and loves this idea. I'm pro letting people do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel good.
HOWEVER, I have to point out how incredibly silly this is. There is a reason why historically we have pooled our resources under the government to produce and manage energy infrastructure centrally.
Let's say these 500,000 individuals instead pooled their 1,000 euro (including installation & time) and funded one industrial-scale solar development.
You could generate a renewable 600MW+ (a 4X factor on what these randomly placed individual units will ever deliver in reality) for that money. And efficient centralized battery storage also becomes an option there.
Then your fellow citizens can spend time creating surplus value in the field they are actually experts in and also you don't have a 3rd world hellscape of outdated balcony solar units to look at out your window for the next 30 years.
There's a funny comment downthread that says "It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward."
Everyone replying disagrees, but I think it's a perfect analogy: just like the backyard furnaces, these small-scale installations are inefficient, provide a negligible portion of total energy needs (<1% of total energy needs if everyone in Germany did it, from TFA), look ugly and - this is the most important - provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
Actually, it is pretty common for homeowners to first install a balcony solar power plant and eventually "upgrading" to a full-scale solar power installation on the roof. The first is very easy and cheap to do and can be done on a weekend, the latter is costly, requires dealing with bureaucracy and partially-sleazy system sellers, and thus requires overcoming way more substantial hurdles, for which one must muster the motivation first.
Balcony solar power plants are sort of a gateway drug into actual, practical participation in the renewable energy sector. They are easy to install, cheap, have a clear and fast way to profitability, and provide significant gamification value (people who buy these kits tend to start with constantly monitoring their energy generation and usage in apps afterwards). That "ice breaker" effect should not be underestimated. It can pave the way to way more substantial actions (or to the acceptance of actions taken by others) that people wouldn't have considered otherwise simply due to inertia of the status quo.
> look ugly
That is YOUR taste. I consider most balconies with solar panels to look futuristic and cool. Garden houses with solar panels on the roof also look way cooler and more modern than without them.
> provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
You're wrong about this. There are a lot of people who still think solar power is only about environmental virtue-signalling and it can never compete with good old dinosaur juice. If everyone adopts balcony solar, it'll help convince these people they're wrong. At least the ones who are merely misinformed rather than dug into an ideology.
1% of Germany's power needs sound like an awful lot to me.
*energy
And yes, 1% of German energy is a ton of energy; but that is an incredibly optimistic forecast of if _every_ German did this. There are 85 million Germans; they could do a lot of things with their combined efforts. Backyard furnaces produced millions of tons of steel; seems like a very apt comparison.
I actually have solar of my own. It powered my entire life (off grid!) for years. That still doesn't mean I think individual small-scale solar is a meaningful solution to the climate crisis.
The biggest risk around climate, in my opinion, is the risk that people and governments think "we're doing something" when they are not. In this case, balcony solar has a very short payback time (a claimed 5 years for one guy's install! That is preposterously short for any investment!) because of the strange way that residential power is priced. If people really paid for the power and the grid infrastructure in relation to the real costs, balcony solar would never pay itself back, but essentially nobody understands that. Instead, they see the large amount they're saving and mentally that magnifies the impact of what they're doing. From the various posts I found, an ideal, un-shaded install produces between 200 and 500 kWh per year, depending on orientation and size. Obviously any sort of shading would drop that off a cliff. Compare that with the 38 MWh (38,000 kWh) per year of primary energy that the average German consumes...
In a way, it is a sort of modern indulgence.
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Here are some yearly numbers on the Chinese steel industry at that time as a whole: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/factbox-a-history-o...
Your total energy needs figure today is completely irrelevant. Half of the so called needs are just for entertainment. Now excuse me I have to step in my SUV and drive to lake Garda Italy for the weekend at 200 km/h.
As batteries and PV panels get cheaper, we'll see demand destruction from this sort of thing. It's going to be a bleeding wound on the grid.
The energy savings are great, but it makes buildings super ugly. Why not putting them on roofs?
Balconies are private, roofs ain't.
related recent discussion on YC about DIY solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476820
should have a (2024) label
Balcony solar is limited to 700-800 watt for safety reasons. There's also a lobby to get ppl to need an electrician for installation, which is bullshit. Rising energy prices (I paid minimum 50 bucks/Month) and sneaky corporate tactics (they give you 12 ct/kwh then after like half a year make it 60 ct/kwh) makes ppl want more price independence, which is understandable
It's only bullshit if you're certain that the electrical installation passes muster. I've seen many installations that are downright dangerous, mostly in older homes and cheap apartments. There's a reason for the 800W limit, that's a little over 3A and shouldn't cause any fires in even the flimsiest of wiring. But erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea when it comes to electrical safety.
Aren’t these the ones where you plug a live wire directly into the wall socket, with zero hardware to prevent surges or fires?
Not sure it’s a good idea really
I wonder if the solar panels could be tailored themselves to be a balcony, but with a rather distinct look. That would be a massive win.
I bet some people wouldn't install it now because it looks kinda meh.
Solar facades can be bought with your desired looks https://solarix-solar.com/en/solar-panels-on-the-facade
This looks such a beautiful idea. Lovely.
Such a stupid government policy. The panels would be far more efficient on the roof of the complex.
This is such a total failure of state capacity.
Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical?
