I've read some horror stories about big solar installations not getting a license to be connected to the grid after installation (either because the grid is "full" or because of bureaucracy working super slowly).
Is that a problem there as well, or is that more of a local issue in some (other) areas of the country?
I don't know about Germany, but here in Belgium my house solar panels have not been working for about 2 years now. There are too many solar panels in the street injecting electricity on the lines, during sunny days the voltage goes over the ondulator's safety threshold and everything stops.
There's been about 2500 complaints about this last year in my region of this small country. And the company in charge of the grid refuse to give any compensations.
Who would have thought “solar is producing way too much power” would be a problem that power companies have the legal ability to complain about...
I’m shaking my head over here. 2 years.. They could have gotten together with the public to lobby for their ability to sell power to other places, or built some type of power-intensive value producer (desalination? hydrogen?).. They could be far richer than if they just sell power to residences.
The power co's have a legal monopoly and in the vast majority of states the commission that regulates these utilities have members that are open bought-and-paid for by the utilities. Thus, they'll never realistically stand a chance unless someone came along with a bigger checkbook. There aren't many companies that want to get into the power business these days that have billions of dollars and the know-how to operate power plants and all the distribution to reach nearly every home.
However, this is ripe for disrupting like Uber did by skirting laws in many areas. Could it possibly be legal to 'provide' power and create a residential subdivision with a microgrid and the price is part of the sale of the house?
Now that solar panels are trending down in price it seems IMHO the real disruption will be when batteries similarly become cheap enough that homeowners may disconnect completely from the grid or at least make solar the majority of their energy supply.
If that happens energy companies will at that point be lobbying to force endusers to stay on grid to continue subsidizing maintenance.
We aren't at that tipping point yet but with large tax breaks coming for EV ownership, an EV vehicle also makes a great way to dump "excess" solar power. Enough so that gas stations will start disappearing over the next few decades as well. Again, IMHO.
If batteries get cheap enough it might make sense for an entrepreneur to sell or lease solar+battery+charger to people who want to sublet part of their property, crowd sourcing EV charging.
>Now that solar panels are trending down in price it seems IMHO the real disruption will be when batteries similarly become cheap enough that homeowners may disconnect completely from the grid or at least make solar the majority of their energy supply.
I think we're there now. You can get "server-rack" LiFePO4 batteries for about $1500 for a 5kWh battery. You can probably get solar, inverters, and 30kWh of batteries for about $25,000 and this should last maybe a few days for most homes. Mini-splits instead of central HVACs reduce power consumption a good bit, and have better energy efficiencies.
It is possible you could get away with that in some places, but everywhere I've lived in the US, it is illegal to sell electricity to your neighbors. The only way around it I've seen is to give it away for free, but it is hard to build a scalable business around that.
The worst part is that it implies that the local grid is also undersized for a major power draw (Heatwave/Blizzard) since as the AC grid is essentially bi-directional the solar would have to both surpass that after the base draw of the regular buildings before the overvoltage start causing problems
I mean unless your on nuclear or something that takes entire days to throttle up or down in which case congratulations you are now on a 100% green grid
Your panels are still working fine. Essentially, your problem is that you supplier is unwilling to invest in storage and management systems and doesn't provide inter-connectivity to the grid.
Could you create a separate grid in your home? Off-grid or maybe hybrid, having no connection to your domestic power connections nor the supply. You'll be able to reuse nearly all of the existing solar equipment and will just need to invest a bit more to re-architect some of the electrical system in your home.
It may be a little awkward to use, since you'll be sometimes unplugging appliances from one supply to another. But if you were willing to invest in energy storage too, there'd be more consistency from your solar and less need to unplug appliances.
You don't need a separate grid, just use a product like [1] to connect the grid to your house and a battery[2], and then connect the solar panels to the battery.
North American products pictured, European versions probably available, but perhaps from a different vendor.
Easier option is a Reliance Generator Transfer switch. Low-tech, but easy to install and can individually select which circuits are powered via solar or grid.
Since the article is in German, I will give a short summary here:
The solar panels of the person concerned are not completely off the grid, but the connection was already deactivated for more than 90 days this year. However, he is entitled to compensation for the electricity not taken, which so far amounts to 35,000 Euros.
The article predicts that the problem will worsen rather than diminish in the near future, as grid expansion cannot keep pace with new installations, affecting wind more than solar. However, there is disagreement about whether this is a general problem or only a regional one and how long it might last. According to the article, a total of 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity was lost in Germany in 2020 (the latest available figure) due to downward adjustments.
> According to the article, a total of 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity was lost in Germany in 2020 (the latest available figure)
I don't think it makes sense to count all of that as "lost", at least in the sense of framing it as mismanagement.
If you want solar to supply a large part of a country's electricity, you have to overprovision to cover cloudy days, which automatically means that only a very sunny day, you'll produce more electricity than you can use, since large-scale storage is not yet feasible.
If I understand it correctly, than it was "lost" not because there existed a general overprovision in ther European grid, but because the local grid was not able to accept and pass on what could theoretically be produced, meaning that somewhere else non-renuable energy resources were consumed instead. If this is correct, than I think it is jusified to speak of a "loss".
I think the number given (6.1 terawatt hours) is just the total of not-used solar electricity for any reason, and the reasons are probably not all that clearly delineated and distinguishable. Another factor is that coal and nuclear plants cannot be spun down just because you have an abundance of solar power for half a day. And that's not the fault of solar power, or the grid, or bad planning.
