Hello Everyone! I am new here at greenbuildingtalk.com and I hope this is the correct forum for this post. Recently I was travelling through germany by train on a business trip. In the southern parts a huge number of solar pannels on houses attracted my attention. I have never seen so many buildings - family homes, farms and factories - powered by solar energy in such a rural area. Do you know anything about some kind of special subsidies of solar power in Germany? I couldn't find a lot about this topic.

Germany has more solar panels per capita than even the entire USA does. One of the main reasons Germany leads the way in energy design is because their electric rates are around 45 cents per kWh. Compared to the USA which the average is around 15 cents per kWh.

It's like with the gas crunch in the late 90's. People in the USA were buying Hummers and huge SUVs that got 10mpg because gas was cheap in the USA but once gas got expensive, people were trading the SUVs in for more efficient vehicles.

That's human nature. If it's cheap and plentiful, they will exploit and waste it. If it's expensive and rare, they will covet and protect it. That's the core of mankind. It's been part of the human condition since man first walked the earth. Look at the settlers from Europe. They raped the North American landscape, slaughtering buffalo, mining land till it was destroyed and barren, killed off species of animals and drove them to the point of extinction, etc.

Back to Germany. They lead the way in energy builds. They developed triple pane windows, they created thermally broken cantilevered concrete decks, PassivHaus design, etc. They have more engineers per capita than anywhere else in the world. As long as they stick to engineering good things and not creating a war machine, I'm OK with it

Interesting story ;). Living in Austria, I know Germany well and what you mentioned is correct: energy costs are higher than in the USA! Still I a do not agree that only economic reasons makes the reasoning: During the 70s when most of industrial countries saw nuclear energy as efficient in terms of costs and supply, Austria argued against it. At the time climate change was not so critical. Therefore I think countries like Austria is an example that not all humans are motivated by economic reasons but more by common sense. :)

Germany kick started their distributed solar industry with EXTREMELY remunerative feed in tariff (FIT) , paying the owners something on the order of USD$0.75 /kwh for early adopters, ratcheting it down over time. The fact that it was stepped down over time, and not on the basis of the total installed capacity was in some ways a mistake, since the payback to the solar own was super-swift and super-rich. They paid too much for their solar in the early years.

Nevertheless, between the FIT and a nationwide standard for the permitting and inspection process, a homeowner can now call a couple of licensed solar installers, get some quotes, get the system installed, and the installer mails in the paperwork to the utility and local governments and it's done. It's a fairly mature and competitive market, and costs less than USD$2/watt all-in to get it installed.

In the US there are federal,state, local, and utility paperwork shuffles, and sometimes multiple inspections, by utilty, local city, etc. Being a less mature industry (it's not like ordering a pizza delivered at competitive pricing the way it is in Germany), it takes more on-site visits & face-time/ hand-holding to make the sale. In the US in 2015 residential scale installations were averaging about $3.60/watt, which is considerably more expensive. It's coming down though. In US states where solar has more policy support it's becoming more of a commodity, and a bit more competitive.

To add a bit... After the Fukushima accident in Japan (and don't forget their scare from Chernobyl 30 years ago), Germany has been moving to shutter all their nuclear generation capabilities. Combine that with a lack of domestic oil reserves (even output in the North Sea is falling) and that natural gas usage is not as widespread in Europe as in North America (plus most of it comes from Russia), and you don't have many options. So, yes, the German government has heavily subsidized solar. Unfortunately, Germany isn't the best location for solar energy production. We'll have to see how all this pans out over the next decade.

Germany is a net exporter of electricity, partly due to the inflexibility and slow ramping capabilites of it's coal fired fleet. When Germany decides to get serious about solving the demand response & storage control issues, the coal power can go the way of the nukes.

Northern Europe is definitely not the sunniest climate, but it doesn't have to be. German & Danish Baltic/ North Sea wind power development could power the entire country with improved grid capacity, but that cost of transmission lines has to be balanced against the cost of automated demand response and grid storage, both of which are becoming cheap at a similar rate to solar. I have great hopes for Germany being able to execute the Energiewende effectively AND cost-effectively, even if they arguably overpaid in the early years.

"lightspot"- a play on "Lichtblick", the German clean power company, perhaps?

At least so far, the statistics say that closing reasonably built nuclear plants (that excludes Chernobyl and some Japan plants) and replacing the capacity with coal is significantly more dangerous/harmful.

German coal plants coming online in recent years had all been planned a decade or more previously, and are both higher efficiency and and more flexible than prior coal generation in Germany. Without wind and solar they would have had to plan on building more coal to keep the lights on, but that's not happening. Phasing out nuclear before the end of lifecycle kept some plants under construction from being canceled, but there is still significant overcapacity in Germany. The existing overcapacity of coal plants has led to a power glut, which has in turn led to more power exports, in some cases putting less efficient fossil burners in neighboring countries in financial peril.

