[HN Gopher] 'Energy independence feels practical': Europeans bui...
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'Energy independence feels practical': Europeans building mini
solar farms
Author : vrganj
Score : 186 points
Date : 2026-03-27 08:55 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.euronews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.euronews.com)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Distributed energy production / storage is the key for resiliency
| in the future.
|
| Every solar farm doesn't need to be China Size - it doesn't even
| need to be a "farm", just put them on roofs.
|
| And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes there are times
| when solar doesn't produce energy, but there are also times where
| it OVERproduces.
| friendzis wrote:
| > And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes there are
| times when solar doesn't produce energy, but there are also
| times where it OVERproduces.
|
| When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone to
| consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could be
| producing energy instead. So you pay actually twice. When the
| solar underproduces, you need to bring in alternative sources,
| but those now have to cover all their fixed costs and generate
| return on investment over this limited timeframe, which means
| the actual backup prices hit stratospheric levels.
|
| What's the actual cost of solar with actual net-billing?
| raverbashing wrote:
| "If you find dollar bills on the ground you _need_ to pay
| someone to collect it as litter "
|
| Charge batteries, do electrolysis, or a multitude of other
| uses (I know some companies do that already)
| conorcleary wrote:
| Used 240w modules built in 2010-2012 are worth $60-100 CAD
| at the moment in small quantities. There will be hundreds
| of thousands hitting the market (as long as they didn't hit
| the _ground_ with careless removals) in ~2030+ as microFIT
| contracts in Ontario expire.
|
| There is no clear path to switching these arrays to Net
| Metering, as of yet. Prepare for all sorts of unrecycled
| solar panels and potential loss of renewable capacity that
| is already installed.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Could you elaborate on this? Why would people remove a
| working solar system?
| jandrese wrote:
| Buildings get torn down. Roof needs a replacement and the
| owner doesn't feel like it is worthwhile to redo the
| solar install for panels that only have 5 years of
| warranty left, or maybe they want to replace them with
| higher power models with a fresh warranty. There are any
| number of reasons why someone might need to offload
| otherwise functional solar panels.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Currently used solar panels are a hot commodity, with
| many groups selling them by the pallet, because 10 year
| old solar panels are still efficient enough to easily pay
| for themselves. Very few installations will care about
| specifically how many panels they want, they just want a
| nameplate output per dollar figure.
|
| Old inverters might not have a second life though.
| msandford wrote:
| Net metering is really, really smart when the installed
| base is small relative to the fossil fuel power plant
| capacity. But it doesn't scale forever. Once it gets up
| towards 20-40% of the fossil fuel capacity, it goes from
| an asset to a liability.
|
| Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's
| 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't
| really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner
| time and 50MW through the night, or if instead it's 79MW
| at noon and 91MW at dinner and 51MW at night. The gas
| costs about the same irrespective of when I burn it so a
| bit of a fuel shift doesn't really matter.
|
| But take that 1MW and turn it into 20MW and suddenly we
| go from 80MW at noon to 60MW at noon, 90MW at dinner to
| 110MW at dinner and uh oh. You see the problem? Whatever
| losses I endured at noon I don't get to make up for at
| dinner because my plant only goes up to 100MW and now
| we're not just shifting when we burn how much fuel, we're
| literally having to shift the power generation to a
| different plant.
|
| Is this example precisely accurate? Absolutely not. But
| it helps you get a feel for the problem of net metering
| at scale. The grid can act as a battery for a few % of
| total generation, but by the time you hit some number,
| maybe 20% maybe 40% net metering turns from a cool math
| trick to a real cost on the grid.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Net metering only makes sense as a way to incentivize
| solar installations. Looking at the economics, it's not
| something any utility would offer willingly.
|
| It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for
| a credit at full price. (Let's ignore the
| sanitary/health/quality issues that would come up.) You
| decide to buy a cow and you drink that milk. Sometimes
| you need more than your cow can give so you buy extra
| from the store. Sometimes you need less and you sell the
| extra to the store. Long term, you use as much as your
| cow produces on average, so you pay the store nothing.
| But the store has provided a valuable services to you and
| has incurred expenses in doing so. They have to keep the
| lights on and maintain a building and pay workers to
| handle your transactions but they make no money from you.
| The only way it would work at all is if they made enough
| money from their non-cow-owning customers to make up for
| it, and that can only take you so far.
| hvb2 wrote:
| > It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk
| for a credit at full price.
|
| I know of quite a few places where through net metering
| you don't get full price, you get the wholesale rate for
| your production which is significantly less.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is literally the only sane usage for hydrogen outside
| of industrial uses, when you have a massive excess of
| renewables, use it to turn water into pressurised hydrogen.
|
| And when the prices go up, you run that through a grid
| scale fuel cell and feed it back to the network.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Storing hydrogen is no small feat. Especially for long
| duration
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone
| to consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could
| be producing energy instead.
|
| You don't have to do this with solar, you can just disconnect
| the panel and have it go a bit hotter. For producers that
| have a long-ish bringup time, yes, you might need to do this
| at time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The situation is slightly complicated by dispatch order,
| and domestic solar isn't usually dispatchable at all. Grid-
| scale farms are.
|
| Wind farms don't _consume_ energy, but there is a real
| issue with how often they have to be "curtailed" (paid to
| turn off). That is to a great extent due to issues with
| grid connectivity between Scotland and the rest of the UK,
| which are (slowly) being worked on.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| My understanding is that all inverters sold at this
| moment, in the EU, need to have demand response and grid
| curtailment mechanisms by law.
| leonidasrup wrote:
| Wind curtailment is the deliberate reduction of
| electricity output from wind turbines, despite their
| capability to generate power under existing wind
| conditions. This practice is typically implemented by
| grid operators to maintain the stability of the
| electrical grid or to address specific operational
| constraints.
|
| https://www.enlitia.com/resources-blog-post/what-is-wind-
| cur...
|
| "paid to turn off" Wind energy providers in some
| countries are compensated for curtailment, this a form of
| subsidy for renewables. It can be payed directly by the
| goverment, or it is added to the price of electricity for
| consumer.
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewable-
| curtailment-c...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy,
|
| Here's the thing. That's a rule and not a technical problem.
| Absolutely no reason to do this other than rules and
| regulations.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yes, but even more so, it's a good sensible rule!
|
| People don't even bother to argue why it's bad, they've
| just seen so many headlines telling them it's bad they
| don't question it.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I'll question it. Why does it exist? Why can't we just
| shut off the panels or dump excess energy into a metal
| rod? Why do we need to have a buyer at all?
| friendzis wrote:
| Because otherwise the incentive structures for solar-as-
| baseload, sweeping the actual cost on the consumers,
| collapse. The system is built on putting equality sign
| between oversubscribed solar and coal/gas backups during
| times of undersubscription.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's not a buyer, people are paid to take the energy that
| would otherwise be wasted. And when energy use is shifted
| it means you need to generate less later, saving money.
|
| The people who pay that cost to the people using the
| energy are people running energy generators that suffer
| wear and tear when they ramp down.
|
| Or sometimes it's a subsidy for the use of clean energy
| being passed on to ensure the clean energy is actually
| used, not wasted.
