this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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First image is of an overcast sky with a guy with two nearly-vertical solar panels
Third image is of a small solar panel under a roof receiving a little bit of light at an extreme angle through an opening in a covered attic balcony
Here's a solar farm in the US:
https://www.energy-storage.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/de-shaw-1024x731.jpg
It's pulling a lot more power per panel.
Another:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/images/project_profiles/img_az_navajo_nation_kayenta_solar_program.jpg
Another:
https://cdn.orsted.com/-/media/feature/vocastimport/orsted_permianenergycenter_cod_0398_698890436958977.png?mh=1440
Does it make sense to stick solar panels on a house relative to drawing power from a solar farm? Sure, it can, if your house is remote and it's costly to connect it to the grid, or if what you're after is a secondary, backup source of power if you lose grid connectivity.
But if what you want is cost-effective generation, it's preferable to stick a panel on a solar farm somewhere where one can leverage economies of scale, maintenance is easy and done by someone who maintains a ton of these on a regular basis, and where you're optimizing location and panel orientation for solar potential.
Like, if you want more solar power on the European grid, you probably want more solar farms in Spain, which has substantially more solar potential than Germany:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Not someone sticking them on their balcony in Germany.
What Germany could do to help solar and wind, if it wants to do so, is drop complaints about building (inexpensive) above-ground transmission pylons, which would help smooth out different generation at different locations on the European grid.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/farmers-and-grid-operators-demand-end-rules-prioritising-underground-power-lines-germany
EDIT: If you want to criticize the US for something as solar goes, it'd probably be Trump throwing tariffs on everything, which makes it more costly to deploy solar panels and other electrical hardware manufactured abroad.
The biggest advantage of balcony-mounted solar panels, at least where I live, is that you need 0 permits. You don't need to ask your neighbors, you don't need to ask your power company, you don't need a building permit, you don't need an electrician and you don't need a solar company to install them for you.
They don't replace large solar farms but if you incentivize people to DIY their solar installation you get tons of additional cheap and clean energy from a source that would be wasted otherwise.
What are you powering with it? How are you storing the energy? It just doesn't make any economic sense to me. I'd love to see some statistics on the total cost of one of these systems and how much power people are actually getting. Maybe it makes more sense in Germany where energy prices are nearly double the US average. But I'd still love to see some real examples to back that up.
Balcony solar panels are dirt cheap, you can get them for 200-300€, including the micro inverter. You usually do not have batteries in these setups, you just use up the generated power while it is available by moving things like the dishwasher and dryer to that time.
To give some actual numbers, I pay 0.22€ per kWh right now. In the last 30 days (Apr 21 - May 20) the balcony solar panels generated 74.11kWh. The month was fairly average with an even mixture of sunny days and rainy days.
Assuming you can use up the 800W of peak power, you will have saved around 16€ in just those 30 days. I don't have full data for the year yet since I only got mine a few months back but my current estimation is that it will have paid for itself after 2-4 years.
How are you getting power to your appliances? Someone else suggested back feeding into an outlet which is illegal in the US.
Back feeding is legal here if it is connected to a micro inverter which can turn off immediately when disconnected and never outputs more than 800W.
And this is the answer to why it makes sense in Europe and not the US.