Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 20, 2024
Balcony solar brings the cleantech revolution to apartments!
Solar balcony setups are making the rooftop solar revolution accessible for apartment-dwellers, and they’re already booming in Germany.
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An interesting new manifestation of the global cleantech revolution is taking off in Germany: solar balconies. It’s basically a less fancy version of a rooftop solar array, designed to be able to “hang” on balconies and so be usable for apartment-dwellers that don’t have roofs of their own.
Balcony solar set-ups are smaller, simpler, and can be bought online. Even better, they don’t require an electrician to install, as they can be plugged into an ordinary power outlet1 and feed power into the rest of your home with a DC/AC inverter.
More than 500,000 plug-in solar systems have been installed in Germany, most of them on balconies, with 220,000 installed in the first half of 2024 alone. (Germany is a longtime solar leader, has set up a tax structure that rewards rooftop solar, and some regions subsidize balcony solar specifically, all helping to take the lead on this emerging trend). One estimate is that Germany already has a cumulative 200 MW (0.2 GW) worth of power-generating capacity from all the balcony solar set-ups popping up around the nation!
“The main reason for the success of balcony solar systems is that it gives people the chance to use solar who weren’t able to use it before.
Most people don’t own a house, or they cannot install rooftop solar because of heritage protection, shading, or other constructional conditions of the roof. For them, balcony solar is appealing because they can use solar power to generate their own electricity and reduce their electric bills.”
-Meyer Burger, German manufacturer.
We need to bring balcony solar to the U.S.A. ASAP and help supercharge democratized clean power for everyone.
Tell your state leaders to support and incentivize balcony solar!
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This makes them one of an exciting new generation of cleantech products that can plug into an ordinary outlet and don’t need an electrician to install (which is important since we don’t have enough electricians). Another example would be the new plug-in induction stove cooktops that are getting lots of positive buzz.
This definitely gets the juices flowing for me! I've been having a hard time convincing my HOA to do solar, but I sure have a balcony I can hang some panels from! Looking at one model, it says I can do as much as 1,000 kwh per year, which looks to be about 10x my personal usage. Definitely don't need a massive rig to offset an apartment!