Comment by TZVdosOWs3kZHus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TZVdosOWs3kZHus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

TZVdosOWs3kZHus

> Germany is specially interesting. They have on the forefront of green revolution. I can't even remember the amount of think pieces hailing Germany as this amazing government lead push to green energy. Germany was held up as the global model over and over. The amount of times I have heard talk about German investment in solar is almost mind-blowing.

Unfortunately the last two cabinets (8 years) did a poor job in continuing a most promising change to more renewable energies. The business lobbying that took place at that time is unbearable.

This graphic[1] (in german, but you get the idea) shows the expansion figures for renewable energies and it is clearly visible how photovoltaics in particular have been severely limited since 2013. Absurd rules were created, for example a levy for privately generated photovoltaic electricity. Or artificially created requirements to keep plant sizes small.

After laws were changed in favour of large investors, fossil energy companies now adorn themselves with large projects, although a large part of the expansion is still done by private individuals.

After an entire industry has been destroyed, there are now complaints that there is a lack of skilled workers and that the number of new installations cannot be increased quickly enough. It all makes me want to puke. We could be somewhere completely different today, but greed and lust for power prevent us from doing anything good for the general public.

[1]: https://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/EE/Redaktion/DE/Bilder/G...

> Absurd rules were created, for example a levy for privately generated photovoltaic electricity.

This makes sense since you stress the grid requiring the grid operators to invest.

No, you misunderstand. This is a tax on electricity, unless consumed in the immediate vicinity.

It applies of you build the solar farm and the power line yourself. And did normal grid, in addition to grid fees.

Not really. It's how I thought it worked since that's how it works pretty much everywhere they have this same issue. You stress the grid by offloading your excess electricity to the grid. Now they have to dispose of it somehow and this costs money. The problem arises because lots of people are offloading their excess electricity at the exact same times so nobody needs it really. It's a victim of its own success haha.

1-1 net metering just isn’t a viable model. It sounds nice from the perspective of someone installing solar on their house, but it doesn’t make sense at a grid scale and it has meant that most home solar installations are just distributed power plants instead of being energy independent. The only thing that really makes fiscal sense for the utility provider is being paid/paying the current price for electricity at whatever time they send/receive power. Unfortunately for people with solar panels, this means getting paid less when selling and paying more when buying, as everyone else with solar panels is selling their excess electricity and buying electricity at the same times. Even with that price spread, it may make sense for power companies to charge a high connection fee or higher than retail rates for power to solar generating customers because they aren’t paying for the infrastructure they need when they are selling power like someone who buys all their power from the grid would.

I agree with this. In principle the solar panel owners are taking all the profits while socializing all the costs, which is good for them but it's not a fair system. Unfortunately by the time the lawmakers realized their "mistake", the solar panel owners had already gotten used to this system and as we all know... Nobody likes paying taxes/levies that reduce their income.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com