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How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels (grist.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (17 children)

My brother, who lives in germany, has told me about this before and i love the idea so much. Its so simple to implement and has no downsides whatsoever. The person renting the appartment buys the solar panel and if they leave they can easily take it with them.

And yet, i can not for the life of me get my land lord convinced to allow me to do this too despite it needing no permanent changes to the apartment... Solar panels rules are too strict here too, and i love that germany just embraced them like its nothing

[–] azertyfun 0 points 2 months ago (7 children)

It's only fine because the panels do not do much of anything.

When large swaths of the population become even partially self-sufficient, it's an enormous issue for the electric grid. Again, not an issue over an occasional few hundred watts, but when whole neighborhoods cover their roofs in solar panels the following happens:

These (comparatively rich) people stop contributing to maintaining the grid. Half of electricity costs are distribution costs, so unless you have no net metering and a separate distribution line in your bill the rich are being subsidized by the poor to install solar capacity at home. Of course changing the billing system fixes that, but it also makes solar much less financially interesting and really pisses off people who already paid for solar and now won't be having a positive ROI for an additional decade.
The panels are not remotely operable so their aggregate power generation sometimes causes enormous stress on the rest of the grid, forcing old nuclear/gas/coal PP to spin up and down much more quickly and frequently than they were designed for.
Locally the voltage fluctuations may be very large. Nominal where I live is 230 V, but it's not unheard of for rich neighborhoods to be pushing 250 V on very sunny days. Then the inverters shut down automatically, but it's always whoever happens to have the most sensitive inverter who ends up not being paid on sunny days.

Anyways apartment solar is not really the issue here, it's the people with 10+ panels. But there are good reasons for solar to be heavily regulated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's plenty of fixed fees in German electricity bills, on top of that the Wh price contains infrastructure levies. As the network changes so will the mix between fixed and consumption-based prices.

That said yes the Green party and its core voting demographic are notoriously bourgeois. "Let them install heat pumps" they said, caressing the one they installed, completely ignoring that at scale district heating is much more sensible. Their non-bourgeois core voters (the ones with a permaculture garden in the countryside) will then defend that by "but we don't want centralisation" MFs municipality-level is not centralised.

[–] azertyfun 1 points 2 months ago

I was thinking of other countries where the billing system has only variable fees. Which used to work when you didn't have many people who are dependent on the grid but have a (almost) net zero power bill.

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