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 This isn’t allowed in most of the United States, for example, because central authorities banned it due to outdated safety rules.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.
