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Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

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Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#261

Post by alexey-salmin »

baq wrote: post #258
alexey-salmin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are forced to do it by high household electricity prices which are the direct result of the government policy failure. In my childhood everyone (like your parents, your neighbors, all the ordinary people) were growing potatoes. Highly decentralized and fully voluntary sustainable food production, sounds like a dream. This happened of course because the state-run economy created food shortages.

Nobody is forced. It makes economic sense, so people do it. It’s how the economy is supposed to work.

Exactly, like growing potatoes made economic sense to my parents' generation.

Economic sense is largely defined by the economic policy set by the government. No one puts balcony solar in France, somehow their economic sense is different.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#263

Post by blitzar »

adrianN wrote: post #177
slow_typist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not if you value the time you put into the project, that can easily double or triple the payback time.

It takes literally two hours to install and plug it in if you have two left hands like me.

Founder, CEO, serial entrepreneurs, who have pivoted from micro-services to blockchain to ai bill their time out to themselves at $100,000 per hour. ROI - its all in the grindset.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#264

Post by kragen »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #244

It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward. Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.

Around here I have a backyard washing machine, a backyard grill, a backyard clothesline, and my neighbors have backyard childcare, backyard parking, and a backyard motorcycle. And actually inside my house I have a flush toilet and an oven.

Your assertion seems to imply that if instead I had to wash and dry my laundry at a coin-operated laundromat, eat at a cafeteria table with all my neighbors, and piss in a portapotty down the street, and my neighbor's kids were taken away to live at a boarding school, while he had to ride the bus to work instead of driving, that would be evidence of successful policy!

We clearly have radically different definitions of success. Yours seems not to be well thought out.

The problem with backyard furnaces was that the steel they produced was not just expensive but also inferior. If you could plug in a Tabletop Minimill that produced ingots of specialty precision steel alloys to your order, ranging from maraging steel to tool steel to nitinol, and which was also cheap to operate, that would not be an economic policy failure. That would be an enormous success!

Your generalization that any kind of decentralization amounts to collective action failure is wrong. Some kinds of decentralization do; my household water pressure tank is decentralized because of collective action failure, for example, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487610. Others don't. We have to analyze the particulars of each case. I've written at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487051 a bit about the particulars of this case.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#265

Post by baq »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #244

It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward. Production of electricity like production of steel makes most economical sense at scale. When the economic policy fails so hard it has to resort to backyard anything you know where it's going.

Yeah no. It would be if everyone had a steam turbine hooked up to their fireplace.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#266

Post by ReptileMan »

melasadra wrote: post #19

Some people laugh at the 800W output. However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less. Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.

The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#268

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

kronicum2025 wrote: post #210
vineyardmike wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand this sentiment at all. They didn’t sacrifice their balcony, and this is electricity that the central utility organizations couldn’t generate. Many parts of the world don’t even allow this kind of solar panel to be used by individuals, so its legality is actually a policy success. Generally, balcony panels are hung off the side of the railing, so no space was lost. If this was blocking out windows o…

> I don’t understand this sentiment at all. They didn’t sacrifice their balcony, and this is electricity that the central utility organizations couldn’t generate. Many parts of the world don’t even allow this kind of solar panel to be used by individuals, so its legality is actually a policy success. Completely disagree. This is definitely electricity that central utility organizations could generate. A central metho…

You characterise massively distributed power generation as a single point of failure for each house? Even though they also have the grid?

I don't think you know what single point of failure means. This is the opposite of a single point of failure architecture.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#269

Post by piva00 »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #261
baq wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is forced. It makes economic sense, so people do it. It’s how the economy is supposed to work.

Exactly, like growing potatoes made economic sense to my parents' generation. Economic sense is largely defined by the economic policy set by the government. No one puts balcony solar in France, somehow their economic sense is different.

France has changed permitting laws to allow small-scale solar, i.e.: balcony solar, the difference is that the nominal output is much lower (350W vs 800W for Germany) which, by policy, makes it less attractive.

So it isn't that France economic policies have made installing balcony solar unattractive, it's the permitting policies which are blocking people from installing more.

You have it inverted, pun intended.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#270

Post by watwut »

ReptileMan wrote: post #266
melasadra wrote: post #19

Some people laugh at the 800W output. However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less. Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.

The real output is probably 200-250 W in perfect conditions. It just points to how insanely expensive German electricity is after they decided to commit the double suicide of ditching nuclear and Russian gas.

Russia gas is suicide. Especially considering that Russia plans war against the Europe and even already started act on those plans.
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