‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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You have Trump now. It'd be our turn to make jokes, if we had any humour.
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Have a look here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_power
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A mere drop in the bucket when 77m have decided on a much worse course of action in another country.
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The "balcony" bit isn't the defining characteristic, it shouldn't be taken literally. Some people do have their "balcony solar power" on their roofs.
What defines it is limitation to 800 W and inverters that come with a normal Euro Type F ("Schuko") plug and no legal requirement for professional installation. A layman can literally plug it in to an existing wall socket. Given that they are capped at 800 Watts, the inverters are also the simplest type and dirt cheap (although often they are literally just software-capped and identical to higher power ones, make of that what you will). Complete systems (2 panels, cabling, inverter) cost between 299€ and 800€ depending on quality. You genuinely only have to buy a fixture that suits your needs and a mate to help you install it.
Proper several-Kilowatt-systems are very expensive in Germany too.
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OK thanks, so they are indeed complete systems including inverter, so it can be connected to the grid.
I suppose they've made some cheap low power inverters then, but the power still needs to have stable voltage an frequency and synchronization. So I wonder how cheap it's possible to make?
I also suppose it still needs an authorized electrician to connect it? Unless Germany has some fancy system that is prepared for "plug in" connection of a local power source. -
For apartment buildings I don't think that's possible, since electricity is a per household connection with separate meter.
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Nuclear is reliable, predictable and stable 24/7 source. Solar not so much and possibly not that great for the environment if we don't figure out what to do with used solar panels. Also their production is not exactly clean. Whereas nuclear requires a wasted fuel storage somewhere and the fuel will eventually run out of radiation in some hundreds of thousands years.
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On second thought... yeah.
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In the EU, as long as it's under 800W it can be plugged directly into an outlet in your home without any kind of installation, back-feeding the grid that way.
You're not getting paid anything for the power you send back into the grid so anything you don't use you lose.
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It literally plugs into the wall.
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And does this have anything to do with generating power from solar panels on your own balcony?
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Those small balcony systems pay for them here in Germany at ~35 Cents/kWh in a few months. Even if your power bill is 7x cheaper, they will pay for themselves easily.
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That's amazing.
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Still very cool, because selling surplus power is almost completely worthless anyway. (at least it is here)
In the summer when you can sell, prices are generally extremely low, we have sold about twice what we use, but the value of selling is only about 5-10% on average, compared to the savings of using it ourselves. That's because the price often drop to close to zero in the middle of the day, and sometimes even below.
Electricity itself is dirt cheap, the reason the prices are high are transportation and taxes, and short peak prices. Here transportation alone is more than the electricity itself during winter.
And we are only paid the pure electricity price here, which I suppose is the case most places. -
Nah, making fun of germans is always ok, especially now that at least 1 in 5 voters are voting for literal Nazis again in Germany.
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Would be nice if grid tied inverters weren’t such a regulatory PITA. Micro-deployment solar, and more importantly distributed energy storage, makes so much sense and could solve a lot of grid-related problems.
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Wait that’s a thing?
Holy shit that a thing!? That’s awesome!!