It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of scale? Why are individuals having to take responsibility for their own energy generation? Are we doing our own sewer and water supplies next?
Why not approach the problem from all sides? There are big renewable projects in Germany as well, of course, but they take time to build, the grid needs to be adapted to handle them and there are many, many people/organizations who oppose all big installations that "block their view of nature" or whatever, so the big projects take even longer. By the way, this (nasty neighbours) would be a big issue for Balkonkraftwerke as well if they had not added them to a list of privileged things you are allowed to equip your house with (without permission process).
Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this?
Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity.
Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil (and it's fresh!). Same principle. Slightly higher yield.
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not.
In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation.
Batteries are even more egregious than solar, why install batteries .one. .at. .a. .time. behind switchboxes where they can only be used individually rather than a suburban installation that allows them to be used in aggregate?
I can only imagine how badly the numbers stack up somewhere suboptimal for solar like a German balcony. What if everyone instead gave their 1000 euros to a state organization that built a big solar farm that everyone shared? Oh wait - that's exactly how the state is meant to work!
The subsidy question is interesting, but in Germany these balcony panels are ~ €600 unsubsidized (depending on the exact kit; see my numbers elsewhere in this discussion) and still pay back in 5 years. The economics work with and/or without government help.
The fact the economics of DIY make sense, is the evidence of the market/state failure. (whether they really do make sense without fanciful efficiency calculations, I leave to you).
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
I think you need to make some better arguments to convince. Your argument only makes sense when wholesale cost of solar panels is significantly cheaper than retail. The better the economics of scale (i.e the smaller the difference between wholesale and retail) the more favourable "DYI" becomes, because the person had home does not need to cover the overheads that are necessary for large scale installations (financing, management, transmission, planning...). It's the same reason that hiring a vps to run all your compute is not necessarily cheaper than buying your own pc.
It makes sense for two reasons: firstly there's limited economies of scale in solar panels: they more or less make the same amount of energy per unit area and per dollar regardless of the size of the installation (rooftop is usually more expensive for installation but these systems have near zero installation cost). Secondly, because the generation is local you're not paying for any margin, co-ordination costs, or transmission costs. This secondary effect is already enough to offset the increased cost of rooftop installation in many cases.
(And maybe you can consider this a market failure, in that it doesn't fit some naïve idea of an efficient market, but you're always going to be paying for someone to make and take on the risk of the big, centralised version of things)
Installing balcony PV is kitsch, fun, or even convenient as well.
What does your vision of perfect solar power look like?
And within that vision, is a free person still able to decide for themselves if they want to buy a solar panel to hang on their balcony?
I think you're misunderstanding plantain's point.
Where I live, in Argentina, every house has a water tank on the roof, which is filled from the water main through a float valve, like a toilet tank. Many houses need a pump to drive the water up to the water tank because the water main has such low pressure. This is somewhat expensive, and the pumps, float valves, and water tanks fail sometimes, which is inconvenient. And the tank is not really that high up, so the water pressure at the faucet is not that high, and it's somewhat variable, which is inconvenient when it changes the temperature of the shower.
Some other places I've lived, such as various places in the US, instead have a large shared water tank for an entire neighborhood, town, or even city—a so-called "water tower". If you've been to the US, you may have seen these. Making this work involves several expenses:
- Larger-diameter water mains to reduce head loss when water demand is high.
- Highly responsive repair crews to respond rapidly to water main breaks, because the higher-pressure water with a high flow capacity can be very destructive.
- The construction and maintenance of the large water tower, which is very dangerous if done badly.
- A high-powered pump to get water up the water tower in the first place.
However, these expenses turn out to be significantly smaller per person than the expenses of small per-house water tanks and water pumps. And they provide better service. (Also, because people are stupid, in the US they build many of their houses out of wood, so they need fire hydrants, which require the larger water mains anyway.)
So, the fact that people in my neighborhood Argentina are spending more to get worse water service is a failure of coordination.
Of course, people in the US can still put water tanks in their houses if they want to. In earthquake areas, it's even recommended to have a store of potable water that isn't dependent on the water main. But, because they have succeeded in collectively building excellent municipal water systems, they generally don't need to.
The claim that plantain is making is that people actually choosing balcony solar panels is a symptom of a similar failure of coordination. To me that seems plausible but not necessarily correct, for reasons I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
You understood my point better than myself.
Thanks! I've been experiencing collective action failures acutely in recent years, so I'm glad my perspective was valuable.
People are entitled to do as they want, even if it's not profitable. I am just pointing out that if the economics of this add up, people have been seriously let down by their governments.
According to the article, the economics of balcony solar pay off in less than ~5 years. That's really pretty good compared to approximately any other point in the history of solar power. The payoff is small, but the investment is also small.
Now, sure: That quick payoff is only possible because electricity in Germany is very expensive, but there's reasons for that, too: Unlike some nations, Germany isn't sitting on a ton of high-quality fossil fuels.
They do have lots of lignite, and they do mine it and use it, but lignite is so low-energy that transportation becomes a serious financial burden: A train full of lignite can cost more to move around than it can produce, Joule per Joule. They've solved some of that problem by putting power plants right next to the mines (which is smart: build transmission lines instead of rail lines!), but their domestic fossil fuel resources are not a matter of policy. They're limited to whatever they have in the ground.