|
| All upside, no problems at all.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Inverters can be configured with export limits to limit, or
| entirely halt, energy exports based on market or grid
| signals. Term of art is "curtailment."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone
| to consume that energy,
|
| Can't we just throttle the solar panel? In a worst case, you
| just pull the plug. It's not like a nuclear power plant which
| needs to be shut down carefully, or am I misunderstanding
| something?
| tacet wrote:
| You can limit amount you feed back into network.
|
| Not sure how is situation with home installations, factory
| i work for runs 150kw plant for our own consumption and
| don't bother with selling, but i know that we can set up
| how much we want/are allowed to feed back.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Yes that's exactly how it works, it's called curtailment.
| pstuart wrote:
| When there's an OVERproduction of energy, that really means
| there's an UNDER-availability of storage. Battery tech
| continues it's march towards cheaper prices, and alternatives
| such as thermal storage are making inroads as well.
|
| It borders on criminal to have abundant energy production be
| disservice.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I'm no energy markets analyst, so take this with a grain of
| salt, but I think the next major breakthrough for solar
| (not the slow, inevitable rollout we're seeing now) will be
| when somebody figures out an economical way export this
| periodic overproduction. There is basically never a time
| when humanity as a whole has an overproduction of free
| energy, but at present we also don't have a way to make
| money turning this surplus into a tradable product (like
| oil, coal, LNG, etc.) because all the electric-powered
| processes for making such products (ammonia, methane,
| primary aluminum production, etc) require big hunks of
| capital equipment that lose money unless they're operated
| more or less continuously. Battery, thermal, pumped hydro,
| etc. help here, in that enough of it can theoretically turn
| off-and-on solar/wind power into a continuous load to power
| your aluminum smelter or whatever.
|
| Even better though, would be a cheap electrically operated
| methane plant that you could afford to run intermittently.
| This, plus a peaker natgas generating plant make,
| effectively, a battery of infinite size, or you can sell it
| to any of the many eager buyers of natgas.
|
| Building a small, prefab, plant like this, if possible,
| would seem to be mainly a problem of scale, and therefore
| it seems likely that China will get to it pretty soon.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Cheap home solar installations usually have a disconnect- do
| they not use those in larger scale installs?
|
| I'm also surprised they aren't using batteries to capture
| overproduction. They've been clutch in the US, and we're not
| exactly pushing the envelope of green energy nowadays
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Home installations just cut it off. In both of these cases.
|
| I did my own battery backed installation. When I'm
| underproducing I can shed load (I turn off my AC - almost
| always that's enough, and it's automated by relay). When I'm
| overproducing (ex - my battery is full and my load is still
| not enough to consume input) I just don't let the panels
| generate more current than I can consume.
|
| Managing grid scale power is different concern, and not
| particularly relevant to small household generation.
| Especially not relevant in the 800W category for "balcony
| solar" (which is much smaller than what I'm working with).
|
| Solar is fucking coming, whether you continue to shove head
| into the ground or not.
|
| It's just way more affordable. Getting easily more affordable
| as batteries continue to improve.
|
| I honestly doubt I'll still be connected to a local utility
| grid for electric 10 years from now, and I live in a region
| of the US that has considerably cheaper grid power than most
| areas.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| My current EV has a 38kW battery.
|
| When it's too worn out for car use (SoH around 60-70%),
| it's still perfectly enough to run _everything_ in my house
| for multiple days - except for the electric sauna, and I'm
| smart enough to turn it on if there are production issues
| :D
|
| There's a reason why EV's will never be as cheap as the
| cheapest ICE shitbox. Just the bare metals in the battery
| are worth thousands when recycled, even more if the battery
| is still viable.
| sl-1 wrote:
| If you ever are looking to implement that EV battery as
| house backup, this repo might be useful:
| https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator
|
| I did mine with it and old leaf 24kwh battery (~60k km).
| After all the safety margins I get ~15 kwh out of the
| battery.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Sorry, the consequences are too dire for me to delegate
| household battery control to a vibe-coded project.
|
| I'm curious what your home insurance provider has to say
| about your installation.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The value of the metals will depend a lot on the battery
| chemistry. LFP batteries don't need nickel or cobalt and
| sodium-ion batteries can also replace the expensive
| copper foil on the anode with cheaper aluminium foil.
|
| I'm somewhat sceptical that used batteries will ever be
| worth much other than as scrap given the cost and
| complexity in testing, installing, and managing a mixed
| set of used batteries in larger installations.
|
| With new batteries halving in price every 4 years or so
| the value of the raw materials in old NMC batteries alone
| should make it economical to sell for scrap and buy new
| batteries for stationary use cases after 10 years or so!
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| No you don't, you could just ground it. Paying them is a
| choice.
| teamonkey wrote:
| This is not how curtailment works.
|
| Curtailment is when an energy company has successfully bid on
| delivering electricity for the next block of time (an hour,
| for example) but it can't provide that agreed amount of power
| because it would overload the grid. There are various reasons
| why that would happen: faults and unexpected lack of demand,
| for example. In that case the company is paid for the energy
| it was contracted to deliver, only for that period of time,
| even though it did not provide power.
|
| It is wrong to say that overproducers HAVE to be paid. They
| don't. They only have to be paid if there was an agreement to
| buy that power but for whatever reason the grid can't take
| it. Normally if there is a generation surplus, the cheapest
| companies will win the bid to provide power and the others
| will simply not be paid.
| bluGill wrote:
| The utility SHOULD ensure there is enough power for the
| worst case. Which is why they will sometimes pay someone to
| not generate power.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Here in Finland electricity prices can drop to under 1c/kWh
| due to renewables, basically every time it's sunny and/or
| windy electricity is practically free (the transfer costs are
| static though).
|
| A few times the price has actually been negative, people got
| paid for using electricity due to overproduction =)
| leonidasrup wrote:
| In Finland you produce more electricity from nuclear
| energy, than from hydropower, wind, or solar.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-
| source-s...
|
| The amounts for year 2025: Nuclear 32 TWh, Wind 22 TWh,
| Hydro 12 TWh, Solar 1TWh.
| mbgerring wrote:
| There will be connected batteries in every home solving this
| problem faster than the fossil fuel lobby can come up with a
| new talking point about why it'll never work.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I'm not convinced we'll ever see mass deployments of
| batteries to homes, not because of the fossil fuel lobby
| but because of the economies of scale from installing grid
| sized batteries at strategic points in the transmission
| network.
|
| In California grid scale batteries have capital costs of
| around $125/kWh to $155/kWh while a home battery might be
| 20x that including installation.
| te_chris wrote:
| Wild that you're getting downvoted for saying something so
| obvious. Weird.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Politics of solar, at work
| izacus wrote:
| That's the same kind of problem solving that thought making
| self driving Teslas is the solution for infrastructure
| problems.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I'm fairly certain securing one's household's access to
| energy independent of rate increases triggered by a
| combination of aging infrastructure and data center power
| demand doesn't have a lot in common with tech bros attempts
| at reinventing trains badly from first principles but I'm
| open to hear the argument. Care to unpack that?
| username135 wrote:
| Im eager to hear rhis one...
|
| _grabbing popcorn_
| mbgerring wrote:
| Not weird if you've been participating in discussions on
| clean energy since the beginning of this century.
