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points by lompad 2 days ago | 0 comments

For germany:

For balcony panels you only have to do a very small registration, but no large bureaucratic process or getting a permit.

For larger ones you still must get a permit for a very simple reason: even if you don't get your power into the general network, you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability.

We have so much power on sunny days now that we can barely deal with it. Which in turn occasionally even causes power prices to go negative - you can get paid for drawing power.

[–] MakersF 2 days ago

Dealing with power from solar panels is easy: you disconnect them (curtailment). So it's not a problem.

Have you ever wondered how is it possible that the price goes negative? Why would someone pay you to use the energy they produce? Logically, the price shouldn't go below 0 (*) . The reason is that the government gives incentives for each kWh produ ed. So if they pay you 0.10€/kWh, you'll be happy to pay people up to 0.09€/kWh as long as you can keep producing, since your marginal cost is 0. Basically government incentives are producing this situation, paying people to produce electricity nobody wants. It's also the reason why production is far from consumption: the incentives never were designed to push to generate useful electrons, just electrons, even if they cannot be moved to where they are useful. We need to rework how incentives are provided, because this is ending up wasting a ton of public money!

(*) except for power stations were they cannot physically turn it off, but generally they wouldn't be able to produce enough energy to define the marginal price

[–] flakeoil 2 days ago

In that case the government should pay incentives when purchasing an electric car. That way the electricity being produced on sunny days can be stored and used when it is cloudy. Electric cars will also be spread out geographically, quite in line with solar panel installations so that solves for regional and network issues too. And as an added benefit we use less oil (less combustion cars) and less gas (we charge when it is sunny and not when we produce electricity with gas generators).

By using less oil and less gas we reduce CO2 emmissions, save money and are less dependent on other regions far away.

[–] netsharc 2 days ago

I wonder if the excess energy could be used to do things like run carbon capture (although I've read that this is very much a pipe dream, that it'll take several magnitudes more carbon capture facilities to counter what we're currently producing).

In a very tiny Canary Island, their battery is many many tonnes of water pumped uphill when they have windpower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXhAj5BHdfM

[–] msby 2 days ago

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is done in the alps (at least in Austria as well)

[–] gniv 2 days ago

Same in France. You also sign that whatever excess you're producing goes to the grid for free.

[–] holgerschurig 2 days ago

> you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability

That is weird and IMHO totally wrong. And I'm living in Germany. Anyone here can e.g. create an isolated network, without any permission. The local electricity provider etc doesn't care. All they care however that they remove the counter and the main circuit breaker at their end, to really isolate your house from the rest.

[–] lompad 1 day ago

Maybe I phrased it badly, the scenario I have in mind is this:

you have a house, taking power from the grid. Then you want to become more self-sufficient and add solar, but don't want to sell to the grid, just for yourself. If the solar installation and its circuit is not _fully_ separate from the one connected to the grid you have to get a permit even if it's a "Nulleinspeiseanlage".

Yes, technically you could make everything completely separate, then it would be fine. But I haven't seen that in the wild a single time so far.

[–] zarzavat 2 days ago

This doesn’t make any sense. You also use less electricity if you switch off your devices. I think Germans just have a fetish for permits.

[–] leonidasrup 2 days ago

Adherence to regulations is one of the reasons why the German grid is so reliable.

The Germans manage their electric grid very well, the last major electric blackout in Germany was in 2006. (More than 15 million clients of the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) did not have access to electricity for about two hours on this date.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

On the other hand electric grids in Philippines are quite unreliable and economic losses caused by blackouts are quite high:

" That is a brutal reminder that every blackout doesn’t just kill the lights; it sets the nation’s money, productivity, and economic progress on fire. " https://mb.com.ph/2026/10/26/blackouts-heavy-price-tag-is-ga...

[–] lompad 2 days ago

Regarding reliability: Absolutely. I honestly didn't experience a major blackout in my entire life in germany. I always forget just how big of a problem that still is for many countries and areas.

[–] richjdsmith 2 days ago

I grew up in Canada and realized I had no memory of a grid blackout (or even brownout for that matter). Google tells me the last time Canada saw a blackout event was in 2003, affecting only one province (not the one I live in), and it lasted for only 7 hours for most people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

I had never really considered how stable our grid is until now. I've experienced blackouts in other countries while traveling/living abroad, but Canada has a remarkably well managed grid.

[–] tharkun__ 2 days ago

Canada is large. Your local experience may not match everyone's lived experience. And yes, I'm not in but very close to one of the major Canadian cities, not in the actual boonies.

Also you may not care for Ontario and Quebec but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Canada_ice_storm Much more recently.

I can count more years where I've used the generator multiple times a year than years where I did not have to use the generator. Given we don't have automatic whole house failover and I have to actually bring it out, fill it, plug a bunch of things into extension cables we run all over the house etc. we only do it for "major" ones i.e. when it's been out for some time and the outage map shows that "it's not just us". And I'm in a part of our town that usually gets the least amount of power outages and is usually the first to get reconnected as well when it does. And our neighbors that do have automatic failovers are what I count as "actually a power outage". That happens even more often. Like the times when I'm like "OK if this goes one more minute I'm gonna 'fold' and go take out the generator". And then it comes back on after half an hour.

This usually happens around the start and end of winter nowadays meaning during storms and especially sleet/ice storms that coat the lines and trees. I.e. I need to remember to fill up the jerry cans soon actually, thanks for the reminder.

Now, vs. say what is being reported of the Philippines there this is still way more reliable but its nowhere near the reliability of what is cited about Germany.

[–] gnabgib 2 days ago

That's an extraordinary experience. That's not everyone's lived experience. Interior BC, or Northern Ontario?

