Balcony solar is taking off | Hacker News Reader

Balcony solar is taking off

theguardian.com

219 pointsmcp_228 comments

In Germany on a south-facing balcony, producing your own electricity from solar panels is cheaper than the transmission costs of the power company. Meaning that even if the power company somehow had a too-cheap-to-meter fusion power plant, getting that electricity to you is more expensive than you making your own solar power.

Part of this is that transmission costs are higher in Germany than e.g. in the US, partially because Germany has a much more robust system with far fewer outages. How to structure these costs will likely become a bigger topic as more people produce their own electricity but still expect the grid to be there when they need it.

This is sort of my problem with pushing at-home solar as a primary means to de-carbonize our electricity production. We still need grid access, but with more people not getting their electricity from the grid, the cost to maintain it gets shifted to those who still use it as their primary source of energy. And, well, it's not the poor who are installing kilowatts worth of solar capacity and battery storage on their property.

We _need_ grid access, for now. Batteries are getting so crazy cheap. LFP is hitting the market en masse, and right behind that is sodium ion to halve the price again.

And, at least where I am, grid _access_ isn't really the biggest cost, capacity is. My power company would love it if I hooked some batteries up to solar and used that during peak hours so they don't have to upgrade every transmission line between me and a bunch of coal in Idaho. In fact, I know this because they pay me to do *exactly that with time-of-use metering.

* I don't actually have any solar, but I do have an electric water heater and an electric car, which are both huge batteries, and easy to time shift the charging of.

If you get two EVs equivalent to average size American cars, that’s over 200 kwh of storage.

That’s equivalent to roughly 15 tesla powerwalls, and newer models can charge your (tiny) house battery as needed during power outages.

Having said that, community net metering makes way more sense in urban areas than per-building solar. The idea is that, by law, you can buy a small fraction of a neighborhood wide solar or wind farm (e.g. on a commercial parking lot, or a few blocks away, etc), and the power company offsets your power consumption bill with the electricity your fraction of the solar installation produced.

sodium ion tech is largely on hold because LFP got cheaper than expected and made it largely non-viable at current pieces. The expensive thing about batteries aren't the raw materials but manufacturing the cells, and those costs increase massively when you're trying to match kWh produced with a lower energy chemistry.

This is only the case in a few markets that still do 1:1 net metering. I still get charged a grid connection fee (which you’re charged even if you use zero electricity) and when I sell power back to the grid I only am credited the production value and not the full kWh rate. As a result anything I net back I still pay the cost of the transmission infrastructure.

I expect that could be mostly solved by changing the billing metric, pay for the ampacity of the hookup not the energy.

Fewer outages vs US source? I work in the power industry in the US and I am sure this is regionally true but highly doubt it as a blanket statement.

U.S. electricity customers averaged five and one-half hours of power interruptions in 2022

Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303

In 2023, German households experienced an average of 13.7 minutes of power outages.

Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-supply-13-7-minutes-of-po...

Not sure if the metrics are 100% comparable (they seem to be?) but points to a huge difference in reliability.

My alarm clock (old school radio alarm clock with big red digits) is plugged in and resets to 00:00 when there's no power. I would notice even the smallest outage this way (unless it happens exactly at midnight and lasts less than a minute).

That has happened maybe twice over the last 16 years. In both cases the outages were a few minutes at best. I live in Berlin; power outages are extremely rare here.

That 13.7 minutes is not for all house holds. In the rare case an outage happen, the very limited amount of households affected by that would experience that duration on average. And lets face it if something knocks out a major power line, which does happen, that single incident might take a few hours to resolve and would probably drag that average way up. Which means that I expect the median outage duration is probably a lot lower than the average; in the order of seconds or minutes at best.

"The number of interruptions per customer in 2023 was 0.34, which means that each customer is only affected by a disruption once every three years on average."

That sounds more like it. I generally only adjust the time on my alarm clock when daylight saving requires me to; twice a year.

Yes, super rare and short in Berlin. I'm originally from a rural area where overground high voltage lines between villages are common. There it's typically 1-2 hours of outage every 3-5 years or so. The local utility company has some truck-mounted generators to help out in smaller outages.

As an anectdotal data point, I live in Poland (Warsaw) and I can't remember the last time I had a power interruption at my home. I don't use UPSs at all, and my NAS gets years of uptime, unless I decide to reboot it.

This gets much worse if you live in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and I would guess that the German average is mostly driven by countryside, not big cities.

I had similar experience in the UK. Maybe 3-4 outages in the first nearly 30 years of my life. Moved to the states and even living in the outskirts of Seattle I used to get multiple outages in a year.

The funny thing is, every time people from not-the-states talk about how rare power outages are, americans feel this bizarre urge to defend their power companies and grids, coming up with incredibly contortions to explain why it's not even remotely possible to do power the same in the states as elsewhere in the world. One memorable conversation here on HN ended up with the poster, facing the fact that yes, even in countries with lower population density still manage to bury their power cables (because they were claiming people were too far apart), somehow decided that it was because the states didn't have the expertise or equipment for burying power cables. Apparently no one here has diggers, and things like sewage pipes and gas pipes just run over the surface.

When I lived in the Czech countryside, we used to have about one outage per year, and it was almost always a planned one, when the grid required maintenance or expansion/upgrade (new houses being built).

In the city, there is something like one outage per 4 years, usually due to an extreme thunderstorm or floods. And it usually lasts under 20 minutes.

Reliability of the grid is a major indicator of infrastructure quality and I am somewhat surprised by the fact that Americans tolerate so many outages and consider them somehow natural.

The typical German experience could be described as "every decades your street loses power for two hours at a time" (which comes out to about that average). As you say, it's worse in rural areas and better in urban areas, though maybe less extreme than in Poland. But power interruptions are typically short and highly localized. Nobody would even think of getting a generator in case the power goes out, and outside a server room nobody has an UPS

Anecdotally, everyone I know in the US who has a generator didn’t get it because of random power outages, but because of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and blizzards.

Since europe uses almost exclusively underground power lines there are rarely outages due to weather.

Don't those natural disasters get included one way or another into an outage calculation?

I suppose parts of the US have more exposure to those disasters than Germany btw.

At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.

But problem in recent years was the dead ash trees from emerald ash borer, they took a few years to fully die and weaken but now they just collapse into lines on a good wind gust.