|
| The inevitability of the energy transition has been obvious
| for so long, and even when it's done there will be cranks
| insisting that it'll never work.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| I'm every day more convinced that the only reasonable future of
| energy production is distributed solar and storage with
| microgrids at the neighbourhood level or so.
|
| Anything bigger in scale is prone to being shittified to the
| limit by public entities.
| derelicta wrote:
| A shame local companies where I am from have year long backlogs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The "balcony solar" system is going to be available in Lidl for
| no-approval self-install. Limited to 800W.
| jandrese wrote:
| Depends on your locality. The Fossil fuel industry is
| lobbying hard against this and is successful in some places.
| cjrp wrote:
| The UK previously didn't allow small plug in solar panels (the
| kind that you just plug in to a mains socket) due to, I believe,
| safety reasons. This has changed within the last few days
| https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/solar-roadmap/
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It hasn't changed... yet. The media noise is because the
| government has announced that they were reviewing current rules
| with the aim of allowing "balcony solar" by the end of the
| year.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I believe it's only legal in Utah so far in the US: they
| legislated it last year, and apparently half the country is
| expected to pass a copy-paste version in their next sessions
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Current state by state status (not my site):
| https://pluginsolarusa.com
| metalman wrote:
| to answer the first question in the article
|
| "Many consumers want to know how long it will take them to make
| back the upfront costs of solar"
|
| my answer is that the payback is imediate, right from the first
| moment watching as energy is generated out of thin air, and the
| sudden relief from getting off the energy angst missery-go-round,
| and the sheer borring inertness of solar pv as it does the thing
| with zero detectable effort, is gratifying and relaxing in a way
| that money never gives.
|
| I will add that solar pv is increadably robust, and damage
| tollerant as well, you can drive a claw hammer through a panel,
| and while it does not improve the performance, the degradation is
| actualy not that much, and it will continue to function for years
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| The mindset shift towards "how many hours of computer usage did
| that one panel enable" is like the mindset shift from learning
| calculus, in some ways. Not quite a paradigm shift, but you
| gain a new appreciation for conservation of use when it's a
| difference between choice of $/kW/hr and "wow, the panel
| powered that for most of the day".
|
| At the same time, many people will just use a solar calculator
| or watch or yard lights etc, oblivious to it all.
|
| Show people a solar powered laptop, a solar powered phone, or a
| solar powered tablet, then they will be impressed.
|
| Remember the craze about solar powered car competitions?
|
| permacompute + solar would make for quite the $100 laptop
| competition.
| zowie_howie wrote:
| Is it immediate? Sure, there is satisfaction that you are using
| 'free' electricity. But it does have an upfront cost. I
| calculated that it would take over 11 years to recoup the
| investment based on our current usage. Given we already get
| cheap night-time rates to charge the car and run appliances, it
| is hard to justify.
|
| Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess
| if we had a battery too (more investment) then we could switch
| to using electric oil-filled radiators, though they would not
| heat the whole house. And we could install a hot water tank.
|
| I guess for new builds there is a real opportunity, but for an
| existing household I'm struggling to see how it works - and I
| want it to!
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't think it ever makes sense to switch to electric
| radiators. It _might_ make sense to switch to a heatpump, but
| you need to avoid being hugely overcharged by the installers
| and there are flow issues if you have 8mm piping.
|
| This ROI calculator looks reasonable:
| https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html -
| note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case
| where the final figure is positive is profitable. But of
| course that depends on whether grid prices go up or down in
| the next decade ...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Well France did move to electric everything (cooking, hot
| water, heating) in the past thanks to ample nuclear
| electricity production (and possibly not too harsh
| winters). Unfortunately they let their nuclear programme
| decay and are struggling now (EU grid integration does not
| help)...
|
| I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is
| that it is understood that electricity production is in
| dire straights, taking into account that the transition to
| EV requires a _lot_ of electricity.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are you talking about rooftop solar?
|
| For an 800W balcony system your background house usage is
| likely to be enough to self consume most of it.
|
| You'd wouldn't be able to run even a small oil heater except
| maybe in peak summer.
|
| It's a good match for working from home as it's a small
| amount of power spread over daylight hours.
| tencentshill wrote:
| Ideally, the problem will solve itself. People will get angry
| with increased energy prices, and elect politicians who
| promise to bring them down (The most effective and visible
| way being home solar subsidies, while reducing gas/coal).
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| UK also has massive subsidies. I know someone who got a
| government subsidy, the company didn't complete the job, got
| paid for the government for the full job, and they calculated
| the payback was 50+ years.
|
| At this point, I do not understand how anyone can possibly
| believe that the people advocating for this stuff are
| thinking in terms of economic (as opposed to political or
| social) returns. This stuff makes no economic sense and is
| already bankrupting the country.
|
| Also, there is a legal requirement for new builds to have
| this now, this is with a massive shortage of housing, with a
| government that is a government of the "people" but has just
| put out the same housing targets as the last one and is
| running 75% behind annually. The scale of subsidies being
| given to these industries is probably tens of billions, green
| energy subsidies are now 5x larger than industry
| profits...this makes no sense, even with sky-high electricity
| prices (to be clear, it is consumers who are ultimately
| paying for this...we pay higher prices so that a lawyer
| somewhere can prattle on about leading a "green revolution"
| that is lining the pockets of donors).
| rdtsc wrote:
| >> "Many consumers want to know how long it will take them to
| make back the upfront costs of solar"
|
| > my answer is that the payback is imediate,
|
| So if I pay $35k for an install, I get a $35k check the first
| time I connect it to the grid? Pretty sure it doesn't work that
| way. But it would be a nice subsidy from the government if they
| were really motivated.
|
| I guess you're saying you start to feel good and validated to
| have spent the money by seeing _some_ savings every billing
| period. It's hard to argue with feelings of course, but that's
| not not the original concern. People want to know how long is
| it going to take: 1, 5, 10 years or ... never (if panels
| degrade or break before it will never pay off) to pay off their
| investment.
| jrmg wrote:
| We just got solar panels and a battery installed on our house.
| I try to be hard-headed about the economics when planning, but
| I have to say the _experience_ of having done it is exactly as
| you describe.
|
| The other thing it made me is angry at the political morass
| that these things seem to be in.
|
| At a technical level I understand the 'base load' arguments,
| but we are throwing away _so much energy_ that's just there for
| the taking by not having these everywhere. On most days, our
| house (in Western North Carolina) gets enough energy from the
| sun that we net-export to the grid - and we have an EV! There's
| just no need for the massive amounts of carbon we are spewing
| into the air - the energy is just falling onto us!
|
| In the future, providing we're still around, we'll look back at
| a time when we could've been getting all our energy needs from
| just the sun (and wind etc.) and shake our heads in disbelief
| at those who fought against the idea that we should even
| _think_ about efficiently using it so viscerally.
| mbgerring wrote:
| It's already possible for consumers to know that, I worked on
| the software that powers the tools that tell US consumers this
| at Genability ca 2015.
