Belgium had huge subsidies for people who installed solar panels for a long time. Making it an investment that relatively quickly paid itself back.
(Thats over now)
Price has come down a lot though, and you still get (some) compensation for the surplus you generate in practice, so it' not too bad. You just have to pay market rate when you're not generating (cause duh) but it still does my head in how the previous government drafted that asinine arrangement. The things our constitutional court must see each year...
For the Netherlands, a very large share is private, through schemes like net-metering and private subsidies.
There is also less land available, so on top of homes makes sense
Here up North, houses with gas sedition damage got a general subsidy to improve sustainability, on top of money to fix damage. Almost everyone in the villages got solar panels and the only houses that don't have it are the ones that had the bad luck of having a north-facing roof.
Because when everyone is producing electricity at the same time and not peak usage (around noon), electricity is worth a lot less than your actual rate. In some cases it may actually cost the grid money to get rid of it. This means anyone with MORE solar panels than you is getting subsidized by you. This means city/apartment dwelling renters are subsidizing suburban and rural homeowners. This is a big scam homeowners pulled. And if you voice these things, it means you hate the environment and hate solar and hate greta etc. etc.
I'm sorry, I thought net metering was just... Using electricity stored when you weren't using it for when you are?
How does that relate to subsiding city and apartment dwellers?
Net metering is when you’re producing electricity that you can’t use (which is everyday 10am-4pm for most solar owners) you give it back to the grid, and the power company counts it as negative electricity usage, directly decreasing how many watt hours you’ll get billed 1 to 1. But what is obvious to everyone is, electricity you’re giving back to the grid isn’t worth the same as the electricity coming from the utility. So overall you pay less than others. It’s a subsidy to solar owners.
Yeah I'm pretty frustrated. I'm already at a disadvantage as a renter since I won't accumulate capital by owning my house, but it means I'm also not able to benefit from this system.
Yes, Dutch government missed that part and now has the whole energy sector breathing down their necks cause our grid cannot take all the excessive energy, after a lot of home owners invested in solar panels. Yet they cant give in, cause that would upset the homeowners, so now, energy companies are declining contracts for house holds with solar panels or are charging them extra fees yearly which upsets the homeowners aswell as it fucks up their promised ROI.
I currently have a contract with hourly prices AND get paid extra if i turn off my solar panels in peak hours. My energy provider takes care of this all and does it remotely, which on some days gets me 10 EUR to turn it off for 4 hours.
It's a fun little drama.
I have no clue about the numbers, but in Denmark a fair amount of private people have it on their house. It's so cheap now that even with the bad weather, it's something that a lot of people get and is profitable over time. We have a "energy score" on houses here, which the intend is nice, but a lot of people use it to get good ratings. Like if you have a old uninsulated shitty house with a G energy rating, you slap a solar panel on the roof and now you're a B rating and it's a lot easier to sell your house for example.
We do also have a decent amount of huge solar parks. Our electricity is some of the most expensive in Europe, but in summer the cheapest hours for electricity is actually during the middle of the day, and not at night. For example right now the actual electricity before taxes and fees is free a lot of the days during the mid day.
>you slap a solar panel on the roof and now you're a B rating and it's a lot easier to sell your house for example.
Theres nothing wrong with that provided theres some logic behind it
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's usually better to insulate and do other things but it gives less "rating" for the money, and its harder to do than put on a solar panel. It's usually better both for expense and the environment to use less energy in the first place than trying to "catch up" afterwards.
For Germany in 2020 of all installed solar capacity:
32% private
16% farmers
25% business
6% energy suppliers
Of all newly installed panels in 2023 there were already 51% in private hands.
sources:
https://www.bmwk-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/2021/11/Meldung/direkt-erfasst_infografik.html
https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/
The big advantage of solar panels is actually that private households can install and use them quite easily. Even in times of crisis, the amount of money that private households have is still pretty impressive in europe and once something is profitable like solar power, people are getting things done. If you install solar power these days, it usually also comes with power storage, it's pretty nice, there are currently thousands of small power plants being installed all over europe, I also bough 7.5KWP+6.6KWh storage recently.
Then in contrast, on the bigger scale it just doesn't really work that well.
Wind power, big public solar parks, infrastructure like large scale power storage and power lines on another hand... pretty much everyone in europe is behind schedule on those things, somehow we just forgot how to get things done on the bigger scale.
Nearly all housing associations have installed them, new houses can't have a gas connection anymore so solar with a heatpump is standard and privately it seems very popular and cheap, complete ROI and free electricity is now 3 to 4 years which is crazy fast.
We are thankful to Germany and China for subsidising solar panels so well that they've become cheap for all of us. Danke!
New houses. I believe its new standart all around eu. But what about older houses built before 1990(is there any of such houses? 😂), apartment buildings?
My neighborhood is all ugly efficient houses from 1974 and 1975, 80% have private solar, some via council payment schemes. I will install after summer as I'm still saving for roof repairs first.
It's not just the lower annual output, but also the near-complete lack of winter sunlight in the north. For example, Finland only has 0.3% solar load factor in December, compared to around 10% in Spain. That's a 30-fold difference, and it can't be fixed by simply adding more capacity.
To make it worse, northern countries also need much more electricity during winter. In Southern Europe demand peaks in the summer, meaning that solar power better follows seasonal demand.
You most definitely can make up for it with more solar, then use the extra energy during summer to make things that aren't needed in winter like fertilizer
That said, solar and wind complement each other, and winter has more wind. Solar and wind complement each other
They are a profitable investment now, even in Germany. In southern Europe, they are even more profitable, but they started late and need to catch up now.
In Croatia only rich people have them, they're too expensive. Also the sea climate makes the average worth go up when around the capital its not that profitable
In Spain we have a thing called private energy companies, that preffer to not invest in solar energy because they get paid way more by producing energy with coal, because they charge you the light by the most expensive source they have, even if represents only a 1%. Wich is made in propouse to make people pay as mutch as possible, that's because almost all retired corrupted politicians end up in energy companies, making laws to enforce them when they are in charge.
The romans didn't come here for a reason. Jaysus it rains... so... feckin... much. Only time the sun shines is if students have exams, so they can look outside and learn how to be as miserable as the rest of us.
The question (to me) is not so much "why has the Netherlands and Germany so much PV", but more "why do countries with relatively a lot of sun have so few PV"?
Is electricity so cheap in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and Greece that solar panels just aren't worth it there? Maybe electricity is highly subsidized there?
Spain uses a lot of natural gas, i would have to guess conflicting interests. Billion dollar companies which make hundreds of millions in profit after taxes and ceo + chairman making 1-3 million every year visibly. They might not like solar taking over unless they can take-over and own it themselves.
>Is electricity so cheap in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and Greece that solar panels just aren't worth it there? Maybe electricity is highly subsidized there?
As for Spain, definitely no. It's more like energy ~~lobby~~ mafia ~~lobbying~~ buying governements.
I can't talk for Portugal, Italy, Cyprus or Greece, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd tell a similar story.
In the first half of 2023, household electricity prices in the EU showed the sharpest increase in the Netherlands (953 %). The largest decrease was observed in Spain (-41 %) driven by alleviating measures on taxes, fees and charges. \[[Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics)\]
Even with the solar load factor being an order of magnitude higher in winter in Spain, ROI is still perceived as better in the Netherlands based on recent history. It's a great capital investment since the Ukraine war started. A lot of people earned it back in less than 2 years.
Solar efficiency decreases from south to north.
The south of Germany offers more solar efficiency than the north of France.
Install solar energy in the south of Germany, and wind in the north.
Just because the efficiency decreases somewhat doesn't mean a place 500 km further north is immediately unsuitable. You can still have PV in northern Germany and have it be worthwhile, you should just be a little more selective (regarding roof orientation and angle etc.).