Localities that have their own utilities never go down (Madison, NJ), my area is covered by Firstenergy that cheaps out and keeps only a skeleton crew in NJ, so when stuff like the poles snap at end of my driveway it takes 3-4 days to send crews from texas or ohio to replace it.

> At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.

I had no idea your basic infrastructure was so bad.

Why not demand buried cables? Trees can't fall on them, drunk drivers can't knock them down.

On the other hand, here in Europe I've never had any problems remotely so common and severe, not in any place I lived, even with overhead power lines, including the tiny remote (by local standards) Welsh hamlet: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AtGFM9C5xJ6GrMJz5?g_st=com.google.ma...

I'm not an American, but Australia has a comparable number of power outages. A big factor is cost, and population density is what causes cost to be a concern. The EU has a population density that's three times higher than the US; underground lines are three times more expensive than overhead.

Australia is of course ten times less dense than the US, comparable to Idaho, but we have a unique combination of moderately dense land in the east and south west plus shockingly sparse areas with little to no infrastructure at all.

This reminds me, I think the normal measures of population density aren't very helpful, but I'm not sure what to replace it with.

If Alaska seceded, almost nobody in the other states would feel the difference, but the population density would jump 15%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+-+...

(Or in reverse if Trump acquires Greenland — with no real change to people's experiences, the population density would go down 23%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+%2...)

Likewise Australia, the outback is about 70%-85%-ish of the country depending who I ask, with about 607k people in it, so if the Aboriginal Australians were to secede with it, the rest suddenly gets x3-x6 the population density with no actual change to their experiences.

I think what would be useful is a histogram of population densities, or for example a percentile based metric: population density covering 99/95% of population.

I'm thinking something like "From the average person's perspective, how many people are within 100m, 500m, 1km, 5km, 10km, and 50km?"

The questions that seem to matter, and for which population density is a proxy, are: how crowded does it feel, and how easy is it to get to the socioeconomic advantages of being near other people (infrastructure, commuting, shopping, community sports, faith buildings, pubs, etc.)?

Those sorts of natural disasters are happening over once a year in many metropolitan areas these days, including places where they used to be incredibly rare.

Ah, but a power outage is kind of fun. It is like a little bit of survivalism, but you know the power will be back fairly soon. There’s a whole ritual, fill the tub, get some candles, figure out how to keep the food cold.

Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days.

> Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days

well, actually… :-)

Germany doesn’t have hurricanes or wildfires. Take those out and I’d bet the grids are much more comparable.

PGE has to de-energize lines to prevent fires. Hurricanes just blow them down.

The links actually cover this, since EIA tracks major events in power disruptions and separates them in the graph. US network is still orders of magnitude worse than Germany.

How many hurricanes did Germany have in 2023? How many tornadoes did Germany have in 2023?

Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting

If I read the provided source correctly, if you exclude those events the average US customer still has two hours of power outages per year. That's a lot better than five, but still nearly an order of magnitude worse than 13 minutes.

Underground powerlines are the norm in Germany, hurricanes, tornadoes or not and their grid would still perform vastly better.

Atlanta, GA has underground power transmission through much of the city (and specifically my neighborhood within the city) and we can still lose power in storms. What isn’t underground currently is being moved there in much of the city. However, the transmission equipment is still outside and still has physical limits. There’s only so much water, so much wind, and so much lightning electrical systems can take without someone going dark. Underground trunks can also flood and short so they’re not a full panacea in areas that have heavy storms.

We’ve had a mild storm season the past two years and we’ve maybe been down seconds in total in my area.

While the average I’m sure is correct, the distribution is going to depend a lot on what is going on with nature. When I lived in California I lived in an LADWP area so I didn’t experience rolling blackouts. As a kid I had friends that would come over because they lived in an Edison area and play time in air conditioning at my house was much more enjoyable in August. If you were to find the average downtime during that period of time I expect it would saddle everyone with 10-15 minutes of outages even though my area never went down and my friends lost power for a few hours each week during heat waves.

I wish that was the case. Coincidentally, I live in Atlanta, also within the city (ITP, close to Piedmont Park) and all my neighborhood has above ground power transmission. Coming from Europe, it's infuriating. Not a year passes that we don't get two or three blackouts and a fair decent number of brownouts. That includes the past two years.

Any time the Santa Ana winds pick up in so cal they turn the power off to prevent fires now so yeah the US power infrastructure is shit compared to Germany. Over there it’s all underground because when they rebuilt after ww2 they realized it’s dumb to have it be so easy to blow up your power grid with bombs.

Putting it underground doesn't stop it being blown up with bombs.

Much harder to hit though, except with modern precision bombs if you happen to know where they are.

That said, I also doubt that bomb resistance was the main reason for underground power lines. The sentiment in Germany at the time was, and mostly still is today: "No more wars!"

I'm not sure it is much harder than hitting aerial wires, is it?

Presumably, you aim for the substations anyway, which I think are generally above ground no matter where the wires are ...

I think you vastly underestimate the quality of the electricity grid in Western Europe. Outages are very rare.

If you have any residential overhead distribution, that’s gonna drag you down compared to everything buried. It still counts as downtime of a tree did it.

If too many people go off-grid just enough to avoid paying their fair share, the costs get pushed onto those who can't generate their own power. Balancing that will be tricky.

I’ve been looking into doing this on my balcony in Spain. They sell “plug in” solar kits, but I’ve yet to determine if it’s actually legal here. I have a south facing balcony that’s about 1mx3m, so should be able to get about 400-600 watts of panels on the railing.

I actually came across this article in my research and it’s the only thing I’ve found saying it’s legal if it’s under 800w. From what I’m gather it’s just a few solar panels and an inverter that feeds electricity into a socket, more or less. My concern is what happens when there’s a power outage? I’d then be feeding power into a system that’s “denergized”. I know with real solar setups there’s an automatic cutoff when that happens to protect people working on the lines…all the kits i see here mention nothing about a cutoff system.

I live in Berlin, I have some friends that bought some panels just because they could. I'm considering myself even though I don't get a lot of sunlight on my balcony. I only pay about 60 euro per month. But these kits only cost a few hundred euros. So why not? If it saves me 10 euro per month or so, it would earn itself back in 3-4 years under ideal circumstances. It's not a huge saving obviously.

