641
‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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It's going to be hard to justify production costs, but in places that subsidize it: it makes perfect sense to scale up solar wherever possible.
Hard to justify costs? The article quotes 6 years of amortization. I know numbers around 8-10 years in Germany.
Show me any consumer investment, that gives such a good ROI.
8-10 years is a fully fledged pv system. The small balcony panels pay themselves after about 5 years, longer if you add a battery.
PRODUCTION COSTS.
It's assumed that the equivalent solar wouldn't be installed somewhere else, so you would need to produce more total to meet demand, meaning increased production costs with an upwards cost growth curve based on scale unless the materials, usually aluminum and slabs of silicon fresh out the oven or sometimes cadmium telluride, are already overabundant.
The actual problem are electricity prices rising higher and that shortens to time to reach the equilibrium between the investetment