‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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Makes sense mathematically or you think makes sense?
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Shoot, my electric is like $.0625/KWH
But there is also another 75-100 bucks tacked on as fees. Tempting to go solar and disconnect from the grid. Even without selling energy back to the grid, I would break even. (Savings over 20 years ~200 bucks)
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These microinverters aren’t made of fairy dust. Doing this stuff at utility scale uses a lot less nasty minerals and chemicals.
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Until I read this comment I was 100% certain the post was about short Germans somehow preferring having their balconies occluded by taller-than-them solar panels.
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"100 million smokers can't be wrong!"
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1.5 10^6 Germans vs 1.5 10^-3 Germans
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That kind of depends on what you're building. Standard is currently 800W (2 standard solar panels). Older models use 600W, other models are using 2000W and limit it to 800W. That doesn't make much sense, but skirts our local regulations that limits them to 800W, but of course generates more energy.
It then also depends on where you live. Can you point it to the sun? Do you live in sunny Spain or in northern Norway? In Germany a 800W system can produce 800-1200kWh per year. Our average electricity price is at 0.35€, so you'll save 280€-420€ a year. And those systems are dirt cheap, there are deals out there where you can get one for 200€. That is quite a good ROI for something that you can install in an hour.
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In Germany, NL, you can just plug it into socket and it works somehow.
This is incredibly dangerous as it will feed power into the grid even when the grid is down. You might say 'that is great!', yeah, well, the line technicians who cannot work on damaged cables because you are energizing them think otherwise.
One of the reasons solar grid-feeding systems are expensive in the US is they have extra equipment to disconnect the system from the grid if it goes down. Your house can will still have local power, but you won't be energizing powerlines technicians are trying to fix.
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Yeah I get all that, but what if I need heating in the winter and have very low consumption in the summer? That is why I'm searching for real world numbers. If you give me some for a specific place then I can at least have a ballpark number if what I might get where I live.
OTOH as you say, they start to be so cheap it's almost impossible to go wrong...
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Smart planning! Thanks for the story, are you planning to go off grid or is it just to be economically free? Any batteries in the future? Excellent reference, and implementation, I'm giving you an 11 out of ten!
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Wait really? I didn't know we finally caught up with the neighbors!
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That won't really work as that is the worst scenario for solar. I can give you real world data from southern germany. I don't have balcony solar, but a 13,4kWp solar system on my roof. Here is the data from this year:
As you can see, days are getting longer in Feb, generation is going up. To get a rough estimate, take my data and divide it by 16,75. That won't give you a lot of heating, esp. with a normal space heater. Even if you had a scenario, where your 800W solar system would produce 800W in the winter, your space heater will suck 2000W. Take a look at its power cord, you'll see how much it uses.
So yeah, 800W is not much, but will cover your running appliances like your fridge, freezer, router or computer on sunny days.
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Storing something extremely dangerous extremely safely for "some hundreds of thousands of years" doesn't exactly sound cheap, does it?
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I obviously don't consider fossil fuels as an option. And I do doubt that it's cheaper to build a nuclear plant compared do building a coal or gas fired one.
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God, I love living in a nuclear plant evacuation zone
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Infrastructure should be public, with regulated access for wholesale and retail. It works. The grid operator needs to make money for large scale projects like interconnectors, modernising, maintenance and build.
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Hey thank you! I'm definitely saving this off for my future calculations!
You're totally correct about the rest, and I'm now able to roughly see if I should buy a 800 system or two, or theee... Electric hookups included in the calculation of course.
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These plugin systems shut down automatically when there's a power outage. To make sure that they really do shut down when needed, in Belgium only plugin systems that have been approved by the network management organisation may be used. The other countries that allow these probably have similar precautions.