> My concern is what happens when there’s a power outage? I’d then be feeding power into a system that’s “denergized”.

This is Germany, they would have studied that topic thoroughly. In short, the certified inverter that you must use for this would indeed shut down in case of a power loss. This is usually called "anti-islanding protection" and not an optional feature for this.

In Berlin, you could get it for free through the SolarPLUS[1] subsidy program. My setup (2 panels, inverter and mounts) cost less than 500€ and was fully subsidized.

[1] https://www.ibb-business-team.de/en/solarplus/

Ask yourself why you are interested in an investment that has only meager returns if everything works out well? Is it worth your time thinking about +/- €10 per month? If that's the case, you could probably achieve it just by using a little less electricity.

This is very much a fire and forget thing. Install takes 2 hours and then generates electricity for years.

Electricity is rather cheap anyway. If you don't heat/cool water or the house with it, electricity cost in Germany is less than 100 EUR per month for a family of 4.

Interestingly, owning even a small PV setup like these "balcony solar" devices, and monitoring its output, causes many people to think more about their grid power consumption, and to reduce it or adapt their usage pattern to solar energy availability to some extent. There is something like gamification going on.

Or do both?

> But these kits only cost a few hundred euros. So why not? If it saves me 10 euro per month or so, it would earn itself back in 3-4 years under ideal circumstances

I'm not saying this is an unreasonable position, but the net present value of an investment that pays 10 euros a month for 4 years is also a couple of hundred euros. So in the end it might be a wash (or might not beat out investing in higher yield projects)

https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/present...

Regarding legality: According to Commission Regulation EU 2016/631 systems under 800W don't qualify as any of the regulated types of power generating facilities, so any law that would limit their installation must be local.

In practice you need to have a two-way meter installed by the power company and you're good to go.

My understanding is that the inverter you get in the kit that you plug into the wall will shut itself off if the power goes out, the same as most larger non off-grid solar systems.

Not only as a safety feature but as an inherent part of their design: they are designed to produce AC that's in sync with the grid. Same frequency and peaks/valleys as the same time. In a blackout there is no grid to follow, so the inverter shuts off.

It is also interesting to read up how this plays into black start plans for the european power grid. You would think solar parks make black starts ... "easy" - just turn them on and have some power, but due to the inverter functions, that's not the case.

Instead, one of the plans I've read about has to start a few black start capable power-plants first to get some kind of phase into the grid. Then you can bring consumers and solar parks online until there is enough load on the grid to bring up larger power plants, while the quick-reacting solar parks are taken online and offline to balance the grid so it never has too much or too little load on it.

There's a link to a pdf manual for what appears to be a fairly common one here: https://github.com/tbnobody/OpenDTU/discussions/855

The inverter is designed to stop feeding power if the grid drops off.

I've an EcoFlow plug & play inverter, and it automatically shuts off if the grid comes down. That's a requirement for all these devices.

Those are grid tie inverters, they cannot/will not output if no grid is present.

At additional cost, one could install a fully manual physical transfer switch which disconnects the PV panels entirely from the gridtie inverter and your apartment's breaker panel, and connects it instead to a charge controller and battery system. Such as one of the nominal 50Ah or 100Ah "48V" Chinese LiFePo4 batteries which come in 2U to 4U rackmount size.

It would be an either/or configuration if done as cheaply as possible such as for a balcony storage system, not capable of both usages simultaneously.

You would then need to have a separate distribution of power from the battery system to your loads. Such as something like a 1000W true sine wave inverter to power essentials like laptop, phone chargers, basic lighting etc during a full power outage.

The small inverters used in these balcony setups aren't setup to provide power without a grid reference.

Yes but they are saying you could - in a power outage - use just the panels, disconnecting them from the grid tie inverter and instead plugging them into a regular off grid charge-controller+battery+inverter setup.

That would cost a bit, but would let you use the same panels for emergency power

The inverter connects directly to the panel and has short DC leads.

Look at the "Component proximity" bit here:

https://robinsun.es/en/products/robinsun-performance-basic-b...

There's probably other setups, but I bet this is how most of the small, cheap ones work.

I’ve not installed these balcony kits, but I’d be surprised if they used microinverters..

Either way, there is no issue using the panels in the kit you linked to in the way described; they are separate panels with standard MC4 connectors. Just unplug the inverter and plug in the grid forming one.

If you look in the menu, I've linked the setup that doesn't include any mounting hardware for the panels, but it's exactly the stuff that's used in the balcony kits.

We've move some distance away from toggling your transfer switch over to the battery charger. Just rewire all the panels, or put in relays at all the DC connections, or...

Huh, for some reason I assumed the balcony kits would be… “dumber”.

Either way, I’ve installed many panels with exactly these little boxes clipped to the back of them, and there is nice clean DC power to pull directly off the panel if you like by just disconnecting the inverter

What I was saying is you completely disconnect the inverter from the panels. The panels become an island, with the positive and negative from the strings instead going through something like a basic DIN mount DC circuit breaker and into the input feed side of a battery charge controller.

I'd be interested to find out what sort of anti-islanding techniques they employ. Most inverters are relatively slow to detect grid failure, and if you pull the plug out quickly you might get a shock.

Maybe check the inverter specs or look for one explicitly listed as compliant with EU safety standards

The way power is shunted into the grid is very simple.The inverter you have senses the line voltage, and by keeping its voltage a tiny bit higher, "knows" that the power will flow out. nothing to sense and push against and it will idle likely doing an on and off test routine till if finds something to push against. Vs an off grid inverter that is stand alone, and self referential. There are hybrid off/on grid inverters, but they will quickly stop sending current, without a reference voltage, and drop back to battery/solar. As to legalities....,if there is no regulation adressing it, its legal, beurocracys hate that, but there it is. Its not like they wouldn't pin an (unlikely) accident on you either way, so..... and with no batteries, there is more risk in dropping the panel or another mechanical failure than anything electrical

> As to legalities....,if there is no regulation adressing it, its legal, beurocracys hate that, but there it is.

This is not law works. Either way there absolutely is regulation in minute detail about backfeeding power into your home, in any jurisdiction in EU or USA I’m aware of

I really wish we could remove the 100% tariffs on solar panels and EVs from China and let the free market do its thing. It feels like lobbying and red tape are the biggest things holding back the energy transition at this point.

