Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm

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

by