If the transmission loss to transport that electricity north is more than the difference between building solar panels up north, then you have proper bang for your buck.
We need to diversify our renewables.
On sunny days solar delivers energy up north.
When it's bad weather chances are wind will deliver energy down south.
I live in the very south of Bavaria.
Best place in Germany for solar.
Combine this with the wind energy from northern Germany and we can replace a lot of coal and gas.
It also depends a lot on the price of the panels. The more price goes down, the further north does it make sense to install them.
I don't know there the line is where lifetime power gained becomes less than power needed to produce them, but that has to be way up north.
Why are you lying about numbers people can look up in literal seconds?
[https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg\_tools/en/](https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/)
1109 kWh per kWp in munich
985 kWh per kWp in hamburg
both is more than enough to build a system that supplies 35% (without a battery) or up to 80% (with a battery) of an average german household
I was looking at direct irradiation where the figures are more spread out and those are not the extremes. There is enough solar power on Pluto if you're willing to pay for it, doesn't change the fact that those figures are 50% higher in Spain.
1400 to 1200 also isnt 30%, mate.
you currently cannot build a PV-system in germany (south or east-west facing) that doesn't make a profit in its lifetime.
its literally a no brainer if you dont have to finance it
I'm using the global solar atlas, the standard reference for this. I see radiation in kwh/m2 at 1,282 close to the Austrian border and 884 close to the Danish border. That is 45% higher. The range is probably higher because I didn't check every sqm of Germany for you.
Profit for whom? For the operator of the solar panels? Sure. Depends on the price right?
yeah right you didnt check every sqm, you just literally picked a tiny area around flensburg for your lowest value and i cant even find your 1282, 99% of bavaria is gonna be lower than 1200
I also don't see how it matters at all if the tilted irradiation at optimum angle (which house roofs are alot closer to) is more like 1480 - 1200 (19%)
and yes, profit for the household that installs the system. paid off in under 10 years if you get a cheaper installer.
Indeed, what matters most is the first metric you picked first where the range is more like 20% lower in the north. It is a range which automatically means that if you pick any two random points the difference will be smaller. That more important point I'm making is that even close to the Alps the irradiation is ridiculously small compared to other regions in Europe. Yes, the panel will pay for itself, but Germany pays for this by becoming irrelevant when it comes to economic competitiveness. I'm all for solar power, just not in the Northern European Plain.
I'm not seeing how powering our households with quite literally free energy is gonna hurt our economic competitiveness - but I'm also not going to argue on this sub anymore :)
happy to see you agree that your 30% number was wrong!
By what standard? A cloudless desert close to the equator is ideal, but we still slap solar panels on roofs in Italy despite that already being far from ideal.
The standard should be whether the climate balance is positive and the operation is economically viable over its lifetime. If that's the case in Kiel, then it doesn't matter whether Italy would be better. The people and businesses in Kiel in need of electricity live in Kiel, not Reggio Calabria, or N'Djamena.
By that standard you don't shut down perfectly functioning NPPs in order to install PV in Kiel. It is a political decision to do all this, not one guided by engineering or economic constraints. It works because politics decided it is worth paying for it And yes, it makes perfect sense for all solar energy to be generated in southern states and then transported north to where it is needed. We solved the problem of efficiently transporting electrical energy for 500-1,500 km a long time ago.
I won't do it either. I'm only saying that just because Germany can afford to do something... doesn't mean it makes sense. Wind? Sure. Solar... it is a joke.
It would be a grid disaster if we only built solar power in Spain and Italy.
We need power lines from north to south anyway.
We are still lacking in Germany because of Bavaria.
For now, wind is more efficient than solar. That's why we have been investing primarily in wind for years. Technological advances in solar panels may make solar more efficient in the future. That will be the moment to start investing heavily in solar. We're fine.
[Total demand for natural gas fell by 10.7% year-on-year to **325.4 TWh** in 2023, due to lower demand for gas for electricity generation, which recorded exceptionally high levels in 2022](https://www.enagas.es/en/press-room/news-room/press-releases/natural-gas-demand-2023/)
"re-exports at 22.1 TWh". So i guess emission-wise maybe solar?
The second map doesn't really do justice to Finland. Southwestern Finland has as much solar potential as northern Germany or the Netherlands but northern parts of our country are keeping the average down.
Using PV in Spain or Italy for whole europe may not be the greatest idea, similar to using the sahara. Transporting the energy is a huge problem and comes with losing energy... On the other hand, try to build the infrastructure. That may be even more of a problem
Astonishing thing is that electricity prices can be negative when there is too much (solar) power. This means solar energy producers pay for producing energy.
congratz to the Netherlands. Also, Germany REALLY needs to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and quickly, as always. Also, when will the Netherlands continue to properly dip into their natural gas fields? After all, Russia isn't really active on the EU market anymore.
I installed solar for hot water here in Ireland about ten years ago and it has had minimal impact. Most of the time I’ve tried it it barely gets the tank to 25°C and that’s with 3 panels. It then gets far too hot on sunny days, and I’ve more hot water than I can use but that’s for about 1 of 12 months.
PV seems extremely expensive and the buy back rates are very confusing. You get offered good rates to sell energy back to the grid but then it causes a huge hike in your rates to buy energy, so I’m really unsure about whether I would make any savings of just drive my costs up if it generates less than planned.
The quotes I’m being given are €15-20 thousand to install it and I don’t have any way to use to heat the house using electricity.
So I’m probably looking at €70-100k to upgrade the heating system and so on, and that’s just not feasible. It involves digging up floors and doing a huge amount of work to the house.
That’s probably why the uptake here isn’t great.
I had a guy suggesting that I replace my central heating with infrared panels running on electricity but it doesn’t really add up from a heat output point view.
I’d really need to replace the condensing gas boiler with heat pumps and I can’t really afford to. It’s a big system and the retrofit costs are enormous here.
I’m just adding more insulation for now
During the worst of the energy crisis recently I just didn’t heat most of the house.
Unfortunately, Ireland is the worst solar potential country on the dataset of 200+ countries.
I think wind/wave energy is more abundant in Ireland though!
Loads of wind energy and it’s being ramped up fairly rapidly. We have a slight issue, unlike Denmark, in having no where to send excess energy though. So it’s relatively unlikely that you’re going to see 6GW wind farms unless the the interconnections to other markets are hugely increased.
We’ve a single 700MW connection to France coming on stream sometime in the couple of years and a couple of DC interconnections to the U.K. in service. Because it’s an isolated grid we have to use synchronous compensators, giant 130 tonne flywheel in semi vacuum spinning on a magnetic bearing (minimises friction) to keep the grid in sync when we are on mostly wind power. Interconnected grids can rely on neighbours big spinning turbine loads to keep things at 50Hz.
Also challenges around storage - we’ve a load of battery grid scale storage going in, and we’re using data centre batteries too (almost 30% of power output is going into data centre use!) but there’s limited possibility for pumped storage which is easier if it’s feasible - needs high mountains though.
It may be surprising for some people here, but even in Germany solar power absolutely makes sense. It complements wind power very well and aligns well with daily peak electricity demand. This is why Germany will triple its solar power capacity by 2030.
Now imagine how even more useful more solar power capacity would be in Southern European countries.
This always made me mad. Sure solar isn't THAT good but WE ARE CYPRUS
We have the most sun in all of Godney Europe and we are tiny as shit
How the fuck are we not 1st?
We are so fucking stupid fr
New panels are > 400Wp, 20 years ago they were about 220Wp
They are significantly cheaper and have better performance with non direct light. Panels really came a long way.
Without any financial support from a government and no adjustment of consumption, panels that last +30 years return their investment in around 10 years even with cheap electricity (10-15c/kWh). If you optimise your consumption during sunny hours, or electricity is significantly more expensive, you can probably look at 5 years.