Those are infuriating, whichever country is applying them. Either you're serious about making the transition happen or you're not.

We can’t do that. Those are subsidized. That’s completely unfair, unlike in the US, where you get a tax break for buying them.

In the USA, given that the vast majority of apartments don't have to pay energy bills, this means they don't have an economic incentive to upgrade appliances, provide adequate insulation during construction, or maintain air seals. My old apartment, constructed in 2002, had dual pane glass, but it had LONG lost its air seals (very cheap 15 year warranty windows). There is zero chance the apartment was going to upgrade the 4000 windows in their complex.

This loophole is a major source of energy waste, and there's not a great way around it unless apartments are forced to bundle bulk energy costs with rent, which has other undesirable side effects.

I've rented 3 different apartments in the US. I always had to pay electricity myself. The water was included as part of the rent.

That's what the previous comment is saying - the tenant is responsible for the electricity cost, but has no ability to make capital improvements/investments to increase efficiency. Meanwhile, the apartment owner has no incentive to make those same investments, because they aren't on the hook for the monthly energy costs. It's a mismatched set of incentives that results in cheaper, low efficiency apartment buildings and higher energy usage across the country.

In theory people should consider electricity cost when selecting where they live. Maybe there is an issue with getting that information. But I think this is the same with all renting, not just apartments.

In Germany (and I believe the entire EU?) we now have a "building energy passport" that summarizes information like this, broken down into simple numbers and rating scales. It has to be provided when selling or renting a place, and definitely influences behavior.

NYC buildings now have an "efficiency" rating they're required to post on the front of their building. Doesn't give you a $, but maybe a gist of what your energy bill might be like.

> In theory people should consider electricity cost when selecting where they live.

In theory, perhaps.

But how many people truly have the capability to choose where to live? Most are happy enough to find somewhere they could afford, let alone afford near enough to where they work, and they can't just go find new work to find better (more efficient, in this case) living conditions so easily.

Given the other answers I got shows that this is something that is done and people have found solutions too.

Many people look at multiple places when they are looking for a place to live.

Its unrealistic to think that for most people there is only a single possible place they can live.

So as soon as you have two places you are considering, having information about what future cost will be, will make you help prioritize one over the other.

Pretty sure OP meant apartment landlords/owners. I can see how you mistook it though, I had to read it a couple of times. Initially, you think individual apartments (i.e. renters) not apartments as in the owners/landlords of the apartments.

Just a datapoint, I had an apartment (2019) that had all utilities included (water, electric, no gas in the building). I wondered many times if they would be able to detect a bitcoin mining operation or if they would notice.

We had a guy who found a direct connection to the grid and it was noticed, reading the article the setup was in the 2-5kW range. How many goes unnoticed is another issue.

Back in the olden days of hot lights, grow houses could be detected by the large amount of electricity being used.

"Vast majority of apartments" seems to be referring to the building/complex owner, not individual renters. In other words, you pay the energy bill but you don't have a say in which efficiency upgrades are implemented.

>In the USA, given that the vast majority of apartments don't have to pay energy bills, this means they don't have an economic incentive to upgrade appliances, provide adequate insulation during construction, or maintain air seals.

I don't understand this argument.

Someone is paying the bill (the owner), and they are also paying for maintaining air seals and upgrading appliances (you don't bring your own). Why don't you think there are economic incentives?

In fact, I'd argue there are greater incentives to do this for the building owner: greater scale and more efficiencies.

I think OP might be saying apartment owners don’t pay the bills (because the apartment tenants do).

Then the argument makes sense.

That's the key, though. The owner is not the one paying the bill most of the time, it's the tenant.

If the windows leak heat like a sieve, a cheap landlord won't care, because they have no incentive to lower energy costs.

In principle, there is an incentive - renters should be picking apartment buildings which are more energy efficient. So buildings should be competing on this metric. But, in practice, renters have no reasonable way of knowing which buildings are more efficient. And buildings will not volunteer this information.

You could mandate buildings get an energy efficiency assessment. But I imagine that will go the way of carbon credits contracts and such - mostly lies.

Apartments in the EU and UK are required to have EPC Energy Performance Certificate.

By January 2030, all residential buildings in the EU must meet at least an E energy efficiency rating, and by January 2033, this will rise to a D rating or better. By 2040, all buildings must achieve an A or B rating.

Energy efficiency happens when an apartment is built or remodeled. The right way to improve it is regulations mandating things like minimum insulation.

I wouldn't say that an energy efficiency assessment hurts, but it's also limited in what it can do to improve the situation. An apartment built with 0 insulation and natural gas heating just isn't going to be environmentally friendly without completely bulldozing the complex.

Transparency is good, but I think most renters really just won't care.

Many car owners certainly care about gas mileage. It might not be the most important factor but there is some consideration for it. Similarly, renters could care if informed. But cars and apartments are very different products, and you can get somewhat reasonably cheap+accurate estimates of the efficiency of one but not the other. So the whole point is moot.

Cars will last for 10->15 years roughly before getting switch out. Apartments hang around for anywhere from 100 to 1000 years.

The cost of retrofitting energy efficiency is massive compared to the cost of building an apartment with energy efficiency in mind in the first place. That's why striking on new builds is so important.

For vehicles, bad gas milage sucks and it should be regulated to keep it down. However, we are talking about products with somewhat short lifecycles destine to be melted down and turned into a new car in the next 20 years.

The median car in service in the USA is 13 years old, so I think your mental model of car lifetime is pretty outdated. For cars made today you should figure 22-25 years.

This says 16->18 [1]

Where are you getting 22+?

Definitely an update to my mental model though.

[1] https://autorecyclingworld.com/what-is-the-lifespan-of-a-veh...

See recent paper, noting the trend and that the rightmost point of the trend is already 8 years ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1/figures/4

Very interesting. I wonder why there's an apparent discrepancy between UK and US life expectancy. The UK has more stop and go traffic, I'd have thought that'd be harder on vehicles.

What may be useful is clear law that makes it mandatory to share energy usage over past 3 years or so and the associated costs.

Mandate apartments report typical (median or mean) energy costs. No assessment necessary.

You can often get average monthly billing from the utility company on request.

My experience is that apartment units tend to have low utility rates anyhow, particularly in larger buildings where only 1 or 2 of 6 surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling) will have any outside exposure.