And for reasons that must make sense to someone, they've completely phased out their domestic nuclear power. (I'm not interested in discussing whether that's good or bad, but it remains fact.)
As far as I can tell, electrical production and distribution in Germany is comprised of a mixture of private entities (eg, companies with profit motive) and public (government-operated) entities -- similar to how it is where I am here in the States, and also where you are in Australia.
And quite clearly: The private entities are obviously interested in maximizing their potential profit. They are, after all, principally in the business of making money.
It's easy to say that it's a governmental failure that ultimately allows balcony solar to have such a quick return... but private enterprise is also involved, so they get to share the blame as well.
If it is profitable to do solar power at utility scale, in Germany, then: Why isn't more of it being done? If the answer is "just rent a few thousand hectares at a few hundred euros per year and cover it all with solar," then why does the private sector not cash in on all the easy money of utility-scale solar power?
Are you seriously asking why individuals are supposed to take responsibility for themselves?
That seem to be the conclusion when you start with the assumption "vertical scaling is always the best option". When you don't start with that assumption, maybe you reach a different conclusion.
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Germany is a pretty rich company. They can do both if they want to.
> Germany is a pretty rich company
You're way ahead of my predicted cyberpunk timeline.
lol, I of course meant country but just got a good laugh :)
The fact that balcony solar has such short payback periods really emphasizes the scale of the failure. Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Balcony solar is a whole lot like Uber, a way to side step onerous regulators, landlords that won't permit/invest in rooftop installations, planning approvals, transmission bottlenecks (eg. SuedLink [1] being forced to use underground cables) etc. The German government tolerates it because it keeps voters happy and helps reduce dependence on foreign gas.
At the end of the day though balcony solar is better than nothing, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
1. https://www.jacobs.com/projects/Germany-SuedLink
> Why can't utility scale operators use bulk purchases of the exact same panels, in a more optimal installation (south facing, unshaded etc) to achieve similar or better payback periods?
Utility scale operators added about 17 GW (peak) solar in 2024, so about 20x as much.
https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/
Exactly! Wind expansion has been going great as-well.
I guess the more fundamental question is why these expansions haven't led to savings for energy consumers and why the economics of these micro-systems are so attractive.
Wind expansion isn't that great actually.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
https://www.wind-energie.de/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/pu...
Looking at who's responsible for policy now, I don't see things improving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
It may be actually better (in the welfare-economics sense) to build the micro-scale setups because the economies of scale may actually be inverted by cheap solar panels. See my analysis in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051.
I don't think so. This is well studied. The LCOE of rooftop solar is terrible compared to utility. I can't imagine what it looks like for balcony.
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
That page, although it was written only four months ago, is citing LCOE figures from 02021, when mainstream solar panels cost €0.25 per peak watt. Now they cost €0.100 per peak watt—see https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Power electronics and batteries are also enormously cheaper now. Also, note that the LCOE numbers it cites are for the US, where most of the costs stem from the US government's anti-renewable-energy policies such as punitive tariffs, policies that are not in effect in Germany.
That page also undermines its credibility by citing the hypothesis that the low cost at the time (which it acknowledges was already down to 36% of the number in 02012) was because the "massive wave of imports" was "subsidized by China’s central bank"; if that were the case, you'd expect that once China owned the world's solar market, the prices would have gone back up to reflect the true costs of manufacturing the panels, so that China's central bank could stop hemorrhaging money in these subsidies. Instead, the prices have continued to drop. They've dropped as much in the four years since that report as they had in the nine years before it. And, if you read the Department of Commerce filings justifying the "anti-dumping" tariffs, you will find that the arguments being made about "subsidies" are transparently ridiculous; the supposed "subsidies" include the fact that Chinese panel manufacturers pay their workers less than Turkish electronic assembly workers, and the fact that they have good public infrastructure to use.
It also incorrectly claims that solar panels need to be replaced after 25–30 years (that's just the warranty period) and that doing so would add US$20–30/MWh to Lazard's US$36/MWh LCOE, which is an obviously an arithmetic error that's off by orders of magnitude.
But its central claim, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility-scale solar, is actually true. The reason for this is mostly that rooftop solar requires much more labor and enjoys poorer economies of scale. You have to pay someone to design custom racking for your particular roof and a custom inverter and battery storage system for your house, pay someone to climb up on your roof and possibly die, pay for permitting and inspection, etc. You can find a more detailed breakdown of "turnkey installed cost" in SEIA's Solar Market Insight Report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight....
However, all of these factors are completely the other way around for balcony power plants. You don't climb on the roof; you walk out onto the balcony. You don't design custom racking; you buy an off-the-shelf retail product. The same thing for battery storage, if you buy a system with battery backup. Instead of spending thousands of dollars, you just hang the solar panel off your balcony like a potted plant and plug the plug into the outlet. The engineering is being done at the factory for a mass-market product, not for your house or for a single utility-scale solar farm. So you're spending less in engineering and permitting and construction costs than a utility-scale solar farm would, not more.
There is one way in which balcony power plants are worse than rooftop solar: they are at terrible angles, so they don't get much sun. But that just means you get less power, maybe two or three times less than you'd get in an optimally-designed utility-scale plant. That matters much less now that solar modules are so cheap.
> Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale
Because there is always a good amount of loss in transmissions.