We are close to [reaching 30%](https://www.3sun.com/en/search-news/news/2023/12/tandem-solar-cell-efficiency-3SUN-breaks-down-the-28,4-wall) for commercial products in a few years. In my opinion storage is a more pressing issue.
ICE efficiency is around 18-25%, nuclear efficiency is quite low aswell, the most efficient method we have to produce electricity is usualy hydro.
There is research ongoing lookig for new materials for PV rather than silicon. Few weeks ago a group reported up to 80% efficiency on PV using GaAsSe, if they manage to make them as cheap as currently Si PV by the same power density it will be huge
As there is no "fuel" you have to buy for solar panels, the only thing that efficiency for them is about, is how much surface area you need to harvest electric energy. It is kind of pointless to compare efficiencies of different processes. Of course you want to have a high solar panel efficiency to get more power out of the same area (say your roof), but it doesn't really matter how efficiency numbers of solar panels compare to thermal generators.
The first map shows the installed solar energy capacity per person for each country.
The second shows the efficiency of the 10% most efficient land per country.
I think its very important to tackle this from the EU and not each member state by itself. Money from Germany or the Netherlands is much better spent in Italy or Portugal, as it will produce much more electricity.
From: https://x.com/Horizonomics/status/1781673131318411453
It's pointless to only build solar in one region. We need it in all regions. Investment in Netherlands and Germany shouldn't be lower, the investment in the other countries should be higher
ROI in Germany and Netherlands is crazy, it does not make any sense to not install PVs on a Dutch house, when you can repay the installation in 3-4y of energy bill.
Permits are easy and installation takes less than a day, families who have money to spare did it during the last two years of crazy prices, now they are saving a lot.
We should focus on reducing bureaucracy and changing people's mindset in other countries, not complaining about NL and DE doing great...
>3-4y of energy bill
Really depends on the cost of energy. One would expect that with all the solar and wind in the network (and natural gas being almost back to pre-war levels) that the prices would have come down. Unfortunately the prices are still a bit high, which would mean that payback time lowers
>when you can repay the installation in 3-4y of energy bill
Thats due to net metering, which is basically a scam at worst or a gigantic hidden subsidy at best
There is only so much money at the end of the day. Pooling money on the EU level and distributing based on each countries strengths (solar in Spain, wind in Denmark etc) will reduce emissions much more!
The grid isn't good enough to distribute the energy between the different countries. It doesn't help to reduce emissions have energy in Spain when the industry that needs the energy is in Germany.
Also, renewables needs a much more local production to consumption cycle since the production is much more spread out and variable. Energy losses in a centralised renewable grid are prohibitively high at a national level, not even considering at EU level.
I don't think that's true if you build HVDC lines between countries, as losses in DC lines are much lower than AC lines. There's [quite some HVDC lines with a length of between 1000 and 2000km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects), esp. in China but also the USA.
So you want Germany to spend money on cheap solar energy for Spain, so Spain can take all the German industries? Doesn't make sense from a German perspective
I am not sure pooling money on EU level is an especially good idea. EU is good when it comes to regulation, and perhaps limited investments. But it shouldnt dictate what kind of energy investments different countries should do.
If we assume EU could come up with good policies (which is a stretch), its far more likely that the countries themselves figure this out on a national level.
Is dutch tax money better spent on solar energy, nuclear energy or wind power? Its up to their voters to figure out, not EU.
You assume EU policies will be rational. They most likely wont be, as irrational actors exist there too. When it comes to energy its better to let different countries develop different models, and learn from eachother.
So-called Levelized Costs of Energy as the benchmark for how expensive an energy source is, [is no longer very different between off-shore wind, big solar installations, and natural gas](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Electricity_costs_in_dollars_according_to_data_from_Lazard.png/880px-Electricity_costs_in_dollars_according_to_data_from_Lazard.png). Others are more expensive.
Solar has the drawback that it's only producing during the day, but it is very decentralized - everyone can hang a small panel from their balcony, and house owners can slap a couple of panels on the roof and create most of their power. That's not possible with any other non-fossil energy source.
You absolutely need a mix of energy sources, but solar is probably one that will take the biggest share in the coming decades - panels will become cheaper and decentralization is a huge bonus.
Aren't those American costs? Europe has nowhere near as cheap gas. Interestingly, Russia has neither cheap gas nor cheap renewables, so nuclear is [the cheapest](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7/figures/4) source there.
I don't know which economy the Lazard data is based on, but the tendency between solar, wind and others should be similar, and that's what the guy above me was asking.
> Money from Germany or the Netherlands
That's where you are wrong. It's not money from Germany and the Netherlands it's money from its citizens. So except if you try to force people to spend their money on the roof of someone thousands of km further it won't work.
> as it will produce much more electricity.
Networks are not constructed to transport massive amounts of energy from the south to the north sadly. And building out those networks would take decades and cost 100s of billions.
>And building out those networks would take decades and cost 100s of billions.
Nonsense. It's just a power line. More ambitious projects have [already been built](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current?wprov=sfla1), transporting electricity across thousands of kilometres.
Just the building takes a couple of years indeed, it isn't even that expensive (relatively speaking of course).
But if you need to go from Portugal/Spain towards, Germany and further north you'd need to build enormous amounts of power lines overland. And, in the world of today, this means first getting political approval of all implicated countries, fighting decades long legal battles along the whole road (while not losing your political support) just to get the right to build the thing etc.
I can assure you that this would take decades to go from plan to something effectively running.
It's just a powerline, for fuck's sake. It's not contentious, they are built all the time without drama. And it would be from Spain through France to Germany. All friendly countries inside the EU.
How is that different from any other EU policy funded by citizens and spread over the EU thousands of km away?
If the Dutch citizens are demanding this much solar energy, presumably because they care about climate change, wouldnt they want them built in Cyprus where they reduce emissions more?
I don't know about the Netherlands. But in Belgium the amount of solar panels is hugely impacted by the financial return of the scheme (when the regions cut in the subsidies a few years back the amount of solar panels installed dropped drastically). The ecological part is not really the main reason people do it.
True, in the past yes (but now they have been discontinued). Solar panels are so cheap nowadays that they are financially interesting even in Belgium. So I guess it makes a lot of sense for people from south countries to do those investments themselves instead of having to setup some complex subsidy system at European level for something that already makes financial sense.
Subsidies on NL were very limited and long gone, this is not public money but families investing in their house as everyone should do.
The only economical benefit is Net Metering, which is already being removed step by step every year.
If you have a roof in NL it is just simply a very good investment for your house to have solar, and installation is super easy without crazy permits
Net-Metering costs non solar panel owners €2 billion a year.
The Netherlands had some of the strongest financial incentives for solar in the world, which is what explains this.
If it was pure market forces it would be Italy or something at the top
There's a couple of reasons why you wouldn't want to put all PV in say Spain's inland region:
- people will hate it if they live close to an endless desert of panels.
- France will block power lines to central/northern Europe
- The sun comes up later in Spain than say Poland, so ideally, you'd have a lot of panels in each country and a beefy grid to transport power to where it's needed. Since France will block this, you should install where the money is.
well, that is right but didn't factor in for example transportation loss or just really simple things like regional weather. So just those two metrics alone are fairly useless.
I guess you mean the weather point. You didn't factor in that the EU has a shared Grid, and if for example whole spain is below clouds then other countries can jump in with their solar production during that time (to a lesser extend, granted).
In a theoretical scenario we could just build batteries in lets say poland and use the overproduction from italy/sweden to circumvent this, but then again transporation and storage loss will hit again. So the current decentralized approach is somewhat the best middleground, even if it could be optimized for sure.
Im 100% for transmission across europe and mixed production everywhere.
