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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.ibb-business-team.de/en/solarplus/
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...
In practice you need to have a two-way meter installed by the power company and you're good to go.
The inverter is designed to stop feeding power if the grid drops off.
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.
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
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/s
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 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.
Then the argument makes sense.
If the windows leak heat like a sieve, a cheap landlord won't care, because they have no incentive to lower energy costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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20-30$/month very quickly pays for a new sliding glass door, but it’s hardly going to get people to swap apartments.
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This is false.
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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."
Drive the cost of production low enough and uninsulated structures aren’t wasteful, but we aren’t there yet.
i woud argue that it is not how German works, word coining is not a metric of its popularity
German Wikipedia has an article about it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkonkraftwerk
Balkonkraftwerk sounds powerful. Not like Aufhängesolarpaneel, or Steckersolargerät.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Or, maybe an inline battery that the solar panel tops off.
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.