I once read an article that in Berlin the sewage system is flushed with fresh water because too many people have installed water saving toilet flushers. So plenty of people bought these water savers and now the price of water has gone up because the water that is directly flushed needs to be paid too.The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into the grid.
The problem is that in the end it will become more expensive for everybody because at times you have a surplus driving the whole sale electricity prices into the negative while still paying fixed prices for injection into the grid.
To make this economically viable, you have to have everyone paying spot prices. Everything else is just green ideology driven inefficiency.
Just to make it clear, I think renewables are an important option for the future. But to make them a viable option of the electricity energy mix, supply and demand, storage and grid capacity need to be taken into account.
Last not least, there is plenty of low hanging fruit to drive CO2 emissions down: drive up the truck tolls. Currently you have potatoes farmed in Germany, driven to Poland to get washed, transported to Italy to be converted to french fries and transferred back to Germany into the super markets.
Same goes for home office, during Covid it was possible for many workers to continue with their work. Does an accountant need to drive to an office every day? Nope. How many business trips could be replaced by a video call?
If the CO2 emissions problem is to be solved rather sooner than later, the money has to be spend efficiently as there isn't enough of it.
3/27/2026
at
6:15:17 PM
The price of water has gone up for a multitude of factors. One of them is water savings in general, but not primarily because the sewage system requires regular flushes. The reason is that water gets paid per qubic meter and includes a fresh water and a waster water component. The assumption is that almost all fresh water you use ends up as waste water. Now, the grid has a very substantial fixed-price component that's largely independent from the actual current volume being used. Putting pipes in the ground and maintaining them there is an actual costly endeavour. If water use now drops, and the baseline cost remains stable, then it's entirely expected that the price per volume rises. It's simple math. The same baseline cost needs to be brought in via less volume.This will also happen to people that use residential gas. As less and less people use residential gas, the maintenance of the gas network gets distributed among less and less customers.
> The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into the grid.
They are subsidized on purchase, but the price they get when pushing energy into the grid is by default fixed at 0. The network accepts the power, but there's no payment. It's also capped at 800W delivery, meaning that at peak power generation, you'd earn a whopping 5 cent an hour with the current subsidy for full scale solar power. So in practice, the only benefit owners have is that they draw less power from the net which is much more attractive because of the pricing structure. You can, optionally, register your balcony power station as a regular solar power plant, but then you're subject to a whole bunch of rules and regulations (for example you need a suitable elctricity meter etc.). This option is generally not attractive for such small power generations.
Fundamentally, though, the same issue as with the water and gas network exists with all localized (solar) power generation. If more and more people use the grid only as a backup, or for winter energy needs, then the overhead of maintaining the grid will have a larger cost contribution to the total cost of electricity.
by Xylakant
3/27/2026
at
9:54:54 AM
I have the curse of having an mom who was a smart CPA.All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.
by Gibbon1
3/27/2026
at
11:03:45 AM
> But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels to a large grid scale one.
But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra 12% of installed solar capacity.
Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now. But it's also almost free.
by leoedin
3/27/2026
at
12:42:39 PM
US costs for rooftop solar (at build time or retrofit) are misleadingly high.In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.
To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the US only utility scale is competitive with that.
Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.
by ZeroGravitas
3/27/2026
at
9:57:39 AM
> Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar.As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is very different when it comes out of a different account.
(everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers of new homes)
by pjc50
3/27/2026
at
10:33:21 AM
While true in general, I suspect that this won't change house prices as (I think) those are more driven by supply-demand imbalances rather than the actual costs, and that the increase in costs will go into someone else's profit margin, which may be some mix of the builders (although they're famously opaque from all the sub-contracting) and the land owners.
by ben_w
3/27/2026
at
1:28:38 PM
Regulations like these make the entire renewable energy sector seem like a crazy scam and greenwashing.They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.
by Ray20
3/27/2026
at
8:05:15 PM
On the one hand, it's been obviously economically a good idea to require this for about a decade, both because PV is cheap and would pay for itself even at full price and also because doing it construction time is cheaper than doing it later.Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards.
On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.
by ben_w