If you're not too particular about temperature, it's often possible to "coast" based on the heating/cooling of your neighbours rather than heating or cooling your own space. Temperate climates such as California further reduce need for interior climate control, though construction is also correspondingly less well weather-proofed (insulated, wrapped, weather-stripped) than in colder, hotter, or more humid climates.

The provider (landlord) and payer (tenant) being two distinct entities is part of the problem, but the other part is that the landlord actively hides that sort of information. If you ask how much water costs, they'll likely not answer, might throw out some fuzzy idea of it being normal, perhaps give you the rate per gallon, and definitely not tell you about the actively leaking pipe whose costs the tenants have to share or about the outdated appliances using 3x too much water. You don't learn about that till you're trapped in a lease, and the amount they're scamming you isn't usually worth the activation energy of taking legal action or moving.

My washer/dryer had to be replaced, and I was able to convince my landlord to split the additional cost of a heat-pump dryer. (The QoL improvement is great since there's no vent in the unit, though it's unclear if my energy bills are actually lower).

But he's just a single-unit condo landlord, and I'm a pretty good tenant, so we have a good relationship. I can't imagine a multi-unit corporation doing this.

So what it is just entirely free electricity? Someone must be paying for it somehow otherwise every apartment would be a bitcoin mine by now.

The tenant pays for the utilities. Because the apartment complex is not paying for they they have no incentive to install energy efficiency upgrades and will instead install only the cheapest hardware they can buy.

Wouldn't the property owner have an incentive?

Because they're not paying for it, the tenant is.

Building more would likely help somewhat. If supply and demand are matched up, supply has to compete.

It’s rarely obvious to tenants that their only exterior wall is extremely inefficient.

20-30$/month very quickly pays for a new sliding glass door, but it’s hardly going to get people to swap apartments.

I guess I'm not sure what your point is. Are you worried that building more and having apartment landlords competing for tenants will work out poorly?

I wouldn't really expect people to be switching apartments to save $30 a month, but I would sort of expect them to give some preference to the more comfortable apartment that bragged about their reduced energy costs when they were otherwise switching.

My point is more housing stock alone would solve many issues, just not this one. It’s the same reason sound insulation which most people care about isn’t directly measured when renting or buying an apartment, you just don’t know upfront.

Now if there was a lot of housing stock, and apartments were forced to include expected utility bills / apartment to apartment sound transmission level that would help.

I've never heard of tenants not paying electric in the US. Water maybe but never electric.

Apartment (complexes) don't have to pay energy bills. Tenants do so there's no incentive for apartment owners to pay for energy efficiency.

> In the USA, given that the vast majority of apartments don't have to pay energy bills,

This is false.

The reading comprehension in response to this comment is atrocious. It's apartment complex /owners/ who aren't paying energy bills because their tenants are.

In American English "apartment" almost always refers to a single residence in a large building. The large building is often called an "apartment building."

The phrase "the vast majority of apartments don't have to pay energy bills" sounds like a claim that each apartment (i.e. each tenant) doesn't have to pay their own energy bills, because it would be very odd to refer to an entire apartment building (or the building owner/manager) as as "apartment."

It's poorly worded, which is causing a lot of confusion.

The full comment does provide context clues to the author's intent, but it was somewhat poorly worded (i.e., "vast majority of apartments" is easily taken to mean individual units/their tenants, and not the property in the aggregate.)

There is no such thing as "energy waste". You just use abundance of energy. It is like throwing money at a problem. If energy is available limitless, why would you care? Lucky americans. Poor germans.

Energy waste here is simply economic inefficiency.

Drive the cost of production low enough and uninsulated structures aren’t wasteful, but we aren’t there yet.

> they are so popular the term Balkonkraftwerk (balcony power plant) has been coined

i woud argue that it is not how German works, word coining is not a metric of its popularity

It's like saying that the fact that the word "balcony power plant" exists is a sign of how popular it is in the English speaking world. Except that German compound words are seen as more legitimate because they lack the spaces and sound German.

Thanks! You wrote it much better than I did!

Quite the opposite. Balkonkraftwerk sounds immediately clear and convincing.

German Wikipedia has an article about it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkonkraftwerk

Nah, any German word with Kraft in it, is a strong sign of it's popularity ;-)

Balkonkraftwerk sounds powerful. Not like Aufhängesolarpaneel, or Steckersolargerät.

Kraftwerk even!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk

>With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority.

In Australia, there is no chance you'd get away with this since basically every strata bylaw document bans non typical balcony furnature and its a struggle to just get those fake plant wall coverings or even hanging your clothes out to dry.

While that stance is about Spain, in Germany only a recent law change brought about by a petition has given balcony solar privileged status, making it harder for landlords to forbid them. Change is possible.

Apartments in Australia work seemingly different to the rest of the world where there is almost never a central landlord that owns the whole building, but every apartment has an individual owner and the rules are voted on by the owners.

Sometimes the state government steps in to make certain rules invalid such as banning pets. But an attempt to let people dry their clothes on the balcony recently failed. And I can see almost zero chance of allowing solar panels since they do have a significant aesthetic impact on the building along with safety concerns around panels getting ripped off in the wind. Most buildings already have solar on the roof but it mostly just powered the lifts and hallway lights.

I spent years renting/owning apartments. Now fortunate to own a mortgage/house.

The amount of freedom open to you is ridiculous. It is like becoming a "first class" citizen - a "homeowner" that the politicians pander to. It is ridiculous.

To deal with apartment living is to deal with bureaucracy/politics/bullshit. And even when the people are lovely - like my last apartment building - the incentives don't align to make for sensible long term decisions for the whole building.

Solar panels with or without battery? Electric car charging? Bike shed? Heatpump-everything? Upgrade building insulation? Arrange the garden to be useful? These are now options available to me on the basis of money alone - no permission from others required.

It is stupid. I know that apartment living can be more efficient per capita in so many ways, better for city planning and public transport etc etc.

But fuck that. A lot has to change until apartments become desirable as anything than a temporary stayover.

As far as I can tell from 5 min on Google, balcony solar is straight up banned in Australia. As in, there are no approved models or installers, and you can't DIY anything electrical without invalidating your home insurance.

A shame, because I'm renting a house, and while I'm obviously not going to invest in rooftop solar, a portable balcony setup I could take with me or easily sell the next time I move would be handy.