For solar, the best thing for grid and consumers is to have it very very close to consumption.
Ideally, a home with a good capacity battery, coupled with solar panels, and a smart grid connected controller that charges the batteries based on grid conditions of demand and supply, would be a great system. Costly, but good for the grid.
The transmission losses are trivial. 5-10% max. It makes no sense to isolate batteries behind meters. Sharing batteries on a neighborhood or suburban level would make far more sense. We are meant to be a society, not libertarians living in proximity.
That is so wrong, both your take about transmission losses and the expectations that there is enough land in a 'neighborhood' to do that.
Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
It is completely rational to install one of these. The paypack times are just a few years, depending on how sunny the balcony is.
Well not if you value the time you put into the project, that can easily double or triple the payback time.
It takes literally two hours to install and plug it in if you have two left hands like me.
Plus the time getting the material, driving to the hardware store another time to get something you forgot, doing the registration, plus the time needed for planning/ calculation of economical feasibility/ decision making. Even at a very moderate 50 € per hour rate (for the typical Gamer) the material cost is the smallest part of the project. Treat it as a hobby, but don’t tell me it is an investment.
You get everything you need shipped from Amazon. You open the box and install it. These things are designed to be set up by amateurs. It’s half a dozen screws per panel. To hardest part is lifting the panels outside the balcony.
As with many things, the hardware store is probably going to be rather expensive and transport is a hassle (most people do not have a car with enough space to transport solar panels). So you order this stuff from specialized companies who will deliver it to your doorstep in one more or less convenient shipment. Same for pretty much any bigger, more expensive things needed when building or extending a house. Hardware stores are convenient if you quickly need something but that's mostly it, IMO.
Founder, CEO, serial entrepreneurs, who have pivoted from micro-services to blockchain to ai bill their time out to themselves at $100,000 per hour. ROI - its all in the grindset.
I think you are exactly correct. As the state fails, it feels good to take some personal control.
Solar power is fundamentally different from traditional power plants because it's modular. Since the panel is the basic unit, a network of rooftop systems is as effective as a single large installation. A rooftop installation makes perfect sense.
Paying contractors to climb on rooftops one at a time and cable up a million distinct houses is clearly not comparable to an industrial installation. Similarly the generation from a balcony on a bad angle, and from walking around Germany, typically shaded, makes no sense.
You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
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).
For context, a hectare (10000 m²) directly facing the sun receives 10 megawatts of sunlight at 1kW/m². The city of Kiel is at 54°19' north, so at the equinox a hectare near it receives about cos(54°19') ≈ 58% of that: 5.8 megawatts. If you were to cover the whole field with horizontal solar panels with a mainstream 22% efficiency, the peak electrical power generated that day would be 1.28 megawatts. But you'd need 2.20 peak megawatts of solar modules to do it, because the modules are rated based on directly facing the sun and getting 1kW/m² of sunlight, which they could never do in this situation. According to the prices on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... those modules are currently 0.100€/Wp, so that's 280 kiloeuros of solar panels. This is about an order of magnitude more expensive than the land under them.
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.
>A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent
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.
>Acquiring land-use rights, permitting, environmental reviews, and zoning changes for an industrial power plant costs far more than the raw rent.
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?
This isn't a government failure. The government is correctly pricing the true cost of industrial land use: the loss of farmland and natural space.
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.
No, land is not a significant cost, not even in Germany. You're in completely the wrong order of magnitude.
You don’t want PV to crowd out local food production though, land is generally overused in Germany and the pressure is rising.
That could start happening if Germany's electrical energy consumption were to grow 100× or so, yeah. That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but no, cheaper forms of energy tend to lead to more energy usage, and solar energy is cheaper, so we might see a lot more energy usage. But we're talking about problems we'll have in 20 years after we've solved global warming.
It happens already. Lease for green land (probably wrong terminus) and arable land went up by more than 30% in ten years [1]. PV is arguably a very small factor of influence yet. But the pressure is real.
[1] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/landwirtschaft/landwirtschaftl...
That page doesn't say anything about PV. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... says that 17 million hectares are used for agriculture in Germany, 48000 hectares are used for golf courses, and (as of 02021) 32000 hectares were used for photovoltaics, which would be 0.2% of the agricultural area. I'm having a hard time finding current figures, but I doubt photovoltaics are more than 2% of the agricultural area yet. I don't think that's why land prices have risen 30%.
Thanks for looking up the numbers, and it wasn’t my intention to exaggerate the influence of PV. I just wanted to point out there is a lot of pressure and it may be a sensible policy to use up rooftops first instead of arable land (even though the influence of PV on land lease rates might be negligible today).
That will never happen in Germany.
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.
Obviously it won't happen anywhere from air conditioning. But, for example, atmospheric carbon capture (putting the CO₂ back in the ground) could use a lot of energy.
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.
Wise of you to be using 5-digit years. Really preempts the "but what about 8000 years from now" questions.
So by bringing up shading and suboptimal angle you're already admitting that for an unshaded balcony these things make sense? The overhead of hanging one of these over the rail of your balcony is pretty minimal, compared to industrial scale installations. There is plenty of overhead with finance, management, billing, land use, and utility profits. That's why it makes sense.
The cost of solar power is close to independent of scale, so the benefit of doing those industrial scale plants is often smaller than the one for repurposing some bit of underused land.