Zero blackouts for me (obviously a different part, but for a while in the one referenced by GP), except a transformer explosion (for me - a very real total lack of power for 7 days, but not the city, province, or Canada). A Canada blackout is impossible right now (we have several separate networks with interties, and each individual network has failsafes preventing an outage spreading). Although, a series of cascading bad decisions could work.. I guess.. if you like that sort of thing.

[–] tharkun__ 2 days ago

Transformer explosion is a really good reference you make there. Not extraordinary at all. Maybe where you are. Not here. Like I said, don't extrapolate from your own Canadian experience to the rest of Canada. There are many thousands of kilometers from coast to coast and the weather is quite different across. I regularly talk to people at work where while I shiver at -20C they sit in the rain in "winter" ;)

The explosions is what we get every single winter. Not necessarily affecting ourselves. But we get "the sky light up" and "loud boom" multiple times every winter. Each time we go like "OK I guess it's starting". Many times it doesn't actually start for us given where we are specifically but I check the outage map and then I see how far away some of those actually are vs. how alight the sky was and how loud it was through closed windows. As in, it seems like it was a street over and it was actually many many kilometers away!

And like I said, big metro area with millions of people. Most of those definitely don't experience this as much as we do here as much of the actual "city" area of that has either buried power lines or when they don't there are no trees nearby (very sad actually). "Out here" in the "boonie but not actual boonies" part of the metro area the power lines do all run above ground and among trees in many parts of the area.

So yeah, while a big 2003 style outage may not be very likely any longer, for my local experience that really doesn't matter a lot in that sense and even in Canada in total, power outages of a half million households plus have happened more recently than your 2003 reference. Not limited to my earlier 2023 example (nicely recent, only 3 years ;) )

2013 ice storm Ontario: over 600,000 customer outages at the storm’s height. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2013_North_American_s...

May 2018 windstorm Ontario and Quebec: over 925,000 customers combined https://cdd.publicsafety.gc.ca/dtpg-eng.aspx?cultureCode=en-...

December 2018 windstorm British Columbia: power knocked out to 600,000 households https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2019PSSG0119-002228

Halloween storm, 2019 Quebec: about 980,000 Hydro-Québec customers without power at the peak. https://globalnews.ca/news/6112250/quebec-montreal-high-wind...

November 2020 windstorm Ontario: Hydro One reported over 542,000 customers affected. https://cdd.publicsafety.gc.ca/dtpg-eng.aspx?cultureCode=en-...

May 2022 derecho Ontario: about 586,000 Hydro One outages. Quebec: about 550,000 Hydro-Québec customers affected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho

September 2022, Fiona Nova Scotia: over 415,000 customers - Prince Edward Island: over 82,000 - New Brunswick: 44,329. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Fiona

April 2023 ice storm Quebec: 1,125,000 customers without power at the same time. Ontario: Hydro One reported over 114,000 affected customers. Hydro Ottawa reported 56,000.

https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2023/04/09/more-than-130000-still...

[–] lompad 2 days ago

On grid-scale this very much has an influence. Obviously not on individual scale. Is the influence big enough to warrant needing permits? Not sure, but I certainly see the problem.

In many areas solar panels get turned of by grid operators remotely for many hours on sunny days. In an area in the south I worked in around 50-70% of the produced power of larger installations (>30kwp) is essentially thrown away because the grid simply doesn't have enough capacity.

[–] zarzavat 2 days ago

Every day people go to work and turn off their electrical devices. Switching your home to off-grid solar + batteries is just like going to work and not coming back. The grid can handle it.

If many houses install off-grid solar, it's still not going to have a negative effect on the grid because the change is spread out over time.

It does mean that less generating capacity is needed over the long term, but decision makers can just get that data directly from the grid. I don't see what extra information the permit is adding.

[–] holgerschurig 2 days ago

Nah, the OP just posted some false facts.

And Germany is #4 regarding grid stability (measured in SAIDI) in Europe. There are only some tiny and small countries better than the german grid, and no large industrial country. And, btw, Europe has a WAY higher grid stability than the Americas.

Why is that important? Years ago, I had weekly telcos with a customer in Tucson, Arizona. And more often than not we didn't had one: they had no power over there. So the shabby quality of the public grid influenced in a bad way their economy. Businesses simply couldn't talk and plan during that period. Probably also not produce.

Having a top-notch grid is IMHO a basis for a successful economy.

(And fun thing: the german grid is so good ALSO because of our neighbors. We're all interconnected. In Germany, we don't really have the landscape for massive water pump storage power plants. But when we have excess electricity, the ones in Austria and Switzerland are using "our" power. And we need the power, we get "their" power back. Or France ... in the summer, they now routinely have to power down their nuclear plants due to cooling issues. But in France ... no one notices. We all help each other. In year 53% of the french atomic power was "out" due to climate change and regular maintenance. And it all worked nethertheless. As it should be!)

[–] nuancebydefault 2 days ago

"negative price" is a bit misleading. It means you get a discount on monthly bill when consuming excess power (in fact preventing that grid voltage gets too high). It does not mean paying for producing excess. There's an easy outlet for excess so no need to scare people off installing/producing more energy.

[–] gosub100 2 days ago

It could be for fire code compliance. Not everyone knows that too much current through a small wire creates heat.

[–] leonidasrup 2 days ago

Every wire, small or large, has a maximum current which can safely pass through. Circuit breakers are used prevent overloading of power lines and potential fire.

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

[–] gosub100 2 days ago

That's patronizing. My point is that electrical code requires the use of safety devices (breakers are only one). Idiots plugging wires together without oversight cause fires.