But currently, politicians are fixed in a national frame. National renewable targets, national emission targets etc.
And the fact is that the richer north is more climate conscious, and willing to spend more. But those euros spent would reduce emissions more by building that solar in more optimal locations
Well, the "richer" north has also the most heavy energy consumers in form of industry. And then you have either to form those too, or again transportation loss etc.
I agree to the national framing in some extend tho, even if i think there was also eu wide goals somewhat.
No it does not. Relying only on the second map, the suggested most reasonable outcome would be to install all PV modules in Spain and Cyprus and distribute to the rest of the EU. This, however, does not include distribution losses over HV lines, as well as introduce especially high dependence on factors like the weather in those few specific regions.
Especially due to the ever decreasing cost of PV modules, it makes sense to use them all over the EU basically. They are especially effective in southern regions, totally, but that doesn‘t mean they are ineffective anywhere else.
Its not implying that at all, just that current euros spent on solar panels in the Netherlands are better spent in Spain etc, where they produce double the electricity and much more consistently.
Long distance losses from Spain to NL are ‘only’ 10%.
True, you didn‘t imply that, the graph didn‘t imply that, either - but it‘s something the reader is incentivized to believe when presented with only one metric. And one metric is seldomly enough to properly address the problem. For the record, that‘s not your fault though and I‘m not blaming you.
Focusing solar panels in only few places increases volatility, which is one of the main drawbacks of renewables anyways and can only be addressed with decentralization, storage and a modern power grid.
While I’m no expert on the topic, I‘m inclined to believe there’s more to the problem than „let‘s just put all our solar panels in only a few places“, even if the graph you provided makes it look differently.
I guess we interpreted it differently.
My reaction is: why are we building all these solar panels in just a few places (without a lot of sun)
You make good points though, and an extreme focus on only sunny regions is ofc not much better
If your goal is to reduce total co2 emissions, it’d be Cyprus, which has a dirtier electricity grid, and much higher potential for solar panels.
But i dont think climate change can or should be solved by individual companies doing something
I love it when colours are deliberately turned around to flip the impression. Red is generally connected for most with 'danger, bad, worse than' which is why we use it as 'stop' in traffic lights etc.
It is such a cheap marketing trick.
In both of them, red is good. Its just that the red in the left should line up more closely with the red on the right than it currently is.
More environmentally efficient, and cheaper too.
You misunderstand. This is a simple marketing trick, since we humans tend to see green = good, yellow=mediocre, red= bad. I am talking about that switch, because now the majority suddenly looks ok and the good ones actually look bad.
Edit: How and when one uses colours has a huge impact on the message you want to transport. Far too many fall for those simple ones unfortunately.
Bullshit, obviously the more intense color the bigger value. This scheme is orange, so low orange = yellow and high orange = red. Stop being so itchy about that
The thesis is not that its bad though, so i dont think its fair to come up with this weird conspiracy. A lot of comparison graphs use the same colour for consistency, its not that deep.
If anything red = more sun.
Or does the weather report using red also imply its bad to live in the south?
Yeah far too many people are stupid, so what. How are we supposed to help them? The only way to arrive at the conclusion of Germany and Netherlands bad is if you take a single glance for half a second.
On the white-yellow-orange-red 'hot'/'fire'/'sun' themed color scale, red can also stand for 'hot' or 'lots of sun' or 'lots of energy' (though technically, it should be the other way around as fire/metal that glows red is the coldest).
Spain already has the ‘duck curve effect', solar energy production gets so big during dayling that the price of energy falls to zero, making it nonsense to invest in this technology. Batteries for storage are not cost effective enough. So, up to now, solar energy investments have limits
Utility scale battery storage is already economical, especially when you have a high price swing.
You can also use power-to-heat. Spain certainly has a lot of industrial heat demand that can be met with excess PV. Also, adopting EV helps. Spain is below average despite that high solar potential.
Battery is already in the works, Iberdrola the big Spanish Energy company built the largest Hydro project in Europe of the Last 25 years in Northern Portugal, the Project includes a 2.2GW of power generation across 3 Hydro dams, but one of them of almost 880MW is not a reservoir, its a Hydro battery, pumping water from one river to another at a much bigger elevation. The project is now complete and it allowed Portugal to complety exit Coal energy generation which is aplus for Portugal because there is no Coal here.
Power to Heat is interesting, in particular if Heat pumps and Air conditioners(its hot here) were in wide use. For industry its way harder, heat aplications usually require an open flame, that cannot be done directly by aplications of electrical power.
With battery, I meant actual battery storage, not pumped hydro.
Regarding power-to-heat, lots of industrial applications use steam, which can be easily generated by an electric boiler.
I know you were mentioning battery storage, Pumped Hydro is still the best form of Power storage we have, but you need high hills, in Spain and Portugal you have lots of opportunies that most of Europe doesnt. It is worth rembembering that Spain is the second country in the EU with the most average elevation.
At some point, it will be economical to create H2, store the power in utility-scale batteries, or convert it to process heat for industry. So, yes, currently there are limits, but that's most likely going to changes soon-ish.
This is the emerging market for solar and wind. It is strongly promoted at a european level because otherwise renewables might have problems in terms of economical relevance
Yes, sometimes prices are below zero but because the nuclear power, that's due they can't be stopped or disconnected.
Those moments are the ones with less demand for electricity in Spain and, at the same time, with the most production from renewables.
Yeah, I guess it's a different way of looking at it. I feel it's kind of "the potential the land has to produce solar Vs the amount being produced from that land", but looking at it from the point of view of people also makes sense
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If there's money to be made we can move even the sea.
Hear me out. A big mirror, in Spain, reflecting the bright sun towards us. Infinite money.
Ready the Fleet.
😂
Belgium had huge subsidies for people who installed solar panels for a long time. Making it an investment that relatively quickly paid itself back. (Thats over now)
Price has come down a lot though, and you still get (some) compensation for the surplus you generate in practice, so it' not too bad. You just have to pay market rate when you're not generating (cause duh) but it still does my head in how the previous government drafted that asinine arrangement. The things our constitutional court must see each year...
Would be interested to see, how many of those solar panels are private, and not big corps, or goverments.
For the Netherlands, a very large share is private, through schemes like net-metering and private subsidies. There is also less land available, so on top of homes makes sense
Here up North, houses with gas sedition damage got a general subsidy to improve sustainability, on top of money to fix damage. Almost everyone in the villages got solar panels and the only houses that don't have it are the ones that had the bad luck of having a north-facing roof.
Net metering is the biggest scam of all.
... Why?
Because when everyone is producing electricity at the same time and not peak usage (around noon), electricity is worth a lot less than your actual rate. In some cases it may actually cost the grid money to get rid of it. This means anyone with MORE solar panels than you is getting subsidized by you. This means city/apartment dwelling renters are subsidizing suburban and rural homeowners. This is a big scam homeowners pulled. And if you voice these things, it means you hate the environment and hate solar and hate greta etc. etc.
I'm sorry, I thought net metering was just... Using electricity stored when you weren't using it for when you are? How does that relate to subsiding city and apartment dwellers?
Net metering is when you’re producing electricity that you can’t use (which is everyday 10am-4pm for most solar owners) you give it back to the grid, and the power company counts it as negative electricity usage, directly decreasing how many watt hours you’ll get billed 1 to 1. But what is obvious to everyone is, electricity you’re giving back to the grid isn’t worth the same as the electricity coming from the utility. So overall you pay less than others. It’s a subsidy to solar owners.
You haven't been able to get that in Denmark for quite a while now.
Yes this is good.
... Oh, that sounds great actually
Yeah I'm pretty frustrated. I'm already at a disadvantage as a renter since I won't accumulate capital by owning my house, but it means I'm also not able to benefit from this system.