|
| As far as I know, they never cracked the European market, so if
| you're interested in working on that, I'm currently available
| for hire! Info in profile :)
| dust42 wrote:
| I once read an article that in Berlin the sewage system is
| flushed with fresh water because too many people have installed
| water saving toilet flushers. So plenty of people bought these
| water savers and now the price of water has gone up because the
| water that is directly flushed needs to be paid too.
|
| The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get
| subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into
| the grid.
|
| The problem is that in the end it will become more expensive for
| everybody because at times you have a surplus driving the whole
| sale electricity prices into the negative while still paying
| fixed prices for injection into the grid.
|
| To make this economically viable, you have to have everyone
| paying spot prices. Everything else is just green ideology driven
| inefficiency.
|
| Just to make it clear, I think renewables are an important option
| for the future. But to make them a viable option of the
| electricity energy mix, supply and demand, storage and grid
| capacity need to be taken into account.
|
| Last not least, there is plenty of low hanging fruit to drive CO2
| emissions down: drive up the truck tolls. Currently you have
| potatoes farmed in Germany, driven to Poland to get washed,
| transported to Italy to be converted to french fries and
| transferred back to Germany into the super markets.
|
| Same goes for home office, during Covid it was possible for many
| workers to continue with their work. Does an accountant need to
| drive to an office every day? Nope. How many business trips could
| be replaced by a video call?
|
| If the CO2 emissions problem is to be solved rather sooner than
| later, the money has to be spend efficiently as there isn't
| enough of it.
| watwut wrote:
| > I once read an article that in Berlin the sewage system is
| flushed with fresh water because too many people have installed
| water saving toilet flushers. So plenty of people bought these
| water savers and now the price of water has gone up because the
| water that is directly flushed needs to be paid too.
|
| What is this supposed to mean? You flush less water, therefore
| water price is more expensive, because flushed water needs to
| be paid too?
| myrmidon wrote:
| Presumably that the water bill (for tap water) was priced to
| cover both tap water provisioning and sewage works. But
| people using (free) rainwater to flush toilets ruined the
| pricing model, making the tap water price go up.
|
| I honestly don't see the problem, it's probably still worth
| it (because society still needs to provide less tap water and
| saves there).
| goodpoint wrote:
| The conclusion that saving water is greenwashing is just
| wrong.
| dust42 wrote:
| > This is just made up.
|
| Or not. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article152318777/Was
| sersparen...
|
| Edit: parent changed his answer, I have included it now.
| coryrc wrote:
| GP is partly right. Most of the cost of sewers is fixed cost:
| employee salaries, building and maintaining X kilometers of
| sewers, etc. Some is variable: chemicals, but a small part.
|
| If you, a single person, cut your water usage in half, you
| pay half as much. But if everybody uses half as much, the
| system still needs about the same amount of funding. So now
| you double the per-unit price, and everybody pays the same
| they were before spending money on water saving features. In
| this case, even if each person used half as much water, the
| total water needed isn't cut in half because the sewers need
| more water to function.
|
| (Also, water isn't "used"; most of it's transported, cleaned,
| transported, dirtied, cleaned again, transported)
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Perhaps that sewers need a certain volume of water flowing in
| order to function correctly. If that water does not come from
| toilet flushes, etc then they pump water into them to
| compensate.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I have the curse of having an mom who was a smart CPA.
|
| All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least
| twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have
| messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
|
| But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW
| connected as fast as possible.
|
| Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You
| could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a
| conventional solar farm.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar.
|
| As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is
| very different when it comes out of a different account.
|
| (everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and
| government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital
| spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers
| of new homes)
| ben_w wrote:
| While true in general, I suspect that this won't change
| house prices as (I think) those are more driven by supply-
| demand imbalances rather than the actual costs, and that
| the increase in costs will go into someone else's profit
| margin, which may be some mix of the builders (although
| they're famously opaque from all the sub-contracting) and
| the land owners.
| Ray20 wrote:
| Regulations like these make the entire renewable energy
| sector seem like a crazy scam and greenwashing.
|
| They might not have much of an impact on property values
| (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building
| regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a
| result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise
| consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up
| windmills.
| ben_w wrote:
| On the one hand, it's been obviously economically a good
| idea to require this for about a decade, both because PV
| is cheap and would pay for itself even at full price and
| also because doing it construction time is cheaper than
| doing it later.
|
| Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square
| metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up
| to the grid afterwards.
|
| On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did
| Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the
| consequences.
| leoedin wrote:
| > But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW
| connected as fast as possible.
|
| I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is
| high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and
| paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels
| to a large grid scale one.
|
| But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the
| government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on
| their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is
| not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of
| households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra
| 12% of installed solar capacity.
|
| Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now.
| But it's also almost free.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| US costs for rooftop solar (at build time or retrofit) are
| misleadingly high.
|
| In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs
| but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.
|
| To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost
| competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the
| US only utility scale is competitive with that.
|
| Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in
| the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when
| pushing into the grid
|
| Neither of these is going to be true for the UK balcony scheme
| (you can't get export generation pricing unless it's an MCS-
| certified install).
|
| > drive up the truck tolls.
|
| The price of diesel is going to do this anyway very soon.
| vrganj wrote:
| Thinking of this in terms of markets is the real ideologically
| driven inefficiency.
| dust42 wrote:
| You can spend every euro or dollar only once. If you consider
| CO2 emissions a critical problem, then you should spend every
| single dollar as efficiently as possible. Obviously
| independence of fossil fuels has a value too, as the current
| situation in the middle east shows.
|
| It would make much more sense to import (renewable)
| electricity from Spain to Germany than strawberries.
| vrganj wrote:
| You shouldn't be spending euros or dollars at all. The
| economic system is the ideology holding us back.
| danaris wrote:
| So...what _should_ we be spending?
|
| Gold coins? Pesos? Cows? Inferior-quality copper ingots?
|
| It's entirely possible that you have a good point, but if
| so, it's gonna need a whole hell of a lot more context to
| elucidate.
| pjscott wrote:
| If money ever starts looking particularly illusory, try
| thinking in terms of the underlying resources that
| markets allocate.
|
| That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible,
| everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who
| know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured
| photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in
| the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing
| a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread
| for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The
| web of collaboration between all these far-flung people
| who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate
| to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most
| of our material stuff.
|
| ... And in a conventional market system, the core of how
| those people coordinate their efforts is _money_. The
| price that each person is willing to buy something for or
| sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about
| it relative to other things. And markets are one popular
| way of aggregating that information, helping guide
| society 's cooperative efforts in the direction of what
| people care about.
|
| There are various allocation systems that don't involve
| money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based
| mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to
| discourage freeloading, for example, can be found _all
| over the place_ in pre-modern history because it worked -
| as long as your community was small enough that you can
| realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th
| century, there were a number of efforts to scale up
| operations research toward the level of nations, since
| suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-
| trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures
| were both instructive.)
|
| --
|
| Coordination problems are _hugely_ underrated in
| political discourse. So when I hear people say things
| like "The economic system is the ideology holding us
| back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this
| person thought about a what a viable alternative would
| look like?
|
| "I dislike the current system" is only the first and most
| trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has
| to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a
| way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed
| discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant
| historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink
| here.]"
| myrmidon wrote:
| No this would not make more sense.