You can set up a low voltage DC solar setup + battery yourself, but you aren't allowed to do anything that connects to the grid without the proper licenses/certifications.

But I'd say the reason you can't find product licensed to do it is because the amount of savings to be had with some panels hanging of the balcony is pretty minimal, the difficulty of securing them properly so they aren't ripped off in a storm is pretty high, and no owners corp would allow it just for visual reasons alone.

Australia has an absolute abundance of empty land, no trees and sun raining down on it. Makes more sense to invest in these installations and just wire it in to the grid rather than zip tieing panels to your balcony rails.

AS/NZ standards prohibit these sorts of systems. Even most models of Victron inverters are not "approved" for grid use without an approved external anti-islanding device, which also vary depending on which energy distributer your are connecting to. Apparently Victron got fed up with dealing with CEC and paying the annual fees to be approved.

One option could be to join something like this: https://haystacks.solargarden.org.au/

The big caveat is you have to sign up with their retail partner, the pricing structure is interesting - you aren't actually paid based on what is generated (or at least from memory).

It was pretty cumbersome in Germany, too. Balcony solar is now considered the same as a satellite dish, which doesn't require special permission.

I think it is simple - electricity from solar panels is cheaper than electricity from the utility companies, which have been too slow to build out solar farms of their own, and it is fashionable to boot. ("Fashionable" is not exactly the word I want; I mean that it would be less popular with your friends and neighbors to operate a coal-fired generator on your balcony.)

This is impractical in the US as things currently stand; most utilities have a permitting process for a grid tie (anything that backfeeds the grid) and smartmeters are capable of detecting and reporting any backfeed.

Mostly the technical aspects are not a problem (most modern meters are two-way); you'd just need a policy like the one in Germany allowing de minimis backfeed.

If you are actually tying the solar-panel into your house's "grid" couldn't you also make additional mods between your electrical-panel and the meter to prevent backfeed?

Or, maybe an inline battery that the solar panel tops off.

It's a solved problem because this is a feature of most hybrid inverters. The only reason it's not as easy as pie is because of lack of information, and "Scare" tactics promoted by electricity-generation companies.

> most modern meters are two-way

That said, people are generally using whatever meter came with their house, and few older meters were two-way. If you have an older meter and you start backfeeding the grid, you will end up paying for that electricity as if you had bought it off of the grid. The meter isn't smart enough to know which way the current is flowing, it only knows how much current is going past and assumes that all current flows into the house, not out.

Do you just hook up and inverter and run your electricity meter "in reverse" then? Is that how this works?

If you have an old analogue meter it will run in reverse, but this is illegal (you are reducing your metered usage of grid electricity, but the price of that includes grid transmission costs, taxes etc). The modern ones have a separate meter if you want to feed it to the grid, but it's not worth it, there are some fees for that so you'd end up with a few bucks every year.

So the way it works, you plug it in, and your appliances can use it and not the electricity from the grid. The excess you don't use gets fed in the grid, generally for free. You save basically on all the taxes, transmission costs etc, which are the majority of the price, if you use your own electricity. The more you can use, the more you will save.

If your home is fully solar powered and you are making more then you're using at the moment, then yes, the meter counts backwards.

Most of the time though, your production will be less than your consumption, so your meter will simply not count the watts you don't pull from the grid.

Digital non-smart meters don't run in reverse. Or at least mine doesn't.

I've ended up with three dumb meters: one main one, one that measures energy off the solar panels (used for feed-in-tariff), and one that measures heat pump consumption (which was a surprise of the installation, I think it was fitted for a subsidy that doesn't currently exist).

When the panels are backfeeding the main meter just puts a red LED on and stops counting. The solar installation is hardwired, not a balcony one.

initially yes but then the local power supplier will come and install a bidirectional meter

In Germany, as long as the inverter output is capped at 800W (and solar Wp at 2kWp), no bidirectional meter is needed.

They are so popular in Germany, you can sometimes even buy them in supermarkets.

I assume Germany has 'the middle aisle' in Lidl and Aldi like we do in the UK? Solar panels are exactly the kind of thing I would expect to find there :D

yup, exactly there :)

We have them because our electricity is incredibly expensive and government regulation forbids anything bigger than that (at least if you want to do it yourself).

So how does this work, the solar panel is plugged into the flats electricity with no problems?

Is there an inverter that can add the power in, can it just be plugged into a normal socket.

The article seems to focus on the solar power aspect. What is preventing this from being done in the UK? There are very high safety standards for home electrics, I"m just curious as to how these are resolved.

I'm always amused comparing the hot and sunny German way with the cold rainy cloudy Australian vision.

https://www.news.com.au/national/australias-nuclear-future-b...

The idea of nuclear in Australia is mostly just a con to keep coal going longer by the conservative side of politics. They are not currently in power and even if they do get elected this year market forces will basically scupper the plan in the medium term anyway.

It's 100% about their connections to the resources (coal) and oil & gas political donors, nothing to do with actual policy. At worst a few billions will go to politically connected people to keep some coal plants running a few more years, but I doubt any nuclear plants will actually pass any kind of business case because they will cost too much and take too long to build (we would have needed to start 25 years ago for them to be economically viable, so they could have replaced the coal plants while the renewables were being built out).

This is currently the same in Europe and especially in Germany.

Social media has been pushing a pro-nuclear power stance since Russia invaded Ukraine (you’ll notice this on /r/europe), with people using the “ecological” no-carbon argument, and are also simultaneously pushing an anti-wind and solar policy.

The neonazi AfD has not held back about its anti-renewables stance, and pro-Russian perspective, but even the probable new German Chancellor came out recently saying that he hate wind turbines because they are “ugly”.

It’s clear that nuclear is being peddled as an option because it’s clear to fossil fuel peddlers that nuclear is a great Trojan horse. It claims to be carbon free but it’s a 25-30 year program until one is operational and when you take everything into account, they actually cost more to run. The insurance alone is devastatingly expensive.

Australia is increasingly conservative when it comes to politics. We've had it too good for too long and so have lost the pioneering spirit.

Solar panels on homes are so popular that energy providers struggle to deal with the output during sunny days, whilst on the other hand solar and wind energy generation plants are looked at with suspicion and are politically unpopular.