There's nothing absurd about it.
It's 10x more expensive. https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/solar-is-only-cheap...
From your source, it's "at least 4 times more expensive", while at the same time it doubts the correctness of the numbers on large-scale plants and thinks it's too low.
Besides, it's all numbers from 4 years ago, when people weren't all putting solar panels on their balconies. And the report about gains from scale mention things like the lack of tracking in small scale installations, that the large-scale ones haven't used for many years now. So propose that your numbers are all wrong.
This is exactly right. Germany has failed to provide low cost electricity at scale and has now incentivised placing panels everywhere, even on those beautiful balconies we once invested in. It is not surprising that you are being downvoted by the solar stasi.
'Industrial scale' projects are also happening and they are quite easy to find on Google Maps, for instance around Berlin there are some pretty big areas covered in solar panels:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6242449,14.2273341,7219m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6993717,14.2185555,3756m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6476471,13.6945097,2856m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.0173558,13.5345601,4387m/dat...
Or this one near Leipzig in a former lignite mining area:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1680221,12.4092084,4502m/dat...
(interestingly most of those seem to be located in former East Germany - probably because land ownership isn't fragmented as much as in former West Germany due to the forced farmland sequestration after WW2).
...and smaller solar fields exist nearly everywhere (even in the back of the woods where I was born: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.5463975,12.9038206,658m/data...)
E.g. why not build renewables at all possible scales?
It's mainly corruption, ignorance and incompetence. Germany has a strong fossil-lobby, because of industries and ancient home-tech. Around 15 Years ago, Germany had a strong solar-industry too, until the government basically buried it and sold it out to China, because of "failures" happening. Till today, there are forces trying to feed on nuclear-power and cheap Russian gas, while simultaneously sabotaging all renewables and electrification. It's so bad, they are willing to destroy whole industries for this BS.
That’s the thing about statistics - it is only somehow valid at some uncertain date. I know 3 not registered installations. One guy has big photovoltaic installation and installed balcony power plant to cover his special energy needs at sunrise. Another guy works from home and has two balcony power plants to cover his home office needs. Third guy didn’t like batshit crazy registration website and left the installation unregistered, but running.
This highlights a sad fact: renting is becoming the new long term standard for the younger generations. The buying market is out of reach to 95+% of the population, and so people resort to small hacks like this rather than install full solar sets. Meanwhile landowners and real estate funds are getting richer and laughing at them. Totally dystopian.
Very solarpunk
This would be very cute if it was some 3rd world island country grasping at the straws to improve their quality of life...doing this.
But you're fucking Germany bro....where's your massproduced precision reactors and turbines everywhere..the planet needs work...what the f.. are you guys even doing..a rising standard of living means 10-100x more energy you know that right?
This whole attitude feels like clapping for a new garden tomato in the middle of a famine... go put some fucking tractors on the field lol but like seriously though.
Standard of living has been decoupled from energy consumption for quite some time now in developed countries.
Complemetely untrue. The evidence is pretty clear. There's no such thing as a low energy country with a high standard of living.
If I were to pick the #1 thing that most European are literally ignorant about is exactly this fact. Data below:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$ui$chart$cursorMode=hand;;...
That’s why I specified „developed“. Economic growth in developed countries has been decoupled from energy use since the early aughts at least.
That's because they've been in an energy crisis for the last 50 years, so much advancement was by improvement of efficiency. Because of the dramatic cost reductions of photovoltaic modules, that energy crisis is over now.
No regard for aesthetics of buildings for pitiful power generation. The German state has completely failed to provide users with cheap electricity and it continues to miss-step with incentivising this nonsense. Shame on them.
Just 5.5 more million to go! And then another 65 million.
We’ve been seeing that exact sort of exponential rate from Chinese solar installations.
I wonder how useful those are just small panels hanging off the side of a balcony oriented poorly.
They also kinda look terrible :(
When it comes to urban design, I consider balcony solar panels to be less of a nuisance than cars on the streets.
Much better than a lot of "architecture", too.
The 450W panels are quite large these days (2m²). I don't mind their looks.
Redirected from https://cleantechnica.com/2024/12/21/germany-embraces-balkon..., which points to this.
(And a reminder that the guidelines ask "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter".)
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Feel free to elaborate on the connection between cargo cult and solar panels if there's some point you want to make with this
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there is nothing lol about it, if you commonly connect anything larger without additional precautions to it you end up in an endless number of safety hazards
and guess what if you do take extra steps you also can have larger solar systems
sure non of this steps are practical for rented out apartments, but quite viable for owned apartments and houses
I think they might be laughing at 800 watts to charge a laptop or small fridge. Most laptop chargers are a fraction of that. Full sized fridges might use slightly more power than that to spin up the compressor, but their steady state energy usage is generally less than that, and their average energy usage (including the time when the compressor is entirely off) is like a 20th of that.
I'm not sure what kind of laptop you're using, but most laptops I'm aware of use considerably less than 800W. :)
oh yes I missed the point,
I mean 60W chargers are common for a laptop.
800W is enough to run 2x console gaming setup (~200W console + <200W for Monitor+misc. which is normally more then enough).
Even for PC gaming where GPU power draw has gotten unhinged 800W you can get you a 5060 setup (~600W) + monitor working, or something like a framework desktop based gaming system (~400W) + monitor.
