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 saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
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.
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 that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
The awesome part is you can circumvent the 800W. First you can legally install 2000W solar panels, making 800W output much more likely. The 800W is only how much you can feed back into the grid. Second you can install one or more batteries and feed devices from them, further increasing the usable energy.
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.
What do you mean by 'that price'? Are there heavy import tariffs or another artificial reason why you can't order from the same chinese manufacturers as germany does?
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
Most powerful draw is going to be on heating and cooling things which can also be done using gas. Is Indonesia using a lot of gas (or even wood) or they just not cooking?
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.
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household.
Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
The hybrid (heat-pump & heat-elements, both) water heater I installed 2 years ago has already paid for itself in savings. This design literally pulls the heat out of your conditioned space, providing both cooling and dehumidification (I live in a humid temperate rainforest so win-win). <3% of my annual electric usage goes to my water heater (typically 10%+).
During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
> 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 being a concern. I am not complaining.
Given that these things are usually hindered by the government's bureaucracy, maybe the best title would be "Germany's government removes obstacles preventing residents from outfitting..."
Electricity is so expensive in Germany, that these things pay for themselves in a couple of years - you are theoretically right, but as things are, these make financial sense.
Unless it is related to weapons or the project that will ultimately benefit big corps, project will not work out using central government policy. With revolving doors and sophisticated lobbing, at this point government seems just like different side of the same coin as big corp.
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
Great idea! Want to learn more on the safety though...
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
Anti‑islanding detects the power frequency and constantly tries to shift it. If the grid is on, its frequency won't budge, so the anti‑islanding doesn't trip. If the grid is off, the frequency shifts and it shuts off. A second one would just make it shut off faster.
Micro inverters pretty much all have automatic shutdowns in these situations. They can ‘boost’ the phase/voltage, but won’t replace it if it is missing.
That they shut off is important for a more obvious reason: The microinverters plug into a normal outlet. So the flow of power is invented to the normal situation, here the prongs of the plug are energized.
The body that writes the electrical regulations of course wanted a mandatory special plug and socket that had to be installed by a licensed electrician, which mostly makes balcony solar financially a non starter. Finally they relented after much discussion.
I was pricing out using bifacial panels for fencing. It seems like it would cost about twice the price of cedar, but last twice as long (50 years) and have less upkeep.
I started looking at that to boost my roof solar capacity. It looks like it’s permitted by code where I’m at and now the only thing I’m unsure about is vandalism since my property is against a busy street. Seems like a great idea though.
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.
Decentralisation is the way to go for energy. Instead of having huge powerplants and fat power lines having a large percentage of the needed energy produced locally is ideal.
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs,”
the article concludes that the most prominent effect of balcony panels is of psychological nature.
At best it pays out in 5 years. Our landlord, for example, requires the panel to be installed by certified professionals, hence it will take even longer to break even, even assuming the device will not malfunction during the time, which I am sceptical about, especially when talking about the cheapest sets from amazon/kaufland.
> [The solar panels are] connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home.
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
What is the real throughput of panels mounted vertically? I have put solar on my roof plus batteries and it reduced significantly my dependence on gas and cost of heating bills, but they're mounted on two sides so they see the sun from early-mid morning to mid afternoon, with peaks roughly mid day depending on season. I've always been skeptical about vertically mounted ones but people say they work, so not sure what to think.
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) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.
This 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!
I hope the US can have more of this. I never thought solar on most resi roofs made any sense. The cost is high, lots of risk from leaks but building a patio with a pergola or other shaded structure? Sign me up. The Us should be fighting to lower the red tape to get these kind of systems in place.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|5 months ago|reply
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 saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
[+] [-] melasadra|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|5 months ago|reply
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 that peak usage? A battery might be able to handle that.) That said, solar panels are probably a lot more efficient in Indonesia than they are in Germany. Since you're in/near the tropics, perhaps 1500-2000W nameplate capacity could cover your 900W? See if you can get a local expert do the maths for you.
[+] [-] jwr|5 months ago|reply
As a data point, 200-300W is enough to heat a 35m2 wooden house to 20°C with a heat pump, in Poland, so with external temperatures normally between -5°C and 15°C.