They still have their political work cut out for them on figuring out how to retire the less efficient existing coal plants, but they're not as stuck as they are in Australia, where even aging crummy 25% thermal efficiency goal fired generation is kept on financial life support with capacity payments for keeping them operational, even as their capacity factors drop to single digits, all to avoid the decommissioning costs for the owners. In Germany it's tough to make a living at burning coal to make electricity, since the wholesale price of electricity is regularly going negative during high solar or high wind hours. Days like this are becoming more frequent:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germany-briefly-hit-new-record-for-renewable-energy-generation

The new ultra-supercritical plant in Vattenfall does a bit better than break even, but it's not clear how long that will remain to be true. The near record low pricing of coal worldwide is the only thing keeping the German coal fleet going. These are clearly going to become stranded assets in the intermediate term well before their design lifecycle. Then it's a matter of figuring out who pays for it, and how much (as with the early nuke retirements.)

Basically look at Germany, California and now Texas.

During peak production of solar, they're producing more power than the country can use. However, off-peak, they still require some form of baseline (brown) power. And, having tossed out the most energy-dense solution (nuclear), they're relegated to so-called "clean" coal.  As such, their greenhouse gas (and other pollutant levels) are rising.

What they're learning is, simply installing generation capacity alone is a half-measure. And corrections are coming from the various governments with these problems to begin limiting new-install capacity. Be it public or private. Limiting power options for fulfilling future demand.

So, if you're going to invest in solar and/or wind for your property, set aside some room for a storage solution too. Because:

A) Why should you buy ANY power from the grid, save in an emergency?

B) With proper software management, you can store excess power and provide it back to the grid at times when prices are higher, rather than during peak generation, when prices are lower.

Texas is in no danger of having prices go negative on solar power any time soon, but there is some wind power curtailment at times. It only barely there in California. Like Germany the grid resources in Texas aren't adequate for high levels of importing & exporting power from neighboring regions.

But unlike Germany the residential retail price of grid power in Texas is way to cheap to make home batteries even close to financially rational. At current residential rates it's cheaper in Texas for homeowners to build 2x the amount of PV necessary to hit Net Zero Energy and throw half of it away than it is to buy & maintain battery system. Changes in both rate structures and utility regulations would have to happen before spot price arbitrage from residential sized system were even possible in Texas (and most of the US states.)

The amount of storage necessary to stabilize the grid with variable renewables in Texas is much smaller than in Germany, in part because of the amount of flexible gas-fired capacity (at a lower fuel price per MWh than coal), but also the more favorable mix of wind & PV. Coal plants are becoming uneconomic, and after FERC Order 745 was supported by the US Supreme court last year, distributed smart "demand response" load control is required to be allowed to compete head to head against generators in electricity markets. That may not affect Texas (which is fairly isolated from nearby grids), but for most of the US this will be a huge factor in controlling grids and markets, since non time critical loads can soak up a lot of excess power when wind or PV is over-producing, and can be paid to turn off or down when there isn't enough generation. That's basically item B) but at a much larger scale, and managed by the grid operator or distributed resource aggregator. This is already being done in the PJM (mostly mid-Atlantic & eastern midwest part of the US) and elsewhere. In the PJM region homeowners with electric water heaters can get paid to give control over to a third party aggregator who bids fleets of controllable residential load into capacity & ancillary services markets. One such aggregator is Mosiac Power:

https://mosaicpower.com/

>Therefore I think countries like Austria is an example that not all humans are motivated by economic reasons but more by common sense.

I've spent a lot of time there, and I can't quit giggling at this. People are so hilariously parochial, and so simple-mindedly derisive about the US. It's almost like a fad to diss the US.

In my part of Texas, you can get a KWH for 4.2 cents. Sounds like a pretty "smart" price to me.

So in reading your post what did their common sense produce?

IMO, part of the solution is to get much more aggressive about demand response (not just water heaters). Green buildings should do it even if rate structures don't yet encourage it. They do other, non strictly economically rational things (like super insulation). And part of it is green metrics. For example, might be better for the environment to talk about "this building uses 1/3 the peak period electricity..." vs "this building uses 1/2 the yearly electricity....".

In order to participate in a demand response market that market has to actually exist, which is not yet universal.

Some utilities allow residential air-conditioning to participate in demand response, but many of those programs are pretty crude, and leave the homeowner far less than comfortable. Water heaters are ideal since they have thermal mass, can be used as energy sinks to reduce excess line voltage & for frequency control. Using space conditioning equipment in a similar fashion would be a pretty wild ride on the comfort spectrum, unless it was only affecting the temperature of buffer tank in a hydronic system but even that has it's limits. A water heater can be run up to 180F if need be for managing load without affecting the usefulness for serving domestic hot water, and time shifting the 4.5kw load as experienced by the grid is pretty easy.

If residential rate structures evolve to include demand charges along with much lower energy pricing, local battery technology can become financially viable. It already is financially viable for commercial ratepayers in a number of US states. Residential demand charges are pretty rare, but not unheard of in Alaska, and is beginning to show up in rate cases for residential solar customers in high rooftop PV penetration states.