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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

#501

Post by wongarsu »

p2detar wrote: post #459
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.

Well, I like the guy but compare the electricity prices in Germany to other European states, and also to China and the US. It’s about $0.15 kWh in the US vs $0.40 kWh in Germany. I personally think this is absolutely insane, but I don’t blame Habeck but the poor renewables transition execution in Germany. It is currently a failure in terms of electricity consumer prices. Edit: I just rechecked China and wow! $0.08 pe…

Even if power plants magically worked for free and all schemes for cross-financing renewables were cancelled, German electricity prices would still be $0.19/kWh (€0.16), using the numbers from [1]. The German electricity network is great and very reliable, but also very expensive

1: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#502

Post by testing22321 »

cjpearson wrote: post #283
jillesvangurp wrote: post #246

Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine. Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500. I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it sa…

A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.

I pay 13 cents a kWh here in Canada. I got a 7.8kw system on the roof, payback will be 6-7 years, then I get $1000 of free electricity a year for the life of the system.

I’m in a tight valley where it snows a ton

Also got an interest free loan from the gov to cover the outlay.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#503

Post by toomuchtodo »

pyrale wrote: post #499
cjpearson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.

Balcony solar is likely to make this worse, given Germany has low/zero electricity market prices when the sun shines. Balcony solar production means Germans don't buy solar from their utility when utility costs are low, and they do want to buy some when utility costs are high. Unsurprisingly, fixed contract prices are bound to be an average of electricity price at different times. With balcony solar, the times where…

Germany needs more battery storage, full stop. It is rapidly declining in cost, it is fast to deploy, and it will soak up excess low carbon energy (both domestic and imported from interconnectors) versus curtailment as more generation comes online.

> Germany’s solar industry calls for 100 GWh 2030 grid battery target

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-industry...

> German battery storage hits 22.1 GWh in [2025]H1

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r...

> PV curtailment jumps 97% in Germany in 2024

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/03/pv-curtailment-jumps-...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#504

Post by locallost »

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.

This comment is so laughably wrong, yet at the same time not funny.

Let's do some napkin math:

* For the whole package people report 200-300 Euro prices. Let's make it 300.

* To get to say 8GW of capacity you'd need 10 million of these units

* The price of that ends up being 3 billion

* With a capacity factor of 12.5% it will produce electricity like a 1GW source that is constantly producing at full capacity

Now let's take a look at the "economical" production at scale model.

* Hinkley Point C currently under construction with a 3.2 GW capacity

* Estimated costs right now in the 50 billion Euro ballpark or 15-20 billion per GW

This is at least 5x more expensive on construction costs alone. The opportunity cost in the lost 15 years of no return on investment during construction, running cost per year difference, cost differences when it's time to scrap both things in around five decades etc. is an exercise left to the reader.

tl;dr sorry but you literally have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#505

Post by forty »

LunaSea wrote: post #483
Archelaos wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran. Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear…

> Nuclear technology is a dead end. You should look at CO2 / kWh in Germany vs. France

You can also decide to look at countries which went 100% renewable and have even better CO2/kWh rating than France (Iceland, Norway, Albania for example).

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#506

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

forty wrote: post #493
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence. Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a s…

Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;)…

France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.

People barely use A/C in France by the way.

> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy

Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.

Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#507

Post by p2detar »

forty wrote: post #493
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence. Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a s…

Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;)…

Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]

If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.

0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#508

Post by V__ »

JamisonM wrote: post #450
V__ wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the worst political decision of German politics since WW2 Except the shutdown had no negative effect. There was no supply shock and prices keep trending down since (Though that of course doesn't mean because of). Let's keep it real. I can probably name worse German political decisions from this week.

"Except the shutdown had no negative effect." Three things here: * Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely? * Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG? * Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (…

* I would have dig deeper on that, but regarding the timeframe when the shutdown occurred, there wasn't a big effect on gas prices. That happened before due to the war with Ukraine and the reliance on Russian gas in general. [1] The idea once was to use cheap gas from Russia and at the same time build out renewables. The latter didn't happen, resulting in the mess Germany is right now.

* There were multiple tax reductions and I think some are in the talks now. Those were independent (and before) the nuclear shutdown.

* Probably. Nuclear should have been shutdown after gas, coal etc. I am with you on that. But the ship had already sailed long ago, before the last three plants were shut down.

[1] https://www.iwh-halle.de/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/...

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#509

Post by wongarsu »

ralfd wrote: post #247
numlock86 wrote: post #238

> Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels A more fitting title would be "Germany's citizens outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels". The current phrasing makes it sound like it's somehow a thing done by the government, which is not the case. If anything the government is one of the many forces slowing down this progress. And yes, I am aware of things like grid security and stability…

Nitpick: Not every house owner is a citizen though.

Most of them are installed by tenants. Who also aren't all citizens, so you aren't wrong there. Maybe "Germany's resident's" would be more accurate, but of course some small percentage will be installed by landlords who actually reside abroad. You will never get that title to be 100% accurate

Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels

#510

Post by okucu »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #271
jillesvangurp wrote: post #246

Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine. Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500. I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it sa…

Not a bad legacy for Robert Habeck (along with the wind reforms), the leader we needed but didn't deserve [1][2]. Interestingly he's recently dropped out of politics and taken a teaching role at UC Berkeley. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwVR5JF8Ok 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxnnVPO9GFU

How out of touch do you have to be with reality? 2+ years of recession and he was the leader we needed? He literally ruined us all
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