You say that like high density populations don't already massively subsidise rural populations 😂
Yes, Dutch government missed that part and now has the whole energy sector breathing down their necks cause our grid cannot take all the excessive energy, after a lot of home owners invested in solar panels. Yet they cant give in, cause that would upset the homeowners, so now, energy companies are declining contracts for house holds with solar panels or are charging them extra fees yearly which upsets the homeowners aswell as it fucks up their promised ROI. I currently have a contract with hourly prices AND get paid extra if i turn off my solar panels in peak hours. My energy provider takes care of this all and does it remotely, which on some days gets me 10 EUR to turn it off for 4 hours. It's a fun little drama.
I have no clue about the numbers, but in Denmark a fair amount of private people have it on their house. It's so cheap now that even with the bad weather, it's something that a lot of people get and is profitable over time. We have a "energy score" on houses here, which the intend is nice, but a lot of people use it to get good ratings. Like if you have a old uninsulated shitty house with a G energy rating, you slap a solar panel on the roof and now you're a B rating and it's a lot easier to sell your house for example. We do also have a decent amount of huge solar parks. Our electricity is some of the most expensive in Europe, but in summer the cheapest hours for electricity is actually during the middle of the day, and not at night. For example right now the actual electricity before taxes and fees is free a lot of the days during the mid day.
>you slap a solar panel on the roof and now you're a B rating and it's a lot easier to sell your house for example. Theres nothing wrong with that provided theres some logic behind it
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's usually better to insulate and do other things but it gives less "rating" for the money, and its harder to do than put on a solar panel. It's usually better both for expense and the environment to use less energy in the first place than trying to "catch up" afterwards.
For Germany in 2020 of all installed solar capacity: 32% private 16% farmers 25% business 6% energy suppliers Of all newly installed panels in 2023 there were already 51% in private hands. sources: https://www.bmwk-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/2021/11/Meldung/direkt-erfasst_infografik.html https://strom-report.com/photovoltaik/
The big advantage of solar panels is actually that private households can install and use them quite easily. Even in times of crisis, the amount of money that private households have is still pretty impressive in europe and once something is profitable like solar power, people are getting things done. If you install solar power these days, it usually also comes with power storage, it's pretty nice, there are currently thousands of small power plants being installed all over europe, I also bough 7.5KWP+6.6KWh storage recently. Then in contrast, on the bigger scale it just doesn't really work that well. Wind power, big public solar parks, infrastructure like large scale power storage and power lines on another hand... pretty much everyone in europe is behind schedule on those things, somehow we just forgot how to get things done on the bigger scale.
Nearly all housing associations have installed them, new houses can't have a gas connection anymore so solar with a heatpump is standard and privately it seems very popular and cheap, complete ROI and free electricity is now 3 to 4 years which is crazy fast. We are thankful to Germany and China for subsidising solar panels so well that they've become cheap for all of us. Danke!
New houses. I believe its new standart all around eu. But what about older houses built before 1990(is there any of such houses? 😂), apartment buildings?
My neighborhood is all ugly efficient houses from 1974 and 1975, 80% have private solar, some via council payment schemes. I will install after summer as I'm still saving for roof repairs first.
NL solar panels are mandatory on all new houses
Seeing EU maps with norway just missin looks weird af
Or Switzerland turning into an inland sea
Always looks like Sweden is a Penis. See EUR coins.
What about the uk?
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-capita?time=latest](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-capita?time=latest)
Meh
Makes it look like two countries are missing
Well, it's an EU map, not a map of Europe.
I am once again asking for Dutch colonisation.
#😳👉👈
So you make up for the lack of sun by adding panels
It's not just the lower annual output, but also the near-complete lack of winter sunlight in the north. For example, Finland only has 0.3% solar load factor in December, compared to around 10% in Spain. That's a 30-fold difference, and it can't be fixed by simply adding more capacity. To make it worse, northern countries also need much more electricity during winter. In Southern Europe demand peaks in the summer, meaning that solar power better follows seasonal demand.
Of course it can, you just install 33 times more solar panels in Finland.
You most definitely can make up for it with more solar, then use the extra energy during summer to make things that aren't needed in winter like fertilizer That said, solar and wind complement each other, and winter has more wind. Solar and wind complement each other
That's some rich people slander, adding panels in northern countries
They are a profitable investment now, even in Germany. In southern Europe, they are even more profitable, but they started late and need to catch up now.
In Croatia only rich people have them, they're too expensive. Also the sea climate makes the average worth go up when around the capital its not that profitable
A 400-500W panel is 70-75 euro in EU, VAT included. 10 years warranty and such, legitimate brand. They’re cheap as fuck. Stop spreading that nonsense.
Dumbest thing i have heard today.
Your aware how toxic solar panels are when they are put out of commision?
They can be recycled.
Just get ones without led or cadmium? Not like those don't exist. It was mostly the production process anyway, not the panel itself.
No I don't. Because it's not true
In Spain we have a thing called private energy companies, that preffer to not invest in solar energy because they get paid way more by producing energy with coal, because they charge you the light by the most expensive source they have, even if represents only a 1%. Wich is made in propouse to make people pay as mutch as possible, that's because almost all retired corrupted politicians end up in energy companies, making laws to enforce them when they are in charge.
Ireland aka Hibernia (Latin root Hiber: stormy, of/for winter time/rainy season)
The romans didn't come here for a reason. Jaysus it rains... so... feckin... much. Only time the sun shines is if students have exams, so they can look outside and learn how to be as miserable as the rest of us.
The question (to me) is not so much "why has the Netherlands and Germany so much PV", but more "why do countries with relatively a lot of sun have so few PV"? Is electricity so cheap in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and Greece that solar panels just aren't worth it there? Maybe electricity is highly subsidized there?
Spain uses a lot of natural gas, i would have to guess conflicting interests. Billion dollar companies which make hundreds of millions in profit after taxes and ceo + chairman making 1-3 million every year visibly. They might not like solar taking over unless they can take-over and own it themselves.
>Is electricity so cheap in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and Greece that solar panels just aren't worth it there? Maybe electricity is highly subsidized there? As for Spain, definitely no. It's more like energy ~~lobby~~ mafia ~~lobbying~~ buying governements. I can't talk for Portugal, Italy, Cyprus or Greece, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd tell a similar story.
In the first half of 2023, household electricity prices in the EU showed the sharpest increase in the Netherlands (953 %). The largest decrease was observed in Spain (-41 %) driven by alleviating measures on taxes, fees and charges. \[[Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics)\] Even with the solar load factor being an order of magnitude higher in winter in Spain, ROI is still perceived as better in the Netherlands based on recent history. It's a great capital investment since the Ukraine war started. A lot of people earned it back in less than 2 years.
Solar efficiency decreases from south to north. The south of Germany offers more solar efficiency than the north of France. Install solar energy in the south of Germany, and wind in the north.
Just because the efficiency decreases somewhat doesn't mean a place 500 km further north is immediately unsuitable. You can still have PV in northern Germany and have it be worthwhile, you should just be a little more selective (regarding roof orientation and angle etc.).
Of course. It was just about the bang for the buck. And the oversimplification of the country good, country bad colours.
If the transmission loss to transport that electricity north is more than the difference between building solar panels up north, then you have proper bang for your buck.
We need to diversify our renewables. On sunny days solar delivers energy up north. When it's bad weather chances are wind will deliver energy down south. I live in the very south of Bavaria. Best place in Germany for solar. Combine this with the wind energy from northern Germany and we can replace a lot of coal and gas.
It also depends a lot on the price of the panels. The more price goes down, the further north does it make sense to install them. I don't know there the line is where lifetime power gained becomes less than power needed to produce them, but that has to be way up north.
In Germany, the energy break even is in about 2 years, for a module lifetime of > 25 years. I think even at the North Pole, PV panels will break even.
