this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 20 hours ago by youradhere@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 58 minutes ago

i mean, it'll work. You should probably just collectively work together to install a solar array on the roof of the apartment instead, assuming it doesn't already have one.

Granted this is in the EU, so ideal solar tracking is kinda just, fucked. It matters more closer to the equator, because you can get significantly more power from pointing them correctly, and tracking, if you decide to use that.

[–] Jolteon@lemmy.zip 1 points 56 minutes ago

This is great for people who live in the middling latitudes.

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 11 points 6 hours ago

Read it as germans who are 1.5 meter tall, wondered why them being short is relevant.

[–] Zip2@feddit.uk 39 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

My dumb ass: “Is it just 1.5m Germans, or other heights too?”

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

1.5m Germans are 150cm people !

[–] amon@lemmy.world 15 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

M in million should always be capitalised for this reason.

1.5M Germans vs 1.5m Germans

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 23 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Megagermans vs milligermans

[–] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 1 points 55 minutes ago

Megagermans just sound evil.

And milligermans, well there's a vaccine against that I think.

[–] Siegfried@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago

1.5 10^6 Germans vs 1.5 10^-3 Germans

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

Until I read this comment I was 100% certain the post was about short Germans somehow preferring having their balconies occluded by taller-than-them solar panels.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 27 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (5 children)

Home solar indicates a massive management failure of public utilities. If it is more cost effective and more pleasant to generate your own electricity without any economies of scale, something is very wrong.

Source: I live in California where the “public” utility is an absolute disaster that charges $.60-$.70/kW/hr so anybody who can afford the upfront cost of solar has done so.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Microgeneration makes way more sense to me. If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should. The unfortunate piece is we have to many landlords who's interest are too divorced from their tenets to put up more microgeneration

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 38 minutes ago (1 children)

If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should.

Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn't necessarily hit on a given roof.

For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you'll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don't get anywhere close to that.

Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you're going to get better and more consistent yield.

[–] MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 1 points 4 minutes ago

welcome to the land of windmills

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 15 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

These microinverters aren’t made of fairy dust. Doing this stuff at utility scale uses a lot less nasty minerals and chemicals.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 55 minutes ago

a mix of both is good, there's arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it's own power plant, and when you're talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.

Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn't that significant at the end of the day.

Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that's part of the reason it's so popular.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Transformers, power lines, roads, trucks, and maintenance teams to move from large scale plants to houses also doesn't grow on trees, but if maintenance in remote places doesn't happen it can burn a lot of them.

Sometimes large scale plants make sense, but as the back up too microgeneration where the costs of infrastructure to move from unpopulated to populus areas make sense.

I am also a fan of less inverted power in microgeneration though. More and more of power usage is DC anyways. The need to convert to AC as much IMHO, but that is my far more radical take

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 39 minutes ago

microgeneration purely in DC only really makes sense in stuff like campers and RV's where you're going to be using primarily nearby, low power consumption devices.

AC is still better, plus modern switching technology while still fairly expensive, is considerably more efficient now. If you're doing AC you also get a number of other benefits, notably, literally every existing appliance and device uses and works with AC voltages, the entire standard around electricity and home wiring is based on AC mains, all of the accessible hardware is also produced for AC mains, not that you can't use it for something else, it's just not intended for that.

Certain appliances will use induction motors, and similar other tech (clocks for example, often use the frequency of the power grid to keep time) based directly on the AC sinewave. You could still run them on DC, it's just significantly sillier. Plus transmission efficiency is a BIG loss in DC (even now with modern solid state switching components, it's still just, not ideal), granted thats less of a problem on a micro grid scale, it's still a concern and potential restriction, nothing beats the simplicity and reliability of a simple wire wound iron core transformer. There are a handful of other technical benefits, and drawbacks as well, but fairly minor.

Having a dedicated DC supply side might be nice for a home environment, but the question is what do you standardize on? DC/DC voltage conversion is fairly efficient as it is already. Converting from AC/DC is incredibly easy and not particularly inefficient at lower power consumption, it's more of a problem with higher draw devices. But you can easily get around that by using a higher voltage to convert down from.

[–] Barsukis@sopuli.xyz 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Makes sense mathematically or you think makes sense?

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 58 minutes ago

Both.