|
| Grids are not set up to move significant percentages of
| national consumption over longer distances, and expansion
| is slow, expensive and prone to nimbyism.
|
| Countries already struggle to move electrical energy inside
| their own borders (e.g. Germany: north=>south), shifting
| double digit percentages of national consumption across
| Europe is not gonna happen any time soon. Germany alone
| plans to spend at least ~EUR100bn over the next decade on
| this (internally, not on connecting Spain!).
|
| Much more effective to focus on local generation first than
| to try and rely on slightly better conditions for solar
| panels half a continent away.
| tjansen wrote:
| As soon as everybody is paying spot prices, balcony power
| stations are not economically viable anymore. Even today, on a
| sunny day, spot prices for electricity are either very low or
| even negative. The more solar power is available, the lower
| these prices will be. So your balcony power station is
| replacing electricity you could get for free anyway. At night,
| when you are not producing electricity, you still need to buy
| the expensive electricity from fossil plants.
|
| The reason why personal solar installations are profitable is
| that you can buy electricity for fixed prices from your local
| power company. You pay the average of the vastly different low
| (or negative) prices during the day and the extremely expensive
| prices on windstill nights. Solar allows you to use your own
| electricity when the average is below spot prices, and get
| power for much less when the price you pay is cheaper than spot
| prices. It's like a state-approved scheme to play the market in
| the name of decarbonization while actually increasing everybody
| else's prices and possibly even CO2 emissions.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > spot prices for electricity
|
| There are various good websites for showing the UK generation
| mix, but pricing seems less public. A lot seems to be done on
| day-ahead, which is pricing for the whole day not minute by
| minute. Is there a minute-by-minute ticker? Tariff?
|
| (the reason I'm asking is that I'm skeptical as to how true
| this is for places that aren't California)
| tialaramex wrote:
| You can see spot prices at the top of grid.iamkate.com for
| example.
|
| It would be nice to have some belated insight into how the
| bids look. Like maybe a few random hours released from a
| week ago?
|
| Oh, and it's half hours. You can't buy or sell five minutes
| of electricity, just half hours, which is why your smart
| meter also thinks in half hours. 48 periods per day.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Wow, PS100 per MWh and 12% is fossil fuels in the mix at
| 10:48am ... a bit more Solar adoption and maybe that 12%
| could go away, it's morning after all.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's windy (41% wind). Solar is not great all day long
| and all year long in the UK (8% solar at the moment, it
| is a cloudy day).
| pjc50 wrote:
| Aha - that led me to https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/system-
| prices , which shows that for the last week prices have
| been hovering in 80-180 range, and there was only one
| period of negative pricing during the day.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| To me this illustrates that with renewables (solar and wind)
| the key is storage. You want to grab all you can during
| excess production/very low prices periods and then use that
| for the rest of the day.
|
| You can do exactly that by buying battery packs but (1) they
| are more expensice pieces of kit than solar panels and (2)
| capacity and output of DYI/plug in systems is very limited.
|
| A quick check online also says that (in the UK) peak spot
| prices are usually 7am-10am and 5pm-9pm, which are basically
| when demand picks up or hasn't dropped yet while solar panels
| are useless...
| tjansen wrote:
| > You want to grab all you can during excess
| production/very low prices periods and then use that for
| the rest of the day.
|
| Batteries help, but even that is limited in northern
| countries like the UK. If you look at the data, in July
| '25, solar produced 2.36 TWh. But in December '25, it was
| only 0.535 TWh: the output in summer is >4 times the winter
| output. So either you need to discard 75% of the
| electricity produced in summer, or you need truly gigantic
| batteries that store power produced in summer for winter.
| Both is not economical. Solar is far less efficient in the
| UK than in, for example, Florida.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| In the UK wind contributes more to the grid that solar
| (not unexpected). Overall the issue with either or both
| is still that production varies widly over time including
| within a day.
|
| With solar specifically you have the obvious day/night
| cycle, which makes storage required to make the most of
| it.
| tpm wrote:
| > As soon as everybody is paying spot prices
|
| Which is never, because even then you are still paying some
| sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network
| fees.
|
| The price of electricity from the network also has to include
| the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to
| recoup initial investment.
|
| Of course this means given enough home installations (in
| places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the
| network will rise, more people will install their own
| stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read
| somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already
| in Pakistan.
| vablings wrote:
| This is why smart meters are important to providers, they can
| more accurately model the spot pricing adjustments which
| means that you actually use LESS fossil fuels. Also most new
| meter installs support bi-directional metering
| Xylakant wrote:
| The price of water has gone up for a multitude of factors. One
| of them is water savings in general, but not primarily because
| the sewage system requires regular flushes. The reason is that
| water gets paid per qubic meter and includes a fresh water and
| a waster water component. The assumption is that almost all
| fresh water you use ends up as waste water. Now, the grid has a
| very substantial fixed-price component that's largely
| independent from the actual current volume being used. Putting
| pipes in the ground and maintaining them there is an actual
| costly endeavour. If water use now drops, and the baseline cost
| remains stable, then it's entirely expected that the price per
| volume rises. It's simple math. The same baseline cost needs to
| be brought in via less volume.
|
| This will also happen to people that use residential gas. As
| less and less people use residential gas, the maintenance of
| the gas network gets distributed among less and less customers.
|
| > The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get
| subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing
| into the grid.
|
| They are subsidized on purchase, but the price they get when
| pushing energy into the grid is by default fixed at 0. The
| network accepts the power, but there's no payment. It's also
| capped at 800W delivery, meaning that at peak power generation,
| you'd earn a whopping 5 cent an hour with the current subsidy
| for full scale solar power. So in practice, the only benefit
| owners have is that they draw less power from the net which is
| much more attractive because of the pricing structure. You can,
| optionally, register your balcony power station as a regular
| solar power plant, but then you're subject to a whole bunch of
| rules and regulations (for example you need a suitable
| elctricity meter etc.). This option is generally not attractive
| for such small power generations.
|
| Fundamentally, though, the same issue as with the water and gas
| network exists with all localized (solar) power generation. If
| more and more people use the grid only as a backup, or for
| winter energy needs, then the overhead of maintaining the grid
| will have a larger cost contribution to the total cost of
| electricity.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Fairly boilerplate article, but the bit that is news is the UK
| balcony solar permitting. Better longread:
| https://solarenergyconcepts.co.uk/post/plug-in-solar-uk/
|
| Government press release with a long list of pull quotes:
| https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...
|
| (I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became
| PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this
| a decade ago. It is embarrassing to be beaten on environmentalist
| regulatory efficiency by _Germany_ )
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband
| became PM because he didn 't eat a bacon sandwich, we could
| have had this a decade ago_
|
| I read what is happening in exactly the opposite way. To me it
| shows that Milliand and the government at large do very little
| with no strategic thinking and no plan (same as the guys before
| in fairness but this government was supposed to be soo
| different...) and, in this case, is only reacting in a panic
| after almost 2 years in office to the pressure of "doing
| something" because of the Iran war, while also being told
| (slight mitigating circumstances for Milliband) that it mustn't
| cost anything. I always picture scenes from The Thick of It/ In
| the Loop when I imagine how they come up with 'ideas'.