Just look at the political reaction to the installation of the "biggest battery in the southern hemisphere" at the time. You'd expect politics to jump on it as advertising how progressive and advanced the country is. Nope, the prime Minister at the time mocked it (the same party proposing nine nuclear reactors): https://www.9news.com.au/national/sa-s-big-battery-just-anot...

Everyone agrees the Australian energy mix will involve lots of solar power. The coalition's policy [0] is keeping all the options open - just insistent that nuclear should be in the mix. And lifting the major legal impediments to developing nuclear power is just common sense, our policy on that has been insane for decades.

Although I don't want to be seen as defending the their overall plan. The part where they want the government to own a nuclear reactor is raw madness and it is hard to see how it'll come together as anything but an expensive disaster. Especially if the Labor party offers any resistance of any kind.

[0] https://www.australianeedsnuclear.org.au/our-plan

More honest version:

https://youtu.be/JBqVVBUdW84

Most important component seems to me the investment security. If you silence all the idiots and go all in on batteries and solar (because your country is a raging inferno) you get very clean cut investment opportunities. The only problem for investors seems that solar keeps getting cheaper(?) I see a calculation where cost drops by 20% every time global capacity doubles.

If, in stead, you force the population to invest up-front into expensive imaginary future energy you don't get the nice investment landscape. Your solar will have to compete with the nuke plants. By the time the nuke plants are online there will be so much solar capacity that they won't be able to compete in the day time market.

They want to build seven plants of which only 2 will be operational in 2035 and do it faster and cheaper than countries that already have them where they always go over budget, never finish on schedule and are actively closing them.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...

[UK here] It'd be great to have blanket permissions for 800W installs , but I've only a west facing two-story wall without a balcony. That probably needs permits and a small scaffolding tower rather than ladders moving your costs up and delaying your ROI :(

These seem like no-brainers for shade with solar generation compared to a traditional awning.

Suggested a similar thing to the energy minister in the UK ~2009, but officials nixed it:

https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-G83-lite.html

Here's a company a friend started for balcony solar in Germany:

https://www.instagram.com/we.do.solar/

> With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years

For what I’m paying PG&E, this would pay for itself in under a year.

What do you pay per kWh? With 800Wp you can expect a few hundred kWh/a.

Literally one month. JHC.

If mean, if you're monthly bill is that high, JHC, to be sure. My highest monthly bill gets in the neighborhood of the low end of that scale, but that's when it's well over 100° (over 40°C for those that can't do the maths) during the summer months, and that's with shitty windows that leak like a sieve.

I'd be taping cardboard over the windows if my bills were as high as your one month

The base allowances in the coastal tariff zone are so low that if someone has a 100-year-old house it's easy to run up hundreds of dollars a month on a utility bill in the winter.

It's a great demonstration how cheap solar actually is. Last time I checked you can get two panels 800w total, inverter and basically everything you need for 500e or less, depending where you buy, and it's probably even cheaper now. If you want to put a larger installation on your roof, it's going to be 1500-2000 per kw, so easily 4x the actual hardware price, so most is just labour, permits etc. But even then it's worth it!

What an amazing invention.

This kit cost 230 euro: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/SUNNIVA%C2%AE-Balcony-Station-Com...

Just the first thing that pops up on amazon.de if I search for "balkonkraftwerk".

Very interesting, I wasn't aware of "plug into the wall" solar provisioning solution that detects if the grid goes down, then it shuts itself down to mitigate the back-feed question, but that seems super easy.

Am I right seeing that power is 40 cents per kWh? Thats the 'incentive', I guess gas from Russia has been too volatile.

High grid energy prices + a cheap personal solar solution will significantly push innovation for residential electric efficiency.

More like 30 cents per kwh.

No more Russian gas.

Is this grid tied? Are people tying these to batteries and then running their appliances off of them? Seems like too little power to properly backfeed the grid.

You basically plug them into your power outlet and feed back into the system, reducing your electricity bill.

If it's a hybrid inverter, it just offsets what you pull from the grid. And btw, as long as you have the right voltage and grid-frequency, you can practically push as little as you want. The details and roadblocks usually come in the form of regulation, contracts, meter features, and the utilities trying to stonewall any sort of slow phase-out of people's dependence on them.

1.5 Million 400 watt modules ist Not nothing.

Yes they are grid tied.

Is it 600 MWatt equivalent? It's curious how the grid adapts at the end of the day

Currently through a lot of dispatch orders. Basically shutting off some PV parks or wind farms and paying them money.

The market reacts now by installing a lot more energy storage (battery parks) to make a profit from that which will lead to a lot less dispatch.

In Germany this year we have a record number of energy storage projects happening.

Not sure if it is still running but in Berlin you got or get 500€ of your balcony solar installation bill payed back from the city.

Full solar cladding, at least on some sides, would be interesting, but I guess panel costs aren't quite there yet.

People are already building fences out of PV[1]. At least in the US, my instinct would be that building codes might not consider them to be adequate as siding, however.

1: https://justwe-gpi.com/solar-power/solar-panel-fence/

Maybe a simple cladding designed to attach the solar panel? The costs start adding up quickly though.

already a thing. here's one example from Canada https://natural-resources.canada.ca/funding-partnerships/wes...

Solar seems to be hitting a lot of inflection points recently.

Colombia had 0.27GW total installed capacity as of the start of 2024.

In that year rooftop solar installed .215GW and utility scale installed 1.41GW

So just rooftop nearly doubled all solar installed ever in one year and utility more than 5x'd it

Well if you have just one solar panel you can double all installed solar in a matter of minutes and 5x it in matter of an hour.

Anyone doing this in America?

About six months ago I bought an Anker set - a portable battery pack and some folding panels. A buddy of mine got basically the same thing, but Ecoflow. He lives in a condo, has a balcony, and can hang his panels there to charge the pack; my options are a little more constrained (3 story house with a couple hundred sq ft concrete "yard", with light blocked most hours of the day by the next house.)

I haven't gotten much use out of my set, but his plan was to run his desktop off it, which sounded very doable. All in all probably not quite the same as Germany (I guess their kits don't need a battery or plug into the wall or something).

The idea of large numbers of big lithium battery packs constantly charging or discharging in apartment buildings is a bit scary to me. Perhaps if they are contained in a fire-proof housing?

The good thing is that many of these are lifepo4, which largely mitigates the risk.

