131–140 of 651 posts
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It takes active work to do that but not to manually approve zillions of individual installations?
The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.
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Yes, but until recently, Germany produced more electricity than China did.
You're not getting his point. Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that. Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator. Overall,…
This is such a total failure of state capacity. Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical? It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of sca…
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Germany is a pretty rich company. They can do both if they want to.
Has anyone done any studies on the co2 emission of manufacturing one panel like this? Curious how long it will take to offset.
Yes there are many studies that did life cycle assessment of them. This is a good source [1] that analyze about 400 of these life cycle assessments. [1] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf
AP News had a great article about this. We really need more states to adopt this beyond Utah. https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy...
> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation. so about 5yrs ROI And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidiz…
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Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this? Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity. Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil…
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not. In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation. Batteries are even more egregious than solar,…
And within that vision, is a free person still able to decide for themselves if they want to buy a solar panel to hang on their balcony?
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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 p…
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.
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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 fo…
Not much to disagree about generating energy at home though.
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Yes, but until recently, Germany produced more electricity than China did.
You're not getting his point. Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that. Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator. Overall,…
However, Germany does not have a space problem. Germany is 357'114km² with "photovoltaic electricity potential" of about 3.0kWh/kWp/day according to Solargis (see above link), which would be a capacity factor of 12.5%. I'm not quite sure how they calculate that, but multiplying by the country's area, the solar constant of 1000W/m², and a fudge factor of 0.8, it works out to something on the order of 30–40 terawatts, electric. That's roughly 50% to 100% more than the entire world's marketed energy consumption, which is about 18 terawatts, about a third of it electric. Germany produced 488.5 TWh in 02024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany) which is 55.73GW.
Therefore, roughly 0.2% of Germany's land area would suffice to produce all of its current electrical consumption with solar energy, about 700km². This would also require something like 450 gigawatts (peak) of solar panels, which would cost about €45 billion at today's prices, roughly 4 days of Germany's GDP.
It is absolutely true that, if you put those same solar panels in the Mojave Desert, mounted with single-axis trackers, they would produce two or three times as much power. (California's average utility-scale solar capacity factor was over 29% last I checked.) So, yes, solar is much more expensive in Germany. But if you check out https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you will see that, in March 02023, solar modules cost three times as much as they do now. So solar generation in California then cost what solar generation in Germany costs now. (Except that, because of Biden's anti-renewable-energy tariffs, actual California prices were and are much higher than you would expect from Solarserver.)
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While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
By definition, only the end customer pays VAT. But also on grid power in Germany. So no subsidy here.