alt.hn

4/2/2026 at 2:17:51 AM

Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm

 https://hackaday.com/2026/03/31/solar-balconies-take-europe-by-storm/

by lxm

4/2/2026 at 4:20:46 AM

I have 2kW of panels on my balcony and 4kWh of batteries. I'm happy with the setup. I expect it to pay for itself in just a few years. The only thing I wish it had is open APIs to control the inverter and the batteries, ideally over bluetooth, so that I'm not forced to use an app.

by adrianN

4/2/2026 at 4:36:49 AM

If port 502/TCP is open you can probably access it via Modbus protocol. Implementing a Modbus client is trivial.

My rebranded Fox ESS hardware has it enabled and there's even official documentation of the so-called "registers".

by effdee

4/2/2026 at 7:26:43 AM

I use victron devices and a litime battery + an esp32 of your choice and some LLM magic to read and relay data from Bluetooth to web.

For both victron and litime plenty of examples exist, including home assistant integrations.

by herbst

4/2/2026 at 7:45:40 AM

Solakon One has a quite decent API you can control without cloud being involved...

by xigurat

4/2/2026 at 6:37:21 AM

Hehe "Balkonkraftwerk", available from Lidl for €250 (see TFA). This makes me unreasonably happy for some reason.

by inejge

4/2/2026 at 4:32:27 AM

Related:

Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601310

by ChrisArchitect

4/2/2026 at 4:51:28 AM

Drill baby drill...

by bamboozled

4/2/2026 at 3:23:44 AM

I really hope these become legal in Canada.

Right now it seems Utah is the only jurisdiction in North America where they are

by testing22321

4/2/2026 at 3:28:52 AM

The only negative thing I feel about all of this is that we're doing now. Once the glaciers are farked, the snow is going and the mass die offs are started. Better late than never they say, but why the hell didn't we just invest in this in the 1990s?

by bamboozled

4/2/2026 at 3:30:00 AM

Solar panels were expensive and not very efficient then.

by SoftTalker

4/2/2026 at 4:50:58 AM

Do you think more investment / subsidies weren't possible over the last few decades?

by bamboozled

4/2/2026 at 8:31:24 AM

They were and Germany was actually going in that direction, but it took the manufacturing scale of China to create an incentive to introduce the hundreds of minor changes necessary to get costs down.

by Tade0

4/2/2026 at 11:41:36 AM

germany stoped the investment and killed the solar industry. Not saying that China helped too, but we don't know if germany would have pushed through it without China.

by muskstinks

4/2/2026 at 5:34:41 AM

Lobby from the other people selling energy: the not green type. They have the money, the lawyers, the ads, everything. Balcony solar power is only allowed now due to energy shortage.

by GoToRO

4/2/2026 at 11:33:27 AM

Balcony solar has been allowed for a number of years in Germany.

by adrianN

4/2/2026 at 12:14:53 PM

We did invest, starting in the 1970s, which is what brought the prices down so much. It just took time to get the R&D to the point where they were cost competitive.

The social problem is that fossil fuel usage was very profitable and employed enough people that polluters were allowed not to pay for externalities and a lot of climate change denial funded by the oil companies proved effective at getting politicians and the public to downplay the risk. Even today, even on HN, you can find people who’ll say it’s no big deal, the earth has been this warm in the past, that it’ll cost too much, that they can never drive an EV because their daily commute is 11 hours each way without stopping, etc.

Because fossil fuel lobbyists so successfully captured most right-wing parties, millions of people added that to their self identity and thus will struggle to admit they were wrong because that more or less means admitting that the same people who lied to them about the climate also lied about other things.

by acdha

4/2/2026 at 5:05:02 AM

[dead]

by thebeardredis

4/2/2026 at 4:00:17 AM

[dead]

by onetokeoverthe

4/2/2026 at 5:05:55 AM

[dead]

by thebeardredis

4/2/2026 at 5:04:46 AM

Is this supposed to be a revolutionary European invention?

by mudil

4/2/2026 at 6:21:49 AM

"In 1839, the ability of some materials to create an electrical charge from light exposure was first observed by the French physicist Edmond Becquerel"

So yes

by WithinReason

4/2/2026 at 6:20:59 AM

Neither the title nor the article implied so.

by widdershins

4/2/2026 at 9:59:51 AM

All to deny the fact that new deal is incompatible with dense cities. Sorry but do the math and you realize that the future is homes and sheds, not condos.

by kkfx

4/2/2026 at 11:43:09 AM

What 'new deal'? If you talk about Solar and PV, it adds value already independen of how little it is. Even dense city has roofs on top. Also they have highways which have plenty direct space next to them were no one wants to live or grow produce (due to polution)

by muskstinks

4/2/2026 at 3:22:35 AM

> They come with small inverters to convert the DC output of the solar panels into AC power, which plug straight into an existing home power socket.

Hopefully these inverters are smart enough to cut the feed if the AC mains power goes out, to avoid backfeeding utility lines that may be under repair.

by SoftTalker

4/2/2026 at 5:00:01 AM

You can't buy an inverter that is certified that doesn't do this. As well as a whole raft of other safety measures and grid quality measures besides.

See for instance:

https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/sites/default/files/2024-0...

Every region has their own set of rules which requires inverter manufacturers to have a bunch of different settings depending on where the inverter is installed.

by jacquesm

4/2/2026 at 3:49:31 AM

Fortunately they do, and in fact the article makes that clear. +1 for reading to the end of the paragraph that was quoted.

by couchand

4/2/2026 at 3:39:53 AM

Yes. Any system that’s UL 3700 (or more generally IEEE 1547 / UL 1741) compliant mandates anti-islanding by shutting off the power within two seconds of grid loss.

by InvisibleUp

4/2/2026 at 3:33:10 AM

I think this is why they're supposed to be limited to 800 W, but is that enough to avoid serious danger to utility workers when a whole apartment building or neighborhood is full of these?

by telotortium

4/2/2026 at 5:05:19 AM

Central Europe has more buried electrical systems and nothing is safe until it's actively grounded so hard it'll arc flash the idiot who broke you LOTO before you even feel a clear tingle.

The 800W is about grid management impact limitation to levels that do not warrant the utility imposing any "but we first have to upgrade the substation before we can get you your local transformer with the higher speed EV charging and McMansion winter full heat pump setup" delays before you are allowed to turn it on/grid-tie it.

by namibj

4/2/2026 at 5:06:04 AM

They are limited to prevent fires. They sit behind the breakers so any power they feed in allows more current on the cables before the breakers trip.

by adrianN