‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
-
I am sorry, but your ideas about how these things work are ignoring a lot of issues.
First of all you have significant losses in the distribution grid. This is minimized the higher your voltage is, which is why longer range grids run on 110 kV and more. Then you have an intermediate level, typically 20 kV. Finally you get your local distribution with 220/230V. Also "current flowing the other way" does not exist in AC, because the "direction" changes 50x per second.
Then you only have a limited transportation capacity, so moving a lot of electricity from a central plant of course costs a lot of investment and maintenance. The idea that "Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free" is completely out of touch with the reality of the electrical grid.
But it gets worse. The more producers and consumers you have, the more you will need to balance fluctuations in production and consumption. This is why traditional grids were built around having a high baseload, with incentivizing high demand industries to connect, stabilizing demand. For renewables this is completely different, because renewabls will fluctuate. So the more energy you run through the centralized grid, the more short and medium term storages you will need to provide and the more investment and running costs you will have.
You mention this with there being too much production on the local grid and then in another place also needing to react to this. This is not a problem exclusive to local grids. It is a problem for any level of the grid with integrating renewables. Note how the article also mentions the limit of 800W without requiring a permit.
Finally in the long term we need to make the demand more flexible to production. So if the sun shines and the wind blows, household appliances should run, the fridge should cool a bit stronger, and the water heater heats up for the evening shower... Having a responsive demand with millions of agents can easily lead to overshooting, so that the demand spikes up far beyond supply, because every consumer reacts at the same time and it doesn't temper out.
This problem is much smaller, if every household can directly see their own production and consumption and already limit how much excess goes into, or is demanded.
So microgeneration is part of the solution and not a problem like you make it out to be.
-
Nuclear as clean? Now that's loco talk.
-
Wasn’t Solar City’s whole gambit ….
Yes there were and still are too many scammers. Sometimes I think that’s held the industry back even more than the price. If we had any consumer protections, it would blow up the installer industry.
That doesn’t change my point
-
I am a big grid fan too. The hope that HVDC ca,n mean longer time with solar on the grid, and more averaged wind power.
Smarter grid ties is definitely something that I would like to see as well, including battery usage.
The infrastructurea though isn't just a potential reduction in wattage needed to be supported in the last mile, but not needing infrastructure at all dedicated to a power plant. Again pro renewables, solar, wind, hydro. Wind and hydro benefit from scale quite a bit, and I don't think roof top solar alone will cover industrial power usage, so I expect we will have some grid scale plants, but in addition to microgeneration. -
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
-
-
-
Nobody else found it odd that these solar installations are just flying away?
-
In Germany those panels usually pay themselves after about 5 years depending on the price of the necessary electronics (don't forget the electricity meter!) and if there's also a battery.
-
Isn't wind energy better on balconies?
-
8-10 years is a fully fledged pv system. The small balcony panels pay themselves after about 5 years, longer if you add a battery.
-
Personally, a remnant of that. Being able to use standard lead acid batteries is a perk, but primarily I find that that voltage range of < 20-50>vdc in terms of equipment is in those 12v increments too. With the powedelivery (PD) extended power range (epr) going up to 48v right now, and the fixed voltages in that spec being multiples of 12 again matching the industry it is now.
With adjustable voltage supplies (AVS) it might matter less (because it can increment in 100mv instead of a couple fixed voltages) but I haven't messed with that yet myself
-
-
Might be most efficient when power is in higedt demands, in the morning and evenings when everyone is using power at home.
-
Russia went trans even earlier than that.
-
Sadly really small wind turbines are really ineffective and not worth the investment until you have a really windy balcony. If you only have a few square meters solar is the only choice.
But I'd still love to have a small windmill in my garden.
-
You don't need a smart meter for this, just plug and play. If seen offers for complete sets from as low as 250€ in supermarkets, so almost everyone can get one and start saving some power.
-
My North-East facing balcony doesn't get enough sun light. But it's an interesting idea.
-
Doubt it. Wind around buildings tends to be shit.
There's a reason they build turbines on hilltops and out at sea.