That quote also stuck out to me. It'd be more accurate to say a dozen laptops.
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Possibly one of the worst possible investment choices From a collective point of view when it comes to electricity.
One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
It costs the state nothing to remove regulations preventing the installations and people who buy one see ROI of 15-20%. It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
> It also helps the grid by moving production closer to consumption.
On the side of the grid, balcony solar means grid maintenance is supported by less revenue (your utility bill pays for the grid, balcony solar expenses don't).
On the side of the producer, it means manageable production means are only amortized when balcony solar isn't producing (this isn't a small factor in a grid where electricity costs frequently reach zero). That increases the cost of electricity when the sun doesn't shine. Another aspect of this is that
These factors mean that balcony solar would be unprofitable if power was metered depending on real whole-system costs (e.g. market prices and/or a subscription for the grid). That it is profitable for some actors now just means that the cost system isn't aligned with the billing system. This isn't bad per se (people prefer to have predictable, stable energy costs), but can't be sustained in a system where this imbalance can be arbitraged.
My bill includes a fixed cost part that is supposed to pay for grid maintenance iirc.
Out of curiosity, what share of the bill is it on average?
Can you explain why it is a bad investment? These 800W of solar pay for themselves within 3 years usually.
They pay for themeslves when compared to your bill prices. They absolutely don't pay for themselves when compared with actual market prices for electricity generation.
Your bill is priced that way so that you can have predictable price for what you consume. That means sometimes markets electricity at zero, but you'll pay the full contract price. Other times, electricity is _much_ more expensive than your contract, and, likewise, you'll pay a fixed price.
That fixed price is not competitive with balcony solar because it pays for services that balcony solar doesn't provide. That means that on average, your solar panels produce electricity when electricity is cheap for your utility provider, and when they don't, electricity is on average (but not always) more expensive.
The logical consequence of this is that your contract is going to become more expensive, because you use your solar when it would be profitable for your utility, and you draw from the grid when it's unprofitable to them.
Another alternative would be the end of fixed cost contracts, where balcony solar users would have to pay market price + subscription for their electricity. If that was the case, balcony solar users would probably spare cents during sunny weekends, and get hammered during winter workdays when there is no wind.
edit: just checked the data, in August, Germany's prices at noon hit 0€ 17 days. On the other hand, prices at 18h soared above 100€/MWh every single day, and above 150€ 10 days in the month. In Sepetember, prices at noon hit zero 14 days.
Another (wind-related this time) example, market electricity prices this weekend were negative most of the time (with a tiny 4€ peak) for 40h straight.
Perhaps as a consumer i don't want the risk of these fluctuating prices. See what happened in Texas…
That said, I do have 2kWh of battery for my balcony solar (it cost only a few hundred euros and prices are coming down even further), so I can spread the usage of the generated power over a longer timespan, not just during peak sunshine.
Of course, balcony solar is only for small installations. For home owners, you'll probably want something like 10+ kWp of solar panels and 10+ kWh of battery. Both of which are no longer very expensive(§). Once enough households have this, we only need those gas power stations for those rather rare periods where there is neither wind nor sun. We can also use EVs as batteries for the grid once V2G finally arrives (that's something the big utilities are stalling).
--
(§) See what CATL is doing: $40 per kWh in the near future: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
I am not blaming you as an agent in this system, trying to optimize your bill. You probably made the right choice for yourself.
What I'm saying is that the consequence of your action will be to rise the price electricity for those without a balcony (that includes industrial users), which is a very bad systemic outcome. This outcome should have been avoided by system-wide policymaking, not by a selfless act from you.
> that's something the big utilities are stalling
V2G is an extremely complex thing to set up in reality, you don't need a conspiracy to explain why it's not around the corner. Just like you don't need to involve big oil to explain why fusion power is likely not happening tomorrow.
What about cheap batteries?
Cheap anything is great.
Aside from that, that would probably require a complete change in the way Germany subsidizes its energy sector, and probably harm to some private companies that benefits from these private companies. I don't really see it happening soon, but who knows?
Is it even possible for a private person to pay market price instead of a fixed price?
Market price + VAT + a subscription paying for the grid and utility's benefits, yes.
I believe that already exists in Nordic countries, I had heard of it in Sweden ([1] says 10% of the population uses it) and Norway ([2] quotes 75% of the population).
[1]: https://swedenherald.com/article/so-you-should-think-about-e...
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
> One has to question how this choice came to make sense to the german public.
Easy: The most expensive energy prices in the world.
The infrastructure investments needed to handle renewables are massive and are effectively passed down the consumer, who to be fair is ideologically on board with this.
thus the downvotes on your post (predictably since Berlin timezone coming live) and this balcony thingy as a crumbs-off-the-table for the non-roof-havers
It's fitting that solar installations are also very popular in third world countries where the government can't provide reliable / affordable power to their citizens. Godspeed, Germany.
Cellphones are popular there too, does that make them a bad idea?
I'm in Germany and keep seeing these, I always wonder what a 400w poorly oriented panel getting like 3 hours of sun a day is good for. If they weren't basically free thanks to tax reduction and other tricks I assume no one would get them
Article cites manufacturers as saying that
> installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give savings of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill, but there are lots of variables that come with that claim. It depends on which direction the balcony faces and whether the panels are shaded part of the day.
