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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

#381

Post by pfdietz »

kragen wrote: post #172
pfdietz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not a problem they're trying to solve, or one they need to solve.

As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is n…

No, their market is not dependent on it. Generation of power from stored thermal energy is significantly different from directly using solar: it is completely dispatchable. As such, it serves a role even in a situation where most solar energy (or most solar + wind) is used directly. It enables solar to be used in places, like at high latitudes, where it is otherwise strongly disadvantaged by seasonality (something batteries cannot fix).

Long term storage of this kind reduces the overall cost of providing steady solar/wind output in Europe by half.

They are also addressing markets where the need is for heat. If you are going to make heat from the solar energy, storing it as heat is much cheaper than storing it beforehand as electrical energy and then converting it to heat later.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#382

Post by MagnumOpus »

Timon3 wrote: post #373
adrianN wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phase out of nuclear was agreed upon after Fukushima, long before Habeck had anything to say.

And just to be explicit, because I see people lie about this very often: this decision was made by the conservative party (CDU) while the Greens were not part of the government.

Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom).

When the conservatives got back into power a decade later, they started to roll back the nuclear exit. But during the panic after the Japan tsunami this policy became unpopular so the conservatives reversed course and stuck with the disastrous Green policy.

But make no mistake, if the Greens did not make it into government, the Atomausstieg would never have happened.

Subjects to read for details:

* “Atomkonsens” 2000 and “Novellierung des Atomgesetzes” 2002, Kabinett Schröder,

* “Laufzeitverlängerung deutscher Kernkraftwerke”, 2010, Kabinett Merkel II

* “13. Gesetz zur Änderung des Atomgesetzes“ 2011 post-Fukushima, taking back the 2010 extensions

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#383

Post by jansan »

MaKey wrote: post #348
walthamstow wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not German nor do I live there, but I would have thought the legacy of Habeck would be more negative due to his opposition to nuclear.

Germany's nuclear power plants were shut down by the governments before him. What do you think he should have done differently?

The plan to shut down nuclear power plants was done under the premise of a stable supply of Russian gas. This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock (at that time nuclear power was even classified as sustainable by the EU btw.), he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable. In my opinion this was the worst political decision of German politics since WW2, unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#384

Post by mft_ »

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.

Hard disagree here.

1) The biggest challenge to renewables seems to be not capacity, but storage: wind and solar can't be relied upon all of the time, and often provide peak power out of sync with peak demand. Within reason, hyper-local generation either removes the need for storage altogether (as generated electricity is immediately utilised by household appliances) or allows easy local storage to be added via a few KWh of battery in the basement.

2) Houses that can mostly power themselves also reduce demand on the electricity grid, assuming that large spikes can be avoided.

3) I like the future vision of all people and their dwellings being energy-independent, and this is the start of a path towards that.

4) Don't fall into the trap of only ever accepting an optimal solution. Local generation might be somewhat less efficient economically (although with private investment rather than governmental/corporate investment being used here, and with no apaprent shortages in solar panel supply, I'm not so sure about the comparison?) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't add some meaningful benefit, or that it shouldn't happen.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#385

Post by krior »

jansan wrote: post #377
adrianN wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phase out of nuclear was agreed upon after Fukushima, long before Habeck had anything to say.

It was agreed upon under completely different circumstances, namely a stable supply of Russian gas. I cannot believe that people do not get this into their head.

Sure, and the reactivation of old nuclear power stations would have been instant and cost nothing. Exactly what was needed in 2022. /s

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#386

Post by flohofwoe »

plantain wrote: post #55

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…

'Industrial scale' projects are also happening and they are quite easy to find on Google Maps, for instance around Berlin there are some pretty big areas covered in solar panels:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6242449,14.2273341,7219m/dat...

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6993717,14.2185555,3756m/dat...

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6476471,13.6945097,2856m/dat...

https://www.google.com/maps/@53.0173558,13.5345601,4387m/dat...

Or this one near Leipzig in a former lignite mining area:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1680221,12.4092084,4502m/dat...

(interestingly most of those seem to be located in former East Germany - probably because land ownership isn't fragmented as much as in former West Germany due to the forced farmland sequestration after WW2).

...and smaller solar fields exist nearly everywhere (even in the back of the woods where I was born: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.5463975,12.9038206,658m/data...)

E.g. why not build renewables at all possible scales?

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#387

Post by BoredPositron »

spongebobism wrote: post #355
BoredPositron wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a lot of historical revision if you blame a dude who was minister for 3.5 years about decisions made 20-30 years ago. Same for your last paragraph. Nothing even close to that happened in the years he governed. Maybe you should start showing recipes because it looks like your grievances are personal in nature and everything but factual.

More like 3.5 years, right? December 2021 through May 2025.

You are right. Corrected.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#388

Post by mft_ »

rmoriz wrote: post #31

Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially)…

> Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany.

Genuinely interested what you mean by this - could you expand, please?

(It seems like the success of this scheme would mean that there is a meaningful group of people who are willing to take such an approach in Germany, whether it is characterised as libertarian or otherwise?)

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#389

Post by detaro »

jansan wrote: post #377
adrianN wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phase out of nuclear was agreed upon after Fukushima, long before Habeck had anything to say.

It was agreed upon under completely different circumstances, namely a stable supply of Russian gas. I cannot believe that people do not get this into their head.

And after a decade of planning the shutdown, stopping contracts, deferring unneeded maintenance, ... you can't just say "actually, never mind, keep them running". The plant operators themselves said it wasn't really possible or only at extreme costs.

And the politicians loudly screaming about it are mostly from parties that are responsible for the "we'll have russian gas, it's fine" policy, and didn't use the decade+ of being in power beforehand to do anything about extending nuclear, but rather often also strongly insisted the shutdown had to be done. Right until the point they weren't in power anymore and they started to blame the Greens for the consequences of their own policies.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#390

Post by jansan »

krior wrote: post #385
jansan wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was agreed upon under completely different circumstances, namely a stable supply of Russian gas. I cannot believe that people do not get this into their head.

Sure, and the reactivation of old nuclear power stations would have been instant and cost nothing. Exactly what was needed in 2022. /s

Three nuclear reactors were still running in 2022, and shutting them down was not inevitable.
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