In countries like Germany, balcony-mounted solar panels are all the rage. But from breaker-masking to voltage mismatches, America’s grid isn’t ready for it—yet.
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:
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.
Farmers and grid operators demand end to rules prioritising underground power lines in Germany
The Federal Requirement Plan Act (Bundesbedarfsplangesetzes), which provides a legal framework for the construction of the high-voltage transmission lines needed to reshape the power grid as ever-more of Germany’s power supply comes from renewables, prioritises underground cables over the construction of visible pylons, which have been met with public resistance.
“So far, we are assuming that all projects will be realised as underground cables,” a BNetzA spokesperson told the paper.
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.
You can have an electrician install a system and setup an agreement with an electric company to back feed and be credited. But you cannot just plug something into the wall that backfeeds. Most places in the US that’s illegal. And that’s why it makes less economic sense here. The system will already pay back at a much slower pace because of our lower energy costs. And the increased minimum cost to install makes it much less desirable. It’s not just a regulation problem either. Our outlets aren’t particularly safe for a backfeeding setup.
Here smaller setups require a battery and again, that increases the cost. You mostly only see larger whole home rooftop installs because of this.
Outlets dont really have an orientation. Shouldnt matter which direction the power is flowing as long as you dont exceed 80% the rating of the lowest denominator of the circuit. 800 watts shouldn’t really hurt any circuits, even the 10amp ones which is about the smallest I think I’ve ever seen here.
Backfeeding is only illegal in the sense of safety requirements to my knowledge. These panels dont feed when grid is off (embedded ATS). Which satisfies safety (UL would just need to approve, but likely wouldn’t until the last item below is addressed). At just 800 watts… I doubt you’d ever backfeed anyway. And if you do, good luck collecting any money for it. But to that point, I backfeed 15kW batteries during peak hours. Above and beyond my solar setup… they can’t really say anything about it. But I go full island when grid is down, which sadly happens often even though I’m in a major metro area.
Lower cost of energy does make it a harder sell overall but that wasn’t really the question. These panels are also significantly cheaper since you dont need to pay install fees and such. The equation is a bit different.
The only real hiccup is the nature of our phased systems here… a solar panel in a single outlet will only feed one phase.That’s a problem. One that probably makes it a nonstarter as people simply wont install 240v outlets on their patios/balconies. But I don’t think Ive seen a law that says backfeed illegal, but illegal to cause safety issues on dead grid (eg. you must have an ATS or main service lockout). Do you have a source on illegality outside ot ATS/lockout requirement?
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.
You plug it straight into the wall, it syncs to the grid and back-feeds it, up to 800W. Your meter stops spinning (or even goes backwards)
Back feeding is illegal in the US.
So… if backfeeding is illegal. How does home solar work in the US?
You can have an electrician install a system and setup an agreement with an electric company to back feed and be credited. But you cannot just plug something into the wall that backfeeds. Most places in the US that’s illegal. And that’s why it makes less economic sense here. The system will already pay back at a much slower pace because of our lower energy costs. And the increased minimum cost to install makes it much less desirable. It’s not just a regulation problem either. Our outlets aren’t particularly safe for a backfeeding setup.
Here smaller setups require a battery and again, that increases the cost. You mostly only see larger whole home rooftop installs because of this.
Outlets dont really have an orientation. Shouldnt matter which direction the power is flowing as long as you dont exceed 80% the rating of the lowest denominator of the circuit. 800 watts shouldn’t really hurt any circuits, even the 10amp ones which is about the smallest I think I’ve ever seen here.
Backfeeding is only illegal in the sense of safety requirements to my knowledge. These panels dont feed when grid is off (embedded ATS). Which satisfies safety (UL would just need to approve, but likely wouldn’t until the last item below is addressed). At just 800 watts… I doubt you’d ever backfeed anyway. And if you do, good luck collecting any money for it. But to that point, I backfeed 15kW batteries during peak hours. Above and beyond my solar setup… they can’t really say anything about it. But I go full island when grid is down, which sadly happens often even though I’m in a major metro area.
Lower cost of energy does make it a harder sell overall but that wasn’t really the question. These panels are also significantly cheaper since you dont need to pay install fees and such. The equation is a bit different.
The only real hiccup is the nature of our phased systems here… a solar panel in a single outlet will only feed one phase.That’s a problem. One that probably makes it a nonstarter as people simply wont install 240v outlets on their patios/balconies. But I don’t think Ive seen a law that says backfeed illegal, but illegal to cause safety issues on dead grid (eg. you must have an ATS or main service lockout). Do you have a source on illegality outside ot ATS/lockout requirement?