| teamonkey wrote:
| These policies were in their manifesto, they just take some
| time to enact, even with a majority government.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| He also removed the effective ban on onshore wind construction
| that was introduced a month after he lost the election,
| restarting after a decade of lost opportunity.
|
| This Trump-level idiocy that is just never mentioned, even as
| people blame the gas burned in england on windy days as a cost
| of wind curtailment, when the curtailment is more a like a
| third of the cost. Burning gas to power people who chose not to
| build turbines is the other 2/3rds.
|
| In the alternate world that is tens of billions of gas costs
| avoided to date and tens of billions more in future.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| At the same time they are banning wind turbines leaders
| (Chinese companies) from opening factories in the UK...
| [1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c995xjxk97mo
|
| [2] https://www.energyvoice.com/insights/energy-
| opinion/594763/m...
| tim333 wrote:
| That seems rather dumb. I wonder why they blocked the Ming
| Yang thing in Scotland? The UK seems to make quite a lot of
| dumb energy decisions like blocking UK North Sea gas and
| then buying North Sea gas from Norway.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes it is rather 'dumb'. Apparently the policy is to
| reset relations with the EU so perhaps selling out to
| Siemens is deemed preferable, or perhaps they got the
| usual friendly phone call from Washington D.C, it is
| difficult to follow. And that's the point: Where is the
| plan? Where is strategic thinking?
| petre wrote:
| China bad. In case of supply chain attack perhaps. It
| doesn't matter anyway because the Chinese have basically
| won by moving forward while others were bikeshedding,
| focusing on diesel emissions cheat devices, closing down
| nuclear power stations, burning Russian gas on a windy
| day, not having a proper grid capacity to move electrons
| South, delivering brexit and so on.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| There's just not much gas left in the UK North Sea.
|
| > Industry body Offshore Energy UK (OEUK) claims that
| more oil and gas could be extracted by 2050. However, the
| 'High Case' scenario for future production in a report
| for OEUK would still mean that 92% of production has
| already occurred.
|
| ...
|
| > Compared to the maximum oil production that occurred in
| 1999, UK output in 2025 was 77% (over three-quarters)
| lower.
|
| https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/around-90-of-uk-
| north-...
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Once upon a time, Brits could build gensets and reduction
| gears. In Britain, even.
| oliwarner wrote:
| British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe
| plan.
|
| Of course they would because it's work being taken away from
| them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into
| ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even
| guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than
| fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No
| guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the cheapest inverters
| to sync frequency accurately. And
|
| I have more faith in German standards and work ethic than our
| own.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The situation in germany is essentially the same, but that's
| why net supply by these is limited to 800 W. I don't think
| anything changes w.r.t. earth leakage, why would the presence
| of the solar supply change anything from the RCD and fault
| point of views, respectively?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Not expert but one difference is that in Germany the
| standard wiring is radial circuits with 16A MCBs while in
| the UK it's ring wiring with 32A MCBs.
|
| So in the UK we have 2.5mm^2 wires in a ring on a 32A
| MCBs... Of course a 2.5mm^2 wire is rated ~20A so any
| issues with the ring (sockets still work since connected
| from the other branch) can burn the wire before the MCB
| trips...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The "standard" wiring is 1.5mm2 on 16A MCBs which are
| rated to trip at 1.13-1.45x nominal current (so 18-23 A).
| So this is already mildly improper because you can pull
| elevated currents continuously and dramatically shorten
| the life of the insulation.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I find it interesting because often the best way to achieve a
| safe building code is to learn by allowing with basic guard
| rails and iterating as things happen. This isn't ideal for
| the rare individual impacted by the "things happening," but
| collectively we refine and iterate. Our current standards
| weren't arrived at by navel gazing - we got the codes we have
| by experience. It's hard to realize that from the present
| that you can't reasonably learn without doing and by
| constraining without learning prevents growth and learning.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Are there lessons on safety that need to be learned here?
| We already know what the happy path looks like, and we've
| plenty of lessons on what the unhappy path will look like.
|
| It isn't as if electric charge coming from balcony solar
| panels is some new magical-seeming type of electricity.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Safety is statistical and depends on human behavior.
| Unexpected behaviors might appear. For example some
| places require a power outlet on kitchen islands because
| with out, people will use cords to the wall which creates
| tripping hazards.
|
| Also, why do wires have to be fixed to joists every 300
| mm? It's not about the electrons.
| jerlam wrote:
| "Things happen" is a interesting way to say "houses burn
| down and kill everyone inside". And I don't believe that
| electrical standards were developed with the idea that
| houses could both consume and generate electricity.
|
| Not to mention that most houses aren't up to current
| electrical standards, much less fire codes.
| labcomputer wrote:
| "Unidirectional breakers" aren't a thing for AC circuits.
| jonatron wrote:
| https://www.bgelectrical.uk/uk/circuit-
| protection/devices/rc... Right there, both bidirectional
| and unidirectional breakers.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| It would be really interesting to know what's so special
| about these UK units that they can be "damaged" by being
| fed from the "wrong" side (as per some other article),
| considering that the only place where these behave like
| that is an island north of France.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Not in the US, but in parts of Europe they effectively use
| AFCI/GFCI breakers for everything.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those are code in the us now too. (with exceptions for
| where they don't make sense)
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Yes they are. Current alternates direction, but power
| usually only flows in one direction, from the input
| terminal (from the bus bar) to the output terminal (that
| the circuit is wired into).
|
| If the circuit will be supplying power too (e.g. battery
| storage, an EV and EVSE that supports powering the house
| from the EV, etc) then you need a bidirectional RCBO.
|
| People with no differential fault protection need not worry
| about any of this, they'll just be killed when it goes
| badly wrong.
|
| Source: Am a UK electrician
|
| Example: https://assets.cef.co.uk/downloads/pdg/wylex_nhxs1
| b32_datash...
|
| EDIT: To say nothing of people with unidirectional
| electricity meters; plugging these into those setups will
| get them prosecuted for electricity theft. All SMETS 2
| smart meters are bidirectional; you'd best check your meter
| if it isn't one of those.
| gib444 wrote:
| British governments have a terrible record with all eco schemes
| (mostly handouts to conmen). I don't expect this to be
| different
|
| And it is of course home-counties obsessed thinking. They can
| both afford these toys and also have more sun
| misja111 wrote:
| Can anybody explain how these plug-in solar panels work? I am
| suprised that it's possible to just plug them in to your wall
| socket.
|
| For instance, isn't it complicated to have their output be in
| perfect sync with the frequency that comes in via the electricity
| net? Because to me it seems that if they won't, you will have
| lower benefits or even a net minus after plugging it in.
| canpan wrote:
| Not a specialist, just from what I heard: There are two things
| that make it work. First they are not really "independent" like
| the title says. They sync with the grid frequency. If the grid
| is down they shut off for safety. The other reason it works is
| that the grid power inside the home is just what you get as
| incoming power ~ 230V. For example, I think in the US you get
| 240V or so delivered to your house, but 120V from the plug.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| My understanding is that plug-in solar inverters do sense what
| is coming from the grid and phase-sync to it with a PLL, and
| also adjust voltage accordingly.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > isn't it complicated to have their output be in perfect sync
| with the frequency
|
| Not especially, given that the inverter has a microprocessor in
| it. All it has to do is measure the phase of the existing grid.