My german electricity bill is around 1200 euros a year. Sign me up for a one-time purchase of 426€ to save ~360€ every year if I had optimal conditions -- call it 50% effective and it's still earned back in under 3 years. The thing lasts, what, a decade? More?
(Price taken from https://kleineskraftwerk.de/products/kleines-kraftwerk-gitte... for 450W, first one I could find from some review site.)
Edit: figure corrected for not using the tax rebate that it apparently advertised with
Yeah so depends on your cost per kWh, and usage time versus production time. My 800W of balcony panels can theoretically produce 3-4 kWh per day (they peak at about 550w of actual production), but they generally produce a lot less than that. This is because my usage during production time is both less than that and also very spiky (my power usage is often 0w or 100-200w base load, with 2kw spikes as the compressor in the refrigerator kicks on, or some other device kicks on). So the savings for me isn't 3 years payoff, it's probably more like 6. But yes, these panels will product for 25-30 years. So yeah, they can pay for themselves very quickly depending on your usage patterns.
I'm in the US, and over here we also have some other complicating factors (here we have 2 sets of breakers that are 180 degrees out of phase and so the solar panels can only feed into one half of the breakers without extra complications. I only sort of understand this, someone else can explain better), so solar panels plugged into the balcony that don't backfeed straight to the grid can only cover a subset of the usage. In Germany you have 240v power so I would assume you would hit payoff very quickly.
Have to also consider the opportunity cost of that upfront cash. Those numbers sound worth anyway, but the 5 year break-even mentioned in the article is more questionable, and that's with subsidies.
A 5-year breakeven for a durable good is a 20% annual return on investment, which is very good indeed.
There are very few subsidies. Some local ones, nothing else. Not calculating a vat tax is not a subsidy.
And they dont matter. This is strictly worth it in every scenario when energy production is not already solar.
(I'm too late and can't edit anymore, but I just noticed upon re-rereading that it says "couple of 300W panels" in the quote and not just "a 300W panel". My math (though done with a 450W panel for an example sales price) is likely off in the wrong direction. Sorry about that.)
"Poorly oriented panel" can equally well be described as "generates most of its power in the evening, when you have gotten home from work and want to use electricity".
It's better to get power at a useful time, even if that means the panel only generates half as much as it could, because storage costs far more than panels.
The tax-credit (there are no other "tricks") just shortens the pay-off time of 3-5 years by 19%, that's all!
A 400W half decently oriented panel (i.e. south facing balcony, 60 degree angle) is sufficient to run your AC to cool your 50sqrm apartment during summer for free.
In the summer the optimal angle where I live (35.5º S) is 12º. Panels lying flat on the lawn are losing only 2% from that. Just now, near the equinox, panels lying flat on the lawn lose around 18% at noon.
I'll find a way to prop them up at 50º for winter when the time comes for that (April or May), though that's for sunny conditions. In our typical overcast in winter flat on the ground is probably still fine to catch the most diffuse light. I'll experiment when the time comes.
Right. I mentioned the suboptimal 60 degrees because many people hang it from the balcony (90 degrees) and the tilt it a bit, but usually not too much. From what I've seen 60 degrees seems like a good average number.
Yeah, in northern Germany vertical and 60º are pretty much equally good/bad in winter (75º would be ideal), but 60º will be getting 70% more power in summer than vertical, and is near ideal in spring/autumn.
It's 800 watts or about 570 KWh per year in berlin, assuming balcony points directly south. At 0.2 euro, that's about 114 euros per year.
Percent-wise I'd guess it's less than 10% of yearly total?
Overall it's OK payback, but mostly penny pinching in grand scheme of things.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=48.886392,9.470215,6&s=5...
Solar is cheap, non-peak-efficiency installs get to be the priority once you get the first 40% or so of production in solar.
This kind of thing just knocks the edges off of production and transmission costs. You get to the point where you're not trying to squeeze peak efficiency any more and you're just trying to fill in spaces wherever works reasonably well.
That's mostly true, but you're mistaken about the reason they're basically free: it's because the costs of manufacturing them have been dropping dramatically for 20 years, thanks to (in large part Chinese) manufacturing innovations, not because of things like tax reduction.
Maybe these can pull 700 watts on a sunny day? And you’d need a battery to store it. Would likely make 50 cents a day or less in electricity, on perfect days. The cost for a battery, panels, and install would be ~1000 euro (or more if it’s a bureaucratic mess).
I just did some modelling with the help of claude (which can write 200LOC+ numpy code faster than I can)
300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.
I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.
But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.
Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
I built one in Utah which is the only part of the US where it's currently legal, so I can give you the numbers.
- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ each for $670 total
- 1x EcoFlow Stream Microinverter for $257.
- Various cables, MC4 crimping kit, etc.. about $150
Grand total was $1077, I set them in direct sun on my patio and have generated 6-8kWh per day. At Utah energy prices (0.12 where I live), they will pay off in about 4 years. Somewhere like California with 4x the energy prices as here, it would probably pay for itself in <1 year.
That's fantastic! What's the microinverter's peak capacity?
1.2kW, the same as the max allowed by the H.B. 340 bill they passed.
I see, thanks!
My 1kW southern facing setup produces a little less than three kWh a day, about 1000kWh a year. A have a battery too so I manage to use most of that energy myself.