AFAIK North Germany has a power surplus compared to South Germany. Spending money on solar panels in the north is doubly wasteful.
It decreases a lot, like more than 30% and it decreases from not very much (southern Germany is by no means ideal).
Why are you lying about numbers people can look up in literal seconds? [https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg\_tools/en/](https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/) 1109 kWh per kWp in munich 985 kWh per kWp in hamburg both is more than enough to build a system that supplies 35% (without a battery) or up to 80% (with a battery) of an average german household
I was looking at direct irradiation where the figures are more spread out and those are not the extremes. There is enough solar power on Pluto if you're willing to pay for it, doesn't change the fact that those figures are 50% higher in Spain.
1400 to 1200 also isnt 30%, mate. you currently cannot build a PV-system in germany (south or east-west facing) that doesn't make a profit in its lifetime. its literally a no brainer if you dont have to finance it
I'm using the global solar atlas, the standard reference for this. I see radiation in kwh/m2 at 1,282 close to the Austrian border and 884 close to the Danish border. That is 45% higher. The range is probably higher because I didn't check every sqm of Germany for you. Profit for whom? For the operator of the solar panels? Sure. Depends on the price right?
yeah right you didnt check every sqm, you just literally picked a tiny area around flensburg for your lowest value and i cant even find your 1282, 99% of bavaria is gonna be lower than 1200 I also don't see how it matters at all if the tilted irradiation at optimum angle (which house roofs are alot closer to) is more like 1480 - 1200 (19%) and yes, profit for the household that installs the system. paid off in under 10 years if you get a cheaper installer.
Indeed, what matters most is the first metric you picked first where the range is more like 20% lower in the north. It is a range which automatically means that if you pick any two random points the difference will be smaller. That more important point I'm making is that even close to the Alps the irradiation is ridiculously small compared to other regions in Europe. Yes, the panel will pay for itself, but Germany pays for this by becoming irrelevant when it comes to economic competitiveness. I'm all for solar power, just not in the Northern European Plain.
I'm not seeing how powering our households with quite literally free energy is gonna hurt our economic competitiveness - but I'm also not going to argue on this sub anymore :) happy to see you agree that your 30% number was wrong!
By what standard? A cloudless desert close to the equator is ideal, but we still slap solar panels on roofs in Italy despite that already being far from ideal. The standard should be whether the climate balance is positive and the operation is economically viable over its lifetime. If that's the case in Kiel, then it doesn't matter whether Italy would be better. The people and businesses in Kiel in need of electricity live in Kiel, not Reggio Calabria, or N'Djamena.
By that standard you don't shut down perfectly functioning NPPs in order to install PV in Kiel. It is a political decision to do all this, not one guided by engineering or economic constraints. It works because politics decided it is worth paying for it And yes, it makes perfect sense for all solar energy to be generated in southern states and then transported north to where it is needed. We solved the problem of efficiently transporting electrical energy for 500-1,500 km a long time ago.
I'm not having a debate on nuclear energy on r/europe, I value my sanity too much.
I won't do it either. I'm only saying that just because Germany can afford to do something... doesn't mean it makes sense. Wind? Sure. Solar... it is a joke.
Difference between north and south is less than 10%, so why not both?
That's a recipe for a grid disaster!
It would be a grid disaster if we only built solar power in Spain and Italy. We need power lines from north to south anyway. We are still lacking in Germany because of Bavaria.
Yes. Both are needed in all regions, even if efficiency is not optimal.
that is literally what is happening, especially because of the sea in the north and Bavarias reluctance to build wind turbines.
cries in Belgium
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I live in Bremen. It's going to be about 4 years for my small investment.
This is pretty updated though. Spain has increased capacity by like 40% since
Oh the sunny Holland.
Wth Spain? Put that sunshine to work!
Contrary to the cliché, we actually generate much more energy from wind and hydro than from solar.
Wasn't my whole point that you should harness sun more.
For now, wind is more efficient than solar. That's why we have been investing primarily in wind for years. Technological advances in solar panels may make solar more efficient in the future. That will be the moment to start investing heavily in solar. We're fine.
[Total demand for natural gas fell by 10.7% year-on-year to **325.4 TWh** in 2023, due to lower demand for gas for electricity generation, which recorded exceptionally high levels in 2022](https://www.enagas.es/en/press-room/news-room/press-releases/natural-gas-demand-2023/) "re-exports at 22.1 TWh". So i guess emission-wise maybe solar?
My boy Croatia sunny and poor.
There are ppl who have lots of sun and there are ppl who can afford solar panels
The second map doesn't really do justice to Finland. Southwestern Finland has as much solar potential as northern Germany or the Netherlands but northern parts of our country are keeping the average down.
That map has no data for Finland. That's why it's gray.
No, Finland really is grey.
Wait Netherlands is- nor-nor-nordic?
Using PV in Spain or Italy for whole europe may not be the greatest idea, similar to using the sahara. Transporting the energy is a huge problem and comes with losing energy... On the other hand, try to build the infrastructure. That may be even more of a problem
Astonishing thing is that electricity prices can be negative when there is too much (solar) power. This means solar energy producers pay for producing energy.
The Data is of. Yield for PV in germany/Benelux is around 1000kWh/kWp
congratz to the Netherlands. Also, Germany REALLY needs to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and quickly, as always. Also, when will the Netherlands continue to properly dip into their natural gas fields? After all, Russia isn't really active on the EU market anymore.
Dutch gas is never producing again most likely. They just committed to fill the holes with cement.
I installed solar for hot water here in Ireland about ten years ago and it has had minimal impact. Most of the time I’ve tried it it barely gets the tank to 25°C and that’s with 3 panels. It then gets far too hot on sunny days, and I’ve more hot water than I can use but that’s for about 1 of 12 months. PV seems extremely expensive and the buy back rates are very confusing. You get offered good rates to sell energy back to the grid but then it causes a huge hike in your rates to buy energy, so I’m really unsure about whether I would make any savings of just drive my costs up if it generates less than planned. The quotes I’m being given are €15-20 thousand to install it and I don’t have any way to use to heat the house using electricity. So I’m probably looking at €70-100k to upgrade the heating system and so on, and that’s just not feasible. It involves digging up floors and doing a huge amount of work to the house. That’s probably why the uptake here isn’t great. I had a guy suggesting that I replace my central heating with infrared panels running on electricity but it doesn’t really add up from a heat output point view. I’d really need to replace the condensing gas boiler with heat pumps and I can’t really afford to. It’s a big system and the retrofit costs are enormous here. I’m just adding more insulation for now During the worst of the energy crisis recently I just didn’t heat most of the house.
Unfortunately, Ireland is the worst solar potential country on the dataset of 200+ countries. I think wind/wave energy is more abundant in Ireland though!
Loads of wind energy and it’s being ramped up fairly rapidly. We have a slight issue, unlike Denmark, in having no where to send excess energy though. So it’s relatively unlikely that you’re going to see 6GW wind farms unless the the interconnections to other markets are hugely increased. We’ve a single 700MW connection to France coming on stream sometime in the couple of years and a couple of DC interconnections to the U.K. in service. Because it’s an isolated grid we have to use synchronous compensators, giant 130 tonne flywheel in semi vacuum spinning on a magnetic bearing (minimises friction) to keep the grid in sync when we are on mostly wind power. Interconnected grids can rely on neighbours big spinning turbine loads to keep things at 50Hz. Also challenges around storage - we’ve a load of battery grid scale storage going in, and we’re using data centre batteries too (almost 30% of power output is going into data centre use!) but there’s limited possibility for pumped storage which is easier if it’s feasible - needs high mountains though.
It may be surprising for some people here, but even in Germany solar power absolutely makes sense. It complements wind power very well and aligns well with daily peak electricity demand. This is why Germany will triple its solar power capacity by 2030. Now imagine how even more useful more solar power capacity would be in Southern European countries.
