‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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I grew up here, occasionally it was mentioned what we would do in an evacuation at school, it was never weird to me
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You’re spending too much time in theoryland. How do you over-provision for 10 feet of snow in a week of 0f/-10c? It’s not a hypothetical. Moving energy across long distances is absolutely critical to carbon-free energy.
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Thanks for the input, but I yet have to find a calculator that shows how much you generate per month and not only oer year!
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Thank you for your concern, I surre will not do anything crazy without knowing what I'm doing
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Hmm no,
- first oft all: noise. Wind turbines have moving parts, that attached to a building or even worse attached to a balcony creates noise in the whole building. Imagine the rattling of 5-6 ~10 year old, bad maintained, wind turbines.
- Second: the energy output is rather low. A 1,2KW turbine is about 1.2m/3.9feet big. That's in spherical, cause it has to be able to rotate by wind direction.
- Third: balconies are preferred to not have wind, but sun.
- And last but not least: blades. Every windturbine form factor has (fast) moving blades. If it's reachable someone is going to stick a finger in it.
If you're living more suburban and have a windy detached place to setup a small windturbine that's an option. On the garage or shed for example.
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will the sun powered line hop over to another one
This is why you need a new meter, at least that was the situation for us. If we didn't get a new meter, we would only be able to use one line, and the surplus would go to the grid.
They actually forgot to tell us that, so after some very confusing analyzing of what the fuck was wrong, I complained that the system didn't work, most of our generated power was sold, and then we had to pay to sort of buy it back!!
This was all down to the meter not being replaced for one that was meant for handling local production properly. We basically lost 3 months of production on that account. After we got the new meter, it worked perfectly, and production is as advertised, and I was very happy to see that production in winter was almost exactly as I'd calculated:
Although obviously you can't calculate the number of sunny days in advance.Something that surprised me, was that in the summer, production is still reasonably good even on days where the sky is completely overclouded, as long as the clouds are white, enough light penetrates so we can still achieve almost half the full capacity.
Another fun story IMO, is that we switched electricity supplier February last year, and they work with advance payments, and since we were new customers, we got a bill for 3 months of normal use. We just received the "bill" for 2nd quarter, with negative payment amount, because there is still money left from our advance payment!
AND that is without sales, which is a separate account, but is only about €15 per month on average. (for selling 7844 kWh for the year 2024) So about 2 cent per kWh on average.