16–20% yearly return on investment is a hell of a lot better than the stock market.
They don't use a battery; they just supplement your apartment so you use less grid.
I use a battery -- 6kWh, 3600W inverter, with 6x 440W panels -- and don't feed power into the house wiring, but simply power the appliances in the same room as the equipment: Starlink, Mac Mini with 32" monitor, 16" i9-13900HX laptop, half a dozen small SBCs (5-15W each), fridge, espresso machine, air fryer, microwave, toaster, kettle, 4kW (output, 900W electricity) portable air conditioner, dehumidifier (250W). some LED lighting.
At the moment (spring) in half-decent weather all the above stuff is 100% off-grid. I'm still using grid power for hot water heating, dish washer, clothes washer -- all of which I do for free in my daily "Free Hour of Power" -- and for intermittent incidentals such as the water pump (e.g. runs for 15 seconds when I flush the toilet) and lighting in usually non-occupied rooms such as toilet, bathroom, and bedroom -- which together means I'm paying around 10c-20c per day over and above the fixed daily charge.
Ensuring no one buys expensive thermal power when the grid is flooded with zero marginal costs renewables and near zero marginal cost storage.
Rephrasing that to be more understandable because I didn't get this as it was: "Making sure no one buys expensive electricity from coal or gas plants when the grid is full of cheap renewable energy and almost-free stored energy."
I'm frankly still not sure what you're trying to say even if I understand the sentence now, e.g.: what free storage?! Isn't germany's projected storage capacity by 2050 somewhere between negligible and tiny?
Storage isn’t free.
But when you have it the marginal cost of an extra cycle is very low.
Germany’s battery storage-related grid connection requests swell beyond 500 GW
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/01/germanys-battery-storage...
That's like saying the cost of taking an additional bite from your food is very low once you have already bought it, if I'm understanding the continued use of marginal correctly in context?
When I buy food, the marginal cost of a bite from the food is very close to the average cost of a bite, because if I eat 5% more food this week, I have to buy 5% more food next week.
Contrast this with the case of listening to music on my stereo: if I listen to 5% more music on the stereo, I don't have to buy 5% more music, and I don't have to replace the stereo 5% sooner. The marginal cost is near zero: just the small amount of electricity the stereo uses, plus a tiny amount of wear and tear. Maybe I only listen to music three hours a week and the stereo cost me $313 and lasts for 20 years, so the average cost per hour is $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.
Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller.
These storage systems are generally warrantied as 5000-10000 cycles with 85% capacity remaining in 20 years time.
Guaranteed money today is better than saving a few cycles to maybe make money in 20 years time. Now also factor in discounting the risk etc. and the calculation is given.
But the business case is of course calculated on having the entire construction cost be amortized with profit over a chosen period. With some days making more money than other.
What batteries do are extending the time renewables flood the grid with cheap electricity and thus force nuclear reactors to throttle down, gas peakers to shut down etc.
Or these thermal plants can bid negative ensuring they don’t have to turn off while hurrying on their own demise.
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason
But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
Yes. Phasing out coal is a multi step process.
The next step is coal plants forced to become peakers thermally cycling daily because they are loosing too much.
As seen in for example Australia:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
The next step is being a reserve plant only activated seasonally.
Finally rounding off with purely being a reserve plant and then decommissioning when it costs too much to even keep it runnable.
And instead they make you a bunch of money a bog standard autumn day because the French and Swedish nuclear power decided to crap out.
Another possibility is retrofitting the coal plant with a thermal battery.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
> 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant.
See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid):
https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-stor...
While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
But that's not a problem they're trying to solve, or one they need to solve.
As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine.
But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
No, their market is not dependent on it. Generation of power from stored thermal energy is significantly different from directly using solar: it is completely dispatchable. As such, it serves a role even in a situation where most solar energy (or most solar + wind) is used directly. It enables solar to be used in places, like at high latitudes, where it is otherwise strongly disadvantaged by seasonality (something batteries cannot fix).
Long term storage of this kind reduces the overall cost of providing steady solar/wind output in Europe by half.
They are also addressing markets where the need is for heat. If you are going to make heat from the solar energy, storing it as heat is much cheaper than storing it beforehand as electrical energy and then converting it to heat later.
Generally speaking, steam circuits have large thermal masses, resulting in ramp-up times measured in hours, so most thermal energy is nowhere close to "completely dispatchable". Completely dispatchable thermal power is internal combustion engines (diesel or Otto) and open-cycle gas turbines, and Standard Thermal is not targeting temperatures high enough to operate those machines. Adding Standard Thermal to a baseload coal plant will not make it dispatchable; you will still have a baseload plant, not a peaker. It just won't consume coal.
I agree that it would make solar usable in situations where it would not otherwise be usable, and high latitudes are a good candidate.
For reasons like these I do not think that they will result in a cost reduction.
Standard Thermal has been bending over backwards to store their heat at the high temperatures I mentioned, resulting in a lot of engineering challenges that a lower-temperature thermal store (say, 400° or below) wouldn't have to deal with. For the most part, process heat is lower in temperature than 400°, so I think that isn't their market either.
Batteries would handle the higher frequency components of the supply-demand mismatch curve, so steam sources wouldn't have to dispatch faster than on an hours timescale.
Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.
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