The reduction of infrastructure and leveraging existing buildings without reducing their existing utility vs converting a new space to be a dedicated power plant plus the infrastructure to move power from less populus (normal case because the cost of populus land is high due to demand) to more populus space.

I also idealogically support it because it makes more controllable by people and less controlled by an outside entity (a corporation/state).

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago

Shoot, my electric is like $.0625/KWH

But there is also another 75-100 bucks tacked on as fees. Tempting to go solar and disconnect from the grid. Even without selling energy back to the grid, I would break even. (Savings over 20 years ~200 bucks)

[–] Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

God, I love living in a nuclear plant evacuation zone

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 38 minutes ago

it's not actually that bad, unless you live next to a gen 1, or maybe gen 2 plant. Unless you're next to one of like, three existing operational RBMK plants.

By the time you needed to evacuate from that area due to a nuclear disaster, you would be well informed, and probably gone already. Even if you didn't the radiation exposure is likely to be incredibly minimal. Probably under the regulated limits.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

The rent seekers making everything worse again

[–] Cataphract@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I live in an area where there is a monopoly of power supply by one of the worse polluters in American history, in a small area within a county there's an existing co-op power company that was basically grandfathered in because it's been in existence for so long while no other competitors are allowed in the area.

That co-op when I lived in the area was about half the cost of the monopoly company, a relative gets actually paid to be a member because they received their fathers account when he passed away and extra funds are distributed among all the members based on how long they've been with them (a little weird, but at least better than shareholders getting the profit).

You are absolutely right that the electric companies as a whole have failed, they've been allowed to amass too much influence and coverage while squashing any kind of competition. Why electrical needs aren't considered a national resource is mind baffling to me. Our country and citizens way of life would literally grind to a halt without it.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

Infrastructure should be public, with regulated access for wholesale and retail. It works. The grid operator needs to make money for large scale projects like interconnectors, modernising, maintenance and build.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 20 points 14 hours ago (7 children)

This is really nice! This is the future!

I'd love to know how much they produce, especially during the winter/monthly.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 34 minutes ago* (last edited 33 minutes ago)

not very much, especially during the winter, the best way to optimize panel production is by pointing it towards the sun most effectively, the farther north, or south, of the equator the less effective it is, the less directly it points towards the sun in general, the less power you make.

It might still produce a decent amount of power overall, through a reasonable period of time, but it's probably WELL below what you could be making with an optimized install, especially one with solar tracking, granted some solar power is still better than no solar power, so you do get tradeoffs at the end of the day.

as another commenter said, there are solar power calculators out there, if you're looking for rough figures, use them.

[–] Obelix@feddit.org 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

That kind of depends on what you're building. Standard is currently 800W (2 standard solar panels). Older models use 600W, other models are using 2000W and limit it to 800W. That doesn't make much sense, but skirts our local regulations that limits them to 800W, but of course generates more energy.

It then also depends on where you live. Can you point it to the sun? Do you live in sunny Spain or in northern Norway? In Germany a 800W system can produce 800-1200kWh per year. Our average electricity price is at 0.35€, so you'll save 280€-420€ a year. And those systems are dirt cheap, there are deals out there where you can get one for 200€. That is quite a good ROI for something that you can install in an hour.

If you want to know more, here is a calculator https://priwatt.de/service/ertragsrechner/

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I get all that, but what if I need heating in the winter and have very low consumption in the summer? That is why I'm searching for real world numbers. If you give me some for a specific place then I can at least have a ballpark number if what I might get where I live.

OTOH as you say, they start to be so cheap it's almost impossible to go wrong...

[–] Obelix@feddit.org 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That won't really work as that is the worst scenario for solar. I can give you real world data from southern germany. I don't have balcony solar, but a 13,4kWp solar system on my roof. Here is the data from this year:

As you can see, days are getting longer in Feb, generation is going up. To get a rough estimate, take my data and divide it by 16,75. That won't give you a lot of heating, esp. with a normal space heater. Even if you had a scenario, where your 800W solar system would produce 800W in the winter, your space heater will suck 2000W. Take a look at its power cord, you'll see how much it uses.

So yeah, 800W is not much, but will cover your running appliances like your fridge, freezer, router or computer on sunny days.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Hey thank you! I'm definitely saving this off for my future calculations!

You're totally correct about the rest, and I'm now able to roughly see if I should buy a 800 system or two, or theee... Electric hookups included in the calculation of course.

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