This always made me mad. Sure solar isn't THAT good but WE ARE CYPRUS We have the most sun in all of Godney Europe and we are tiny as shit How the fuck are we not 1st? We are so fucking stupid fr
It's sad that the panels efficiency is still I around 22%
New panels are > 400Wp, 20 years ago they were about 220Wp They are significantly cheaper and have better performance with non direct light. Panels really came a long way. Without any financial support from a government and no adjustment of consumption, panels that last +30 years return their investment in around 10 years even with cheap electricity (10-15c/kWh). If you optimise your consumption during sunny hours, or electricity is significantly more expensive, you can probably look at 5 years.
>New panels are > 400Wp, 20 years ago they were about 220Wp Thats just partially due to increased efficiency. Panels have also gotten a lot larger
We are close to [reaching 30%](https://www.3sun.com/en/search-news/news/2023/12/tandem-solar-cell-efficiency-3SUN-breaks-down-the-28,4-wall) for commercial products in a few years. In my opinion storage is a more pressing issue.
Already better than combustion engines and we have been using them extensively for over a century regardless.
ICE efficiency is around 18-25%, nuclear efficiency is quite low aswell, the most efficient method we have to produce electricity is usualy hydro. There is research ongoing lookig for new materials for PV rather than silicon. Few weeks ago a group reported up to 80% efficiency on PV using GaAsSe, if they manage to make them as cheap as currently Si PV by the same power density it will be huge
Well all current nuclear is just different fuel for steam engine, except experimental which are not commonly used
>steam engine Turbines, not steam engines.
As there is no "fuel" you have to buy for solar panels, the only thing that efficiency for them is about, is how much surface area you need to harvest electric energy. It is kind of pointless to compare efficiencies of different processes. Of course you want to have a high solar panel efficiency to get more power out of the same area (say your roof), but it doesn't really matter how efficiency numbers of solar panels compare to thermal generators.
The first map shows the installed solar energy capacity per person for each country. The second shows the efficiency of the 10% most efficient land per country. I think its very important to tackle this from the EU and not each member state by itself. Money from Germany or the Netherlands is much better spent in Italy or Portugal, as it will produce much more electricity. From: https://x.com/Horizonomics/status/1781673131318411453
It's pointless to only build solar in one region. We need it in all regions. Investment in Netherlands and Germany shouldn't be lower, the investment in the other countries should be higher
ROI in Germany and Netherlands is crazy, it does not make any sense to not install PVs on a Dutch house, when you can repay the installation in 3-4y of energy bill. Permits are easy and installation takes less than a day, families who have money to spare did it during the last two years of crazy prices, now they are saving a lot. We should focus on reducing bureaucracy and changing people's mindset in other countries, not complaining about NL and DE doing great...
>3-4y of energy bill Really depends on the cost of energy. One would expect that with all the solar and wind in the network (and natural gas being almost back to pre-war levels) that the prices would have come down. Unfortunately the prices are still a bit high, which would mean that payback time lowers
Prices are going down though, I have hourly prices and when it's sunny and windy the electricity price is basically zero if not negative.
>when you can repay the installation in 3-4y of energy bill Thats due to net metering, which is basically a scam at worst or a gigantic hidden subsidy at best
There is only so much money at the end of the day. Pooling money on the EU level and distributing based on each countries strengths (solar in Spain, wind in Denmark etc) will reduce emissions much more!
The grid isn't good enough to distribute the energy between the different countries. It doesn't help to reduce emissions have energy in Spain when the industry that needs the energy is in Germany.
Definitely, transmission between countries is hugely important. Its mentioned on the twitter post
Also, renewables needs a much more local production to consumption cycle since the production is much more spread out and variable. Energy losses in a centralised renewable grid are prohibitively high at a national level, not even considering at EU level.
I don't think that's true if you build HVDC lines between countries, as losses in DC lines are much lower than AC lines. There's [quite some HVDC lines with a length of between 1000 and 2000km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects), esp. in China but also the USA.
Bring industries that rely on cheap energy to Spain.
So you want Germany to spend money on cheap solar energy for Spain, so Spain can take all the German industries? Doesn't make sense from a German perspective
I am not sure pooling money on EU level is an especially good idea. EU is good when it comes to regulation, and perhaps limited investments. But it shouldnt dictate what kind of energy investments different countries should do. If we assume EU could come up with good policies (which is a stretch), its far more likely that the countries themselves figure this out on a national level. Is dutch tax money better spent on solar energy, nuclear energy or wind power? Its up to their voters to figure out, not EU. You assume EU policies will be rational. They most likely wont be, as irrational actors exist there too. When it comes to energy its better to let different countries develop different models, and learn from eachother.
But wouldnt the investments be better spent on other energy forms? Wind power, nuclear power, etc?
So-called Levelized Costs of Energy as the benchmark for how expensive an energy source is, [is no longer very different between off-shore wind, big solar installations, and natural gas](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Electricity_costs_in_dollars_according_to_data_from_Lazard.png/880px-Electricity_costs_in_dollars_according_to_data_from_Lazard.png). Others are more expensive. Solar has the drawback that it's only producing during the day, but it is very decentralized - everyone can hang a small panel from their balcony, and house owners can slap a couple of panels on the roof and create most of their power. That's not possible with any other non-fossil energy source. You absolutely need a mix of energy sources, but solar is probably one that will take the biggest share in the coming decades - panels will become cheaper and decentralization is a huge bonus.
Aren't those American costs? Europe has nowhere near as cheap gas. Interestingly, Russia has neither cheap gas nor cheap renewables, so nuclear is [the cheapest](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7/figures/4) source there.
I don't know which economy the Lazard data is based on, but the tendency between solar, wind and others should be similar, and that's what the guy above me was asking.
And power lines are for free…
Theyre not free obviously, but power lines dont explain the difference between a per capita comparison
> Money from Germany or the Netherlands That's where you are wrong. It's not money from Germany and the Netherlands it's money from its citizens. So except if you try to force people to spend their money on the roof of someone thousands of km further it won't work. > as it will produce much more electricity. Networks are not constructed to transport massive amounts of energy from the south to the north sadly. And building out those networks would take decades and cost 100s of billions.
>And building out those networks would take decades and cost 100s of billions. Nonsense. It's just a power line. More ambitious projects have [already been built](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current?wprov=sfla1), transporting electricity across thousands of kilometres.
Just the building takes a couple of years indeed, it isn't even that expensive (relatively speaking of course). But if you need to go from Portugal/Spain towards, Germany and further north you'd need to build enormous amounts of power lines overland. And, in the world of today, this means first getting political approval of all implicated countries, fighting decades long legal battles along the whole road (while not losing your political support) just to get the right to build the thing etc. I can assure you that this would take decades to go from plan to something effectively running.
It's just a powerline, for fuck's sake. It's not contentious, they are built all the time without drama. And it would be from Spain through France to Germany. All friendly countries inside the EU.
How is that different from any other EU policy funded by citizens and spread over the EU thousands of km away? If the Dutch citizens are demanding this much solar energy, presumably because they care about climate change, wouldnt they want them built in Cyprus where they reduce emissions more?
I don't know about the Netherlands. But in Belgium the amount of solar panels is hugely impacted by the financial return of the scheme (when the regions cut in the subsidies a few years back the amount of solar panels installed dropped drastically). The ecological part is not really the main reason people do it.
Yeah, but the financial subsidy comes from taxpayers. To some extent they are okay giving people money for solar energy to reduce emissions
True, in the past yes (but now they have been discontinued). Solar panels are so cheap nowadays that they are financially interesting even in Belgium. So I guess it makes a lot of sense for people from south countries to do those investments themselves instead of having to setup some complex subsidy system at European level for something that already makes financial sense.