Not the part where they plug the panels into a wall outlet. In the US getting the permits for grid tie is a huge expense and hassle so it would make no sense to do it for just a couple of panels. You need permission not only from the local government, but the power company, and possibly an HOA.

If you did this you would buy some Bluetti or similar power bank to charge off of the panels and use that power to run lights or maybe a mini-split heat pump so you can launder your energy savings through not having to run your home's grid-tie heat pump as much.

To do exactly what they’re doing in Germany would be illegal, or perhaps merely would make your utility very mad. It’s something like an 800w inverter that plugs into a wall socket. One issue for the US is that you don’t have access to both hots on one plug in a typical receptacle. Not a dealbreaker but one of many reasons you shouldn't import a German one and try and modify it for US use.

Just in my van -> RV conversion. ;-)

It's actually a neat idea. So far solar has been a suburb only thing, but the balcony idea is great! Particularly in denser countries it has a lot of potential.

Won't denser areas have less sunlight ?

I think in Paris the issue is that because of rules protecting the aesthetics of buildings, you probably wouldn't be allowed to install those...

It also wouldn't work in the vast majority of corporate-controlled apartments in America for similar reasons. You aren't allow to fly flags or have decorations in most of these kind of units either, although this kind of rule tends to be selectively enforced.

The more people generate their own power, the less reliant cities are on centralized grids and big utilities

I'd have it too if it wasn't for these tall buildings around me.

surprised nobody is mentioning the huge downside of reduced indoor natural light with this option. i wonder if the mental health decrease is worth the monetary savings.

saves an average of 6-12 euro per month

Per 450 kwp panel.

Per pair of 300 watt panels

Any chance these one day look better?

Is it because of wind ?

> there must be something in it

Subsidies.

I don't think most people buy balcony solar in Germany to save money. The eletricity you generate is very little, and it takes years before you even break even, and then you maybe save a couple of dozen euros a year. No, I think it's more about the feeling of independence and sustainability.

A 500W kit costs around 500€. With good orientation you break even in 3.5 years (2kWh per day at 20c the kWh). Very few investments would give you such 25-30% yearly ROI.

They are getting even cheaper. I have four modules with a total capacity of about 1800W (the inverter has a limit of 800W to comply with the regulations). Cost was about 370€ including delivery.

Sure, but how much € can you actually save after 3.5 years per year?

after around 5-7 years you break even, and solar panels can last for 2-4 decades. Most panels you can buy in germany have a warranty of around 25 years. So yeah, you buy them to save money since electricity is hugely expensive in germany.

I have it on my balcony.

Took me a few hours to research and a helping hand to get it installed.

It will pay for itself in 4 years.

No subsidies.

And my balcony has a tree shadow at lunch.

It's just easy to do (plug it into the socket) and done.

400 watt module.

Today I made only 400 watt. Not a lot. It's still enough.

The energy price per kWh is just relatively high. 30-40cent

Your utility company subsidizes you.

In the usual contract, you pay an price of 40 cent per kWh, no matter when you use it. But that price is based on a year-round average. Actually, sometimes electricity is super cheap for the utility company, like when the sun is shining in summer and electricity prices go negative. And sometimes it is very expensive, like on dark winter days without sun and wind, when prices are >1 EUR/kWh.

What you can do with balcony solar is skip the cheap summer sun prices (which cost the utility nothing, but they still charge you 40ct), and you still buy at expensive times for 40ct, when it's actually worth much more.

That's not a subsidy, that's more like a time-based arbitrage.

In short term I think it is workable strategy. But in long term I expect the pricing to move more towards market price direction. Either by purely market or some strange adjustments based on consumption timing. And ofc transfer will go up...

I don't think this is based on a real analysis of German electricity wholesale prices.

doesn't seem like subsidies so much as no regulatory roadblocks.

probably just buy up to 800w of panels, plug them into an outlet, and you're allowed.

Nah, solar panels have just gotten really cheap.

subsidies don't make products cheaper for the consumer, most of it lands in the pockets of companies.

Nope, zero subsidies.

That is just incorrect. There are / were a ton of subsidies: https://www.finanztip.de/photovoltaik/balkon-solaranlage/foe...

I've heard so many lies in support of "cheap solar" that I've lost count. Environmentalists may be the least honest political cohort in existence, which is saying something.

total solar capacity got increased by 75% in the last 3 years in germany alone.

and yeah, i forgot about the free vax we got for small installments last year.

Yes, for home customers, they are VAT-free.

There's an indirect subsidy via tax

This sounds like a nice idea but I would imagine either their electrical usage is _really_ low already or this is being given more praise than it deserves.

From the article, it seems like they're typically installing 2 - 300-watt solar panels. Most they can install is 800-watt without a certification.

Apartments here in the US, at least where I am, have a typical usage of 300 - 800 kW, which is a lot more than 800 watts.

Perhaps no A/C, using natural light more, fewer appliances attribute to a much lower monthly usage in Europe than they do in the US?

If you can do it, then do it but I don't think it would be as worthwhile here in the US.

*EDIT* I am likely thinking incorrectly on this. I am still skeptical of it being useful but not necessarily for that above.

I think your numbers are something different (maybe a usage of 300 - 800 kWh per month?)

My whole house peaks at about 3 kW but the average is between 500 W - 1200 W when heating or cooling, depending on the outside temperature. Right now the AC isn't on so the whole house is literally only pulling 120 W.

You can install a 800Wh installation without a certification. Your monthly usage is 300 - 800 kWh.

In theory a 800Wh system can produce between 25kWh and 105kWh per month, depending on the location and month of the year.

> Apartments here in the US, at least where I am, have a typical usage of 300 - 800 kW, which is a lot more than 800 watts.

Isn’t this confusing usage with capacity? To compare them you have to multiply by efficiency and average sunlight hours.

Still likely doesn’t fully coverage the high end of that use but the set of apartment usage would certainly have some overlap with the set of generating capacity of 800 watt panels.

Are you sure it's not 3.3 - 8kW installations? Or maybe it's 300 - 800 kWh energy usage per month?

For comparison, Germany has 22kW capacity as standard for homes, and me in Indonesia gets by with AC, appliances, and 2.2kW car charging with a 5.5kW installation.

*EDIT*

I could be mistaken. I went back and dug into it more.

Perhaps, the main issue here in the US would be plugging into the grid.

My entire house and car use about 950kWh per month!

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