You are very probably right that many different reasons have contributed to the figure. To which percentage deficits in the grid structure are responsible I do not exactly know. But in any case, the topic plays a big role in the German mainstream media and politics. According to what I hear, the main problem is that the industrial energy consumers are predominantly located in the south of Germany, while the best locations for wind energy are at the coast in the north. This means that Germany needs a very different large-scale electricity grid for a renewable future. Past governments were rather tardy in planning,[1] so that upgrading the grid became the limiting factor for a rapid expansion of renewable energies.
Something similar I could observe myself on a local scale in the region my parents live (also in the state of Bavaria, about 100 km away from the person who is mentioned in the Spiegel article). There, the limiting factor for the size of new solar parks was the capacity of the grid nodes in the vicinity. This is of course only anecdotal.
[1] They first wanted to build "cheap" overhead power lines. After protests from the population along the planned routes, they changed their minds and decided in favour of underground cables and had to start planing again. Unfortunately, it took more than two years for them to change their minds. (And of course, it was not them that were responsible for the delay, but the evil protesters, generally long procedures and nonsensical appeal options.)
It was Bavarian minister Aigner that in 2015 blocked/delayed the improved North-South connection. Environmental organizations opposed the connection completely despite the clear environmental benefits.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink#Wilster_%E2%80%93_Ber...
The whole Suedlink process has been a triumph of pseudo-environmental Nimbyism over the actual environment and now threatens the whole energy stability of Germany in the coming energy-crunch winter.
Out of curiosity, with my non-educated guess, why cant your system drop or stop producing electricity when it overloads the system? This way at least you can power your residence with solar power and drop the excess. Of course it’s stupid of the energy grid/infra company’s inability to “buy” cheap electricity. But at least it’s not a huge loss for you.
It’s not stupid to shut off overproduction from flooding the grid just as it’s not stupid to shut off your tap when the bathtub is full. What is stupid is building so much solar that there is no where for the energy to go during peak production hours. Everybody is gung ho to put cheap panels on their roof but no one is footing the bill for adding storage without which all that power production just goes to waste.
> What is stupid is building so much solar that there is no where for the energy to go during peak production hours.
That's not stupid at all, it's unavoidable if you want to still have enough energy when you don't have peak production. Given how cheap solar is getting, it may even be more economical. And you always have the option to add storage later, when it becomes more economical (which it isn't yet).
It sounds like it's grid-tie only - so it just shuts down when the local grid is over-voltage. Ideally you'd want something that could run in an isolated mode, if only to supply power to something useful like an electric water heater.
Problem these days are 90% or more of the residential solar sold in the U.S. is only AC-coupled and nowadays only use micro-inverters. Meaning, when the grid goes down your solar is shut down as well. Modern inverters following standard UL1741 also will de-sync from the grid just from a signal from the PowerCo through frequency shifting to shut down your solar and require your house to go in grid-only mode (when the grid has too much solar production).
Isolated DC-coupled solar is mostly done by DIY folks with inverters like Sol-Ark that can do AC or DC-coupling and can work when the grid is shutdown. Your solar constantly charges your batteries and powers your house as a microgrid. Any excess power COULD be sold back to the grid, but to avoid the added hassle of interconnection agreements, most just store it into a larger battery bank for rainy days. The goal here is to fully zero out your monthly power bill AND be self-sustaining.
> the company in charge of the grid refuse to give any compensations.
The grid is expensive to maintain and it isn't there to deliver solar power the other way, there is no reason why it would compensate you. Next when Solar is generating the wholesale price is usually low, so really you shouldn't get paid much anyway.
The final problem with Solar in Northern countries is that in cold Winter nights you want to get power from the grid and use the infrastructure which most of the year now doesn't make any money. So either you should pay very high electricity prices in those periods ie several Euro/kwH (which isn't politically acceptable) or realistically solar should be restricted in the first place.
Lol if you're going to downvote me, tell me why residential solar deserves to get paid as much as it is.
Load shifting is a thing. Create the conditions for solar overproduction, and we will adapt to use it. Hot water production can be done primarily during the day. Thermostats can treat houses as thermal batteries. And batteries will likely become a lot more common. A single night’s worth of battery storage doesn’t add all that much to the cost of a house. 30 kWh of lithium iron phosphate batteries can be had for $10k.
Yes but you can't load shift over seasons. The OP is in Belgium, in Winter solar is not strong enough during the day to charge your batteries to get you through the night.
Right, the point is that overprovisioning solar is not a bad thing, and that it shouldn’t be restricted. Not saying that it’s sufficient on its own. Unless it somehow became so cheap that it was reasonable to overbuild to an extreme, and we had good energy sinks for peak times. If we became serious about direct air capture, for example, there might be an argument for it.
> compensated for solar PV generation at a separate VOS rate in dollars per kilowatt hour ($/kWh). The VOS rate accounts for solar PV's benefits to stakeholders net its costs.
Yes this is what is needed. The problem with Northern Europe is that the VOS would be so tiny people wouldn't bother.
Germany has a real problem as it doesn't have much nuclear, its main generation is still coal! Basically its desperate for any electricity at any price. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE. The solar farms (incl rooftop) is much better than households as you can build/use bigger transmission lines to those locations.
Belgium has a lot of Nuclear so not such a big problem. Its still burning gas though so more solar would help. Again farms are easier rather than residential houses who expect to get paid 10c/kwH on a sunny day in May.
Do you have a home battery? I heard about similar problems in the Netherlands, and that although there is a lot of distributed solar generation there isn’t much distributed battery storage.
As of February 2022, in the northeast USA alone, there was more than 136GW of backlogged solar capacity awaiting to be connected to the grid. This is the rough equivalent of 80-100 natural gas fired power plants
Source: google search on "PJM Interconnection Backlog"
https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/service/presse/pressemi... (German)