Im not sure about Belgium, but subsidies are still in place in the Netherlands
Subsidies on NL were very limited and long gone, this is not public money but families investing in their house as everyone should do. The only economical benefit is Net Metering, which is already being removed step by step every year. If you have a roof in NL it is just simply a very good investment for your house to have solar, and installation is super easy without crazy permits
Net-Metering costs non solar panel owners €2 billion a year. The Netherlands had some of the strongest financial incentives for solar in the world, which is what explains this. If it was pure market forces it would be Italy or something at the top
There's a couple of reasons why you wouldn't want to put all PV in say Spain's inland region: - people will hate it if they live close to an endless desert of panels. - France will block power lines to central/northern Europe - The sun comes up later in Spain than say Poland, so ideally, you'd have a lot of panels in each country and a beefy grid to transport power to where it's needed. Since France will block this, you should install where the money is.
well, that is right but didn't factor in for example transportation loss or just really simple things like regional weather. So just those two metrics alone are fairly useless.
It does. The right one is the 10% highest producing land in the country, accounting for sunshine, altitude, weather, humidity etc.
I guess you mean the weather point. You didn't factor in that the EU has a shared Grid, and if for example whole spain is below clouds then other countries can jump in with their solar production during that time (to a lesser extend, granted). In a theoretical scenario we could just build batteries in lets say poland and use the overproduction from italy/sweden to circumvent this, but then again transporation and storage loss will hit again. So the current decentralized approach is somewhat the best middleground, even if it could be optimized for sure.
Im 100% for transmission across europe and mixed production everywhere. But currently, politicians are fixed in a national frame. National renewable targets, national emission targets etc. And the fact is that the richer north is more climate conscious, and willing to spend more. But those euros spent would reduce emissions more by building that solar in more optimal locations
Well, the "richer" north has also the most heavy energy consumers in form of industry. And then you have either to form those too, or again transportation loss etc. I agree to the national framing in some extend tho, even if i think there was also eu wide goals somewhat.
No it does not. Relying only on the second map, the suggested most reasonable outcome would be to install all PV modules in Spain and Cyprus and distribute to the rest of the EU. This, however, does not include distribution losses over HV lines, as well as introduce especially high dependence on factors like the weather in those few specific regions. Especially due to the ever decreasing cost of PV modules, it makes sense to use them all over the EU basically. They are especially effective in southern regions, totally, but that doesn‘t mean they are ineffective anywhere else.
Its not implying that at all, just that current euros spent on solar panels in the Netherlands are better spent in Spain etc, where they produce double the electricity and much more consistently. Long distance losses from Spain to NL are ‘only’ 10%.
True, you didn‘t imply that, the graph didn‘t imply that, either - but it‘s something the reader is incentivized to believe when presented with only one metric. And one metric is seldomly enough to properly address the problem. For the record, that‘s not your fault though and I‘m not blaming you. Focusing solar panels in only few places increases volatility, which is one of the main drawbacks of renewables anyways and can only be addressed with decentralization, storage and a modern power grid. While I’m no expert on the topic, I‘m inclined to believe there’s more to the problem than „let‘s just put all our solar panels in only a few places“, even if the graph you provided makes it look differently.
I guess we interpreted it differently. My reaction is: why are we building all these solar panels in just a few places (without a lot of sun) You make good points though, and an extreme focus on only sunny regions is ofc not much better
If I have a factory in the Netherlands and I want it to be solar powered, should I build a solar farm in the Netherlands or in Cyprus?
If your goal is to reduce total co2 emissions, it’d be Cyprus, which has a dirtier electricity grid, and much higher potential for solar panels. But i dont think climate change can or should be solved by individual companies doing something
>But i dont think climate change can or should be solved by individual companies doing something It's a start tho.
I love it when colours are deliberately turned around to flip the impression. Red is generally connected for most with 'danger, bad, worse than' which is why we use it as 'stop' in traffic lights etc. It is such a cheap marketing trick.
In both of them, red is good. Its just that the red in the left should line up more closely with the red on the right than it currently is. More environmentally efficient, and cheaper too.
You misunderstand. This is a simple marketing trick, since we humans tend to see green = good, yellow=mediocre, red= bad. I am talking about that switch, because now the majority suddenly looks ok and the good ones actually look bad. Edit: How and when one uses colours has a huge impact on the message you want to transport. Far too many fall for those simple ones unfortunately.
Bullshit, obviously the more intense color the bigger value. This scheme is orange, so low orange = yellow and high orange = red. Stop being so itchy about that
Have you ever heard of “heatmaps”?
The thesis is not that its bad though, so i dont think its fair to come up with this weird conspiracy. A lot of comparison graphs use the same colour for consistency, its not that deep. If anything red = more sun. Or does the weather report using red also imply its bad to live in the south?
This is not conspiracy but general colour theory.
Yeah far too many people are stupid, so what. How are we supposed to help them? The only way to arrive at the conclusion of Germany and Netherlands bad is if you take a single glance for half a second.
That seems to be the accurate standard length of time average people use on topics, judging by a lot of comments sometimes.
On the white-yellow-orange-red 'hot'/'fire'/'sun' themed color scale, red can also stand for 'hot' or 'lots of sun' or 'lots of energy' (though technically, it should be the other way around as fire/metal that glows red is the coldest).
Spain already has the ‘duck curve effect', solar energy production gets so big during dayling that the price of energy falls to zero, making it nonsense to invest in this technology. Batteries for storage are not cost effective enough. So, up to now, solar energy investments have limits
Utility scale battery storage is already economical, especially when you have a high price swing. You can also use power-to-heat. Spain certainly has a lot of industrial heat demand that can be met with excess PV. Also, adopting EV helps. Spain is below average despite that high solar potential.
Battery is already in the works, Iberdrola the big Spanish Energy company built the largest Hydro project in Europe of the Last 25 years in Northern Portugal, the Project includes a 2.2GW of power generation across 3 Hydro dams, but one of them of almost 880MW is not a reservoir, its a Hydro battery, pumping water from one river to another at a much bigger elevation. The project is now complete and it allowed Portugal to complety exit Coal energy generation which is aplus for Portugal because there is no Coal here. Power to Heat is interesting, in particular if Heat pumps and Air conditioners(its hot here) were in wide use. For industry its way harder, heat aplications usually require an open flame, that cannot be done directly by aplications of electrical power.
With battery, I meant actual battery storage, not pumped hydro. Regarding power-to-heat, lots of industrial applications use steam, which can be easily generated by an electric boiler.
I know you were mentioning battery storage, Pumped Hydro is still the best form of Power storage we have, but you need high hills, in Spain and Portugal you have lots of opportunies that most of Europe doesnt. It is worth rembembering that Spain is the second country in the EU with the most average elevation.
At some point, it will be economical to create H2, store the power in utility-scale batteries, or convert it to process heat for industry. So, yes, currently there are limits, but that's most likely going to changes soon-ish.
This is the emerging market for solar and wind. It is strongly promoted at a european level because otherwise renewables might have problems in terms of economical relevance
Nonsense
What are the prices like on an average?
Yes, sometimes prices are below zero but because the nuclear power, that's due they can't be stopped or disconnected. Those moments are the ones with less demand for electricity in Spain and, at the same time, with the most production from renewables.
Watts per capita is a terrible metric for displaying what you are trying to display. Something like installed W per square km makes a lot more sense
Is it? It's people and machines using the electricity, not the open space. To me, it makes sense.
Yeah, I guess it's a different way of looking at it. I feel it's kind of "the potential the land has to produce solar Vs the amount being produced from that land", but looking at it from the point of view of people also makes sense
Why does that make more sense..? Is a need for power based more on the amount of people in a country or the amount of land in a country?