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.
Secondary question, is rooftop solar installation any different in danger than housing construction or other equivalent blue collar construction jobs that people will fill anyway?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About Russia - NATO membership: western media hold narrative “in 1990s Russia was close – in 2007 Putin declared independent way of using energy and army resources”, but I find this 2001 Bush reaction humiliating (reasons unknown, pure subjective observation) https://youtu.be/x7kkRkWbIzI?si=LBhci7V_qdWDBDT9
Putin says he saw some secret KGB documents about the whole east-west situation when he became a president, idk if that’s legit at all.
I can only add up to the topic that in 90s almost all oil/gas in Russia was exported by western companies, and only in 2002 all sources became formerly owned by russian companies and citizens. As for now 20% Rosneft still held by BP Russian Investments Limited.
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.
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.