|
| I don't have references for how it's actually done, but one
| obvious approach is simply to wait at each zero-crossing for a
| new half-cycle to cross a voltage threshold before turning on
| the output. This also implements the requirement to drop out if
| the grid goes away. It is probably also possible to measure
| during the "off" side of inverter output PWM, in the same way
| that variable frequency motor drivers work.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Typically, you have "dumb" panels connected to a mppt-
| controller/charger/inverter box which is connected to batteries
| and and electrical plug. This controller tunes voltage/current
| that is taken from the panels, optionally manages the attached
| battery and measures and feeds into the grid connection.
|
| Some systems are capable of running in isolation from grid
| (providing 230V AC on their own), but this is less common and
| often unnecessary.
| wyldfire wrote:
| I guess if you can solve phase alignment then another big
| problem is grid capability?
|
| If everyone plugged one in, could the transmission network
| reliably deliver the power generated where it's needed? I
| thought that was a serious long term challenge for utilities
| wrt solar.
| gorbypark wrote:
| The micro inverter (most of these balcony kits use micro
| inverters) uses the grid as the reference. Most of these
| inverters will actually do nothing when the grid goes down.
| Like, they shut down for safety so you are not back feeding the
| grid, but even if you had some sort of back feeding isolation
| going on, they would still do nothing because they don't have
| the reference of the grid.
|
| It's a downside of many grid tied residential systems (even
| large ones). No grid = no solar.
|
| The Enphase IQ8 series is one of the first mass market micro
| inverters based systems to have the ability to make its own
| tiny electric island when the grid goes down. Requires an
| isolation switch and a relatively power hungry controller to
| use that feature, though. I looked into them for a balcony
| solar setup but it would be way overkill to run a full on
| controller for 800w of solar!
|
| The best way for a small setup is just have a small "solar
| generator" battery that can take MC4 connectors as input.
| Prolonged power outage? Unplug the inverter, plug in the
| battery.
| itsmek wrote:
| Syncing them with electricity is easy. The hard part is
| preventing export to the grid which requires either a
| compatible smart meter that can communicate with your panels or
| a transformer clamp installed by an electrician. My
| understanding is some meters measure both directions equally so
| if you do end up exporting power you can conceivably increase
| your utility bill.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| They are going to start selling solar panels at Lidl, a German-
| owned grocery store chain
| https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/house-garden/l...
| gorbypark wrote:
| I saw a video from the UK government with a guy walking down
| the aisle of a Lidl talking about it! I quickly went to Lidl.es
| to look as these 800w balcony solar setups are legal here in
| Spain. Unfortunately they don't sell the here! Maybe once the
| UK does it they'll start.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Related, there's also a boom in at-home battery installations.
|
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/switzerland-...
| roysting wrote:
| So where are these solar panels that are providing this energy
| independence being made? In Europe, right?
|
| Because if they were being made in, e.g., China, that wouldn't
| really be independence any more than being a trust fund nepo baby
| makes you a great success.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Once you've bought the panel, unlike oil, that's it. The panel
| doesn't remember its national origin.
| glimshe wrote:
| And panels last forever, ensuring that Europe won't have to
| deal with panel manufacturers ever again.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Warranty lives tend to be in the 20+ year range and
| potential lifespan even higher, so .. kinda?
|
| By coincidence I had my solar panels installed round about
| the time construction started on Hinkley Point C. They've
| already paid back their installation cost. I don't expect
| to replace them any time soon.
| abenga wrote:
| You have 20 years after buying them to set up a local
| supply chain.
| jandrese wrote:
| Historically panels are generally considered to be
| exhausted after 30 years of service, although even that
| means they're down to 80% of their original capacity.
|
| The more failure prone component is the inverter, by a huge
| margin.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Once you 've bought the panel, unlike oil, that's it. The
| panel doesn't remember its national origin._
|
| Until there's a geopolitical event occurs and your supply
| chain gets cut off so any expansion, warranty, or replacement
| units cannot arrive, so you're stuck at the your current
| level of deployment (which may or may not be sufficient for
| your needs).
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's certainly an issue, but much, much less critical
| than gas.
|
| Are people really suggesting the opposite: that the
| renewables transition should _not_ occur, and the EU should
| continue to burn gas from more and more desperate sources,
| until it can be onshored?
| danaris wrote:
| That's nowhere near the level of dependency that fossil
| fuels bring.
|
| Barring significant damage, you can maintain approximately
| your current level of power generation for _years_ at a
| time without more than routine maintenance.
|
| Fossil fuel power requires _constant_ input of, well,
| _fossil fuels_.
|
| So while what you're saying is true, it would be a
| ludicrous stretch to say that it brings solar panels within
| a few orders of magnitude of fossil fuels in terms of
| dependency on foreign powers.
| michaelteter wrote:
| This is normal business. Suppliers change due to all kinds
| of reasons. If you are planning any major build and you
| haven't also planned contingency cases, including alternate
| suppliers, then you are not qualified to be in charge of
| such a build.
|
| And it's not like you cannot find good alternatives outside
| of China. They may be more expensive, but they exist (and
| are high quality - Germany).
| vablings wrote:
| Solar panels are piss-cheap to make. They are literally
| just glass with a transistor on them (huge
| oversimplification)
|
| All of the materials used are readily available and
| manufacturing is not incredibly difficult. Inverters and
| control circuitry is way more of a risk than the panels
| themselves but there are stockpiles and sources that are
| good for many places
| jandrese wrote:
| That is a problem. The only way it could be worse is if
| your technology required a constant supply of input from a
| foreign country...
|
| From a geopolitical standpoint running a country on locally
| produced renewable power is obviously the least risky
| approach, even if you get cut off from further expansion of
| your renewable production.
| michaelteter wrote:
| > In Europe, right?
|
| Germany makes a lot of high quality solar panels.
|
| But whether you like China or not, buying their panels and
| equipment to make yourself energy independent is a reasonable
| option, especially if (when) their products are good quality
| and priced well.
|
| Your independence is only at risk if China decides to stop
| offering you the things you need. In that case, your future
| supplier will have to change. But not only is that unlikely to
| happen, it's irrelevant to the NOW. In the NOW, you could be
| buying tons of what you need to become self-sufficient.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Clearly uneducated take.
|
| The photos hitting my solar panel don't travel through the
| straight of Hormuz.
| triceratops wrote:
| Countries other than China make panels too. India is dealing
| with an oversupply from domestic production right now:
| https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f...
| roysting wrote:
| There is so much darn what-about coping going here. I can't
| help people with their emotional rationalization.
|
| Fact of the matter is still getting your source of energy
| from India, when you are not India, is still not energy
| independence either, regardless of whether or not you do or
| do not like India more or less than China.
|
| The craziest part about all of this is that Europe is quite
| literally not independent in any way whatsoever, especially
| not in matters of energy of any kind.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| "We periodically need replacements for our magical energy
| making machines" is a problem, but it is orders of magnitude
| less severe than "we will run out of fuel for our furnaces
| tomorrow."
|
| That said, "running out" of oil isn't necessarily a real
| problem for the US, as we're net exporters of oil. The oil we
| export isn't the same kind as the oil we refine, but we _could_
| build refineries to refine our own oil and achieve
| "independence" that way. It'd just be less profitable.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "Suddenly" is horrific evidence that the government has no idea
| how to do long-term plans.
|
| Wait until you tell them you can run cars entirely on electricity
| from a solar farming. I'm sure they will ignore you until the
| price of diesel reaches four-digit territory. 1000p today? If
| only we didn't have to pay these incredible prices, what a
| miracle that would be..
| michaelteter wrote:
| It's not that government has no idea, it's that around the
| world, too many "leaders" are directly or strongly indirectly
| being enriched by the fossil fuel industry and their support
| industries.
|
| So politicians have a choice: do what's right for the people,
| or gain more power/money for themselves. Not every one of them
| chooses poorly, but enough do that it is difficult for real
| progress to be made.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Don't forget the truly _staggering_ amount of voters who seem
| to be ideologically opposed to energy independence and self
| delusion to support those bought politicians.
|
| People earnestly and genuinely spout "But the birds" to wind
| installations. Why are they so intent on taking any possible
| excuse? Why do they _need_ to have an opinion on something
| they know nothing about?
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| For european individuals, yes. For european nations, not in the
| least. They try to avoid independent consumers and producers of
| energy with all the regulations they can throw to them.
| myrmidon wrote:
| What nations are you talking about? E.g. in Germany, you can
| buy up to 7kW of panels, screw them onto your roof, wire them
| up with controller and battery and feed up to 800W into local
| grid, no one is gonna stop you or anything (only thing you need
| to do is register online with the grid operator if you have
| >2kW of panels).
|
| Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e.
| landlord) actually _can 't_ easily stop you from doing this.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| The limits in power you can install, power you can inject to
| the grid and power you can just directly sell to neighbours
| through a micro-grid (zeeo, as it's illegal) tell quite the
| story.
| MandieD wrote:
| A quick check of OBI (our main home-improvement chain) shows
| that I can get that 800w "balcony" plug-and-go system for
| 300-600 EUR depending on the exact panels and inverter I want,
| and it's all pre-approved. I have fill in a simple, free form
| online announcing that I've done so or am planning to, and I'm
| now technically an energy seller - my local utility pays some
| for power fed back into the network (not nearly the rate they
| charge for delivering power, but better than a poke in the eye
| with a sharp stick). If I don't want to accept 0.08 EUR/kWH,
| I'm free to plug in a battery for any excess. Our base load
| when I have my work computer and monitor on during the day is
| somewhere in the neighborhood of 300w, so I think this would
| work out well for us. I need to get off my bum and do it.
|
| Shockingly unbureaucratic for Germany.
|
| There is, as one could imagine, somewhat more burden for larger
| systems that require the involvement of someone who is actually
| an electrician, but I don't want my neighbors to be able to DIY
| fire hazards.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Yeah, as long as you are basically giving free power to your
| provider, it's all good.
|
| God forbid you produce more, or try to sell it for market
| prices or even sell it directly to other individuals through
| a microgrid.
| bokohut wrote:
| Several recent HN posts about "time" and these correlate superbly
| in relation to the now obvious, to nearly all, global energy
| issues. Those proactive in a reactive world are often mocked and
| laughed at until as such passage of time is achieved for those
| only reactive to learn of the proactive's hindsight choices. For
| those in the United States aware of the 'behind the scenes'
| energy grid issues this insight reflects that prices will not be
| dropping for those electrons we all so depressively require daily
| just like our air and water. Energy grid decentralization is
| occurring with the actions of each individual and this article
| supports exactly that because no one alive can survive in our
| modern world without those electrons. "Necessity is the mother of
| invention" only now resonates for some while the futurists here
| that acted long ago acutely understand this growing trend.
| exabrial wrote:
| EU had quite a bit of energy independence with its nuclear fleet
| at one point.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i have been looking on this for an year+.. Here some current
| (online-shops) prices in Bulgaria.. say shop.chepakov.com /
| kameasolar.com - panel 490Wp 2sq.m chinese = ~80E
| - battery 5kwh Li chinese = ~1200E , non-chinese ~2000E+ -
| hybrid invertor+charger 4kw = ~800E chinese , ~2000E non-chinese
| - grid and regulations: -- day price: 0.15E/kWh, night:
| 0.09E/kWh -- no such thing as spot prices - summer or
| winter, peak sun or midnight, no difference -- can install
| anything AS LONG AS Nothing goes back into grid - and does not
| break other city/dwelling rules
|
| if one gets the electronics from Germany - geizheis.de - prices
| are half, coz a) no VAT, b) less middlemen . Even some smaller
| things come with free postage - from Germany to Bulgaria ; i did
| buy several smaller chargers/inverters (5kg), while local sellers
| here have no such ideas. But anyway.
|
| The (proven) efficiency one can get is about 50-60% per Wp (if
| there is sun). So.. it depends how much panels one can install as
| that is the monie-source, all else is monie-sink :/
|
| Rough Napkin math, electronics with german prices, ~5 hours per
| day sun on average: 10 panels (1000E) + 2 batteries (2000E) +
| inverter (1000E) ~~4000E yielding on average 440kwh/month i.e.
| pay itself in 5-7+ years, mostly for summer loads. While 5 panels
| + 1 battery + inverter ~2500E -> ~220kwh/month -> 6-8+ years
|
| BUT only IF you can use that much electricity, otherwise it will
| take much longer to repay. And, batteries have to be replaced
| probably in 5-7 years, depending on depth-of-discharge.
|
| In most places here everything is electrical. i have convectors,
| boilers, stove, etc. No A/C. (all other electrics is maybe under
| 2kw in total). i use like day/night 400/250kWh in summer,
| 1400/800 kWh in winter. Some people have noisy heat pumps but
| doubt that changes things much.
|
| If it was a separate house - i would have done it long ago. But
| it's a block of flats.
|
| So... small Balcony stuff makes no sense (a very expensive UPS?),
| big balcony stuff (like putting those 5 panels as balcony's
| shade.. a) probably won't be allowed, b) only a short balcony
| faces south-ish.
|
| The roof of the building is empty - 250sq.m - and can hold about
| 75 panels - but dividing that into 15 (or 50+ in higher
| buildings).. is not pretty. a) Making one single farm and
| splitting the bill/output seems the only reasonable way but does
| not work without completely rewiring the building's grid input
| and measurings; not doable without bunch of
| permissions/certifications ; while b) making 15 separate
| 5-panels-packs - is not much economical, plus few kilometers of
| cables.. And c) If only few people want panels on roof, maybe
| some form of renting the roof space from others who don't want..
| may work for a while but as any renting, may go crazy.
|
| So.. been sitting and thinking.. and recently seems only
| sitting..
| Aboutplants wrote:
| In the US, Distribution costs (the separate charge outside of
| your energy cost on your utility bill) are also incredibly high
| and going to keep rising as infrastructure costs mount. In my
| area, my distribution costs is actually more than my energy cost
| so the only way I ever think about solar is if I can decouple
| from the grid completely and get rid of those distribution costs.
| Got a long lo no ways to go
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