this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.
Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.
Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)
Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.
As your northern neighbors. We did subsidize it too, but now the privatized energy companies started whining that there wasn't enough capacity, so now they charge you for creating free energy
You guys shouldn't complain, you still have saldering (net metering) ánd get money for the electricity you have left which is still a huge subsidy.
4 million households in Australia have solar panels.
They are great value.
I'm fairly sure that all newly built houses in the UK require solar by law.
All the new houses around here with no solar would indicate that is not true. They're not even required to have a south facing roof.
At least here in California, having solar panels on a non south facing roof usually only reduces production by 10-20%, as long as it's not entirely north facing. Solar systems are often slightly undersized - it's more cost effective to size it so it handles average load rather than the summer peaks you only see for a few weeks per year - so the actual difference for a given system may be less.
With my system, I see the best output from south-east facing panels since they get the morning sun. West facing panels are also fairly popular here due to time-of-use electricity plans. Some electricity plans have peak pricing from 4 to 9 pm, so people want to try and collect as much sunlight as possible during that period before sunset.
The UK is a lot further north, and it's probably not a massive loss.
It was enough to prevent me getting "free" solar panels (while that was a thing) though, so I'm still salty about that.
Same here in California
They're installing ridiculously small systems so that they're barely compliant, but the systems aren't very useful to the people that buy the house.
It is very poorly implemented. "Builder grade" solar panels in a "smallest compliant" configuration with no concern for architecture to benefit from solar takes place. Builders are intentionally putting the shittiest solar to reduce value of the homes they build so that they can complain about the policy.
This is the price of guaranteed electricity delivered to your doorstep. We can't get rid of gas fired power stations and kms of electricity grid network yet.
Only partially true. The solar panels almost all inject power back into the grid. Power companies started complaining about their profits when they had to actually pay the users for their power that they generated so now home power generating houses get paid pennies on the dollar for delivering power and reducing the power capacity needed by the power companies and of course the power companies didn't lower prices at all, so they are just sucking up the difference in pure profit.
That is surprisingly expensive there. I think it's like 12¢/kwh here (though we have block one and block two prices depending on how many kwh you use in a month, so it could be a higher rate if you are eating through tons of power).