Your watts can go much farther than you think.
[+] [-] ManBeardPc|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 months ago|reply
I would have thought that the issue is purchasing power inequality between germany and indonesia, not that they're not available globally at a similar price
[+] [-] hedora|5 months ago|reply
If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)
I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
[+] [-] alias_neo|5 months ago|reply
Thinking about my home (in the UK) the "worst offenders" seem to be things that heat things, washing machine when it's heating water (~2.5kW), electric oven (~2-4kW), kettle (~1-2kW), electric heater (1-2kW).
Outside of those, we could have most other things on in the house and not be using much more than 1kW, though granted I've been very intentional with electrical efficiency with the electrical and electronic devices in our home (by UK standards).
[+] [-] hshdhdhehd|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ReptileMan|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] john61|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ProllyInfamous|5 months ago|reply
During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
[+] [-] numlock86|5 months ago|reply
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 being a concern. I am not complaining.
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] torginus|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MrGilbert|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zenmac|5 months ago|reply
Things can really only be DONE on the grass root local level.
Edit: actually even some of the weapons projects are not working out so well.
[+] [-] ralfd|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] paulmist|5 months ago|reply
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
[+] [-] WaitWaitWha|5 months ago|reply
> Once in place, people simply plug a micro-inverter into an available wall outlet.
later
>Gründinger and experts at the German Solar Industry Association noted that the devices don’t generate enough power to strain the grid, and their standardized design and safety features allow them to integrate into balconies smoothly and easily.
This seem to talk to the safety of the grid and the balcony. What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something? The wires remain energized despite proper distribution panel shut down. Do these setups have auto shut off if they see no other power on the plug they are on? what if it is the building, wouldn't other panels still energize the wires, so they would not shut down? Just asking, as my personal experience is quite hair raising and crispy when it comes to inappropriately de-energized circuits. ;)
[+] [-] geor9e|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] valenterry|5 months ago|reply
Yes. This is Germany we are talking here. I doubt any other country has higher (and more annoying) safety standards.
[+] [-] lazide|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mduerksen|5 months ago|reply
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netz-_und_Anlagenschutz
[+] [-] shellfishgene|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GaggiX|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] b3orn|5 months ago|reply
Well, I hope that any competent electrician will measure if there's still any voltage on the circuits after pulling the breakers.
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] syntaxing|5 months ago|reply
https://apnews.com/article/balcony-plug-solar-climate-energy...
[+] [-] bickfordb|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rcdemski|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alexey-salmin|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tecleandor|5 months ago|reply
That gotta be a big laptop!
[+] [-] Tepix|5 months ago|reply
Nowadays, having some solar and a battery is very affordable and means you don't need power from the grid perhaps 80% of the time. And with batteries soon getting a lot cheaper ( https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/catl-sodium-ion-battery-packs/ ) and photovoltaics continuing their price trajectory, soon most alternatives will be unattractive, in particular nuclear.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aitchnyu|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nebula8804|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] slow_typist|5 months ago|reply
The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)
OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
[+] [-] elashri|5 months ago|reply
[1] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf
[+] [-] ponco|5 months ago|reply
Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).
[+] [-] cmenge|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] asdefghyk|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tdiff|5 months ago|reply
> “Even if we attached panels to all suitable balconies across the country, we’d still only manage to meet 1 percent or less of our overall energy needs,”
the article concludes that the most prominent effect of balcony panels is of psychological nature.
At best it pays out in 5 years. Our landlord, for example, requires the panel to be installed by certified professionals, hence it will take even longer to break even, even assuming the device will not malfunction during the time, which I am sceptical about, especially when talking about the cheapest sets from amazon/kaufland.
[+] [-] vintagedave|5 months ago|reply
Is this safe, feeding electricity into the local cabling? I recall a discussion on HN a few days ago with someone running a parallel cabling setup and there was _strong_ criticism over electrical safety; that was an entirely parallel set of cabling.
How would this work re phase, load, how it balances re the mains input, if it goes through the fuse box, etc?
[+] [-] squarefoot|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rmoriz|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] infecto|5 months ago|reply