> German regulations limit balcony solar systems to 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop. That gotta be a big laptop!
Better be safe for future AI GPUs
Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
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Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#72Some 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.
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What a ridiculous take. I have one of these systems and a 2kWh battery attached to it. It reduces my electricity bill by about half and will pay for itself in less than five years. I sacrifice nothing of my balcony, the panels hang outside.
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#73This is cool. One annoying thing with much of San Francisco is that renting means you can't put things on the outside of the building usually (not a law just common lease language) but I have a little solar panel that I use to charge a phone that I can leave outside. This is wonderful. Power from the sun and no consumables!
A typical phone battery has a capacity of about 13.5 Wh. Assuming a converter efficiency of 90%, it takes 15 Wh (0.0015 kWh) to charge your phone from an outlet. Assuming an electricity cost of $0.39 per kWh in San Francisco, that's 0.58 cents ($0.0058) every time you charge your phone using the solar panel.
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings.
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#74[deleted]
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#75Some 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.
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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 or reducing the enjoyment of apartments then I could understand, but this basically unlocks “free” solar panel real estate in apartments, without any real installation costs.
Meanwhile, decentralized power generation with all these liminal spaces is basically impossible for a utility company. Hundreds of dollars/euros is not trivial, but spread across years of usage, it’s a pretty affordable way to reduce power consumption, and it’s well within affordable range for the median German household. Plus it’s subsidized! This basically lowers the cost for the utility to create locally generated renewable power, reducing demand over the expensive to maintain public infrastructure.
Being able to plug a solar panel into a spare wall outlet and reduce your bill and grid power usage is so easy, anyone can do this. This isn’t allowed in most of the United States, for example, because central authorities banned it due to outdated safety rules. Many areas with this banned have far more sunlight than Germany (eg California), so far more incentive for the population to want it.
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#76This 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…
Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
It is completely rational to install one of these. The paypack times are just a few years, depending on how sunny the balcony is.
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#77[dead]
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#78Some 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.
To be sure, when talking about solar panels, 800W is the nominal/nameplate capacity. That's how much it generates when conditions are perfect and the sun is shining straight down on them. Most of the time an 800W installation will produce rather less than that. You'd need rather more panels (and/or some combination with batteries) to hit 900W output constantly. (on the other hand, do you need 900W constantly, or is t…
panels up to 2000W is legal, the 800w limit is actual net input, you can even battery in-between (or use it directly)
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is also 30 times larger in area than germany.
It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!
Inner Mongolia is so far from populated areas that China build 2000 km electric power lines, as long as a car drive from Munich to Sicily.
Re: Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
#80Some 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.
Is it discouraged so hard that you can't get it at all? I'd think it would be pretty hard to keep people from importing solar panels from Vietnam or Thailand—although of course you'd probably have to put it somewhere that surveillance drones could see it, if you want it to get any sun. (In that case, if you have a rooftop, maybe you could put it under a frosted-glass skylight.)
If anything, I'd expect the prices to be lower. Do you have a local Indonesian equivalent of eBay like we do here in Argentina? Or, just eBay?
I assume "electricity capacity of 900W" means that the wires from the transformer (and in the walls) are only rated for 4 amps at 230VAC. This means that you can't really run a 2000-watt air conditioner at all. Whereas, with an 800-watt solar panel charging a battery, you can run a 2000-watt air conditioner 40% of the time when the panel is in full sun. Washing machines and refrigerators are an even bigger difference, since they usually have huge peaks of current draw when they start up their motors, but relatively low average power. So the solar panels may actually be a much bigger boon than simply comparing 800 to 900 makes it sound like. A single car battery can typically source 6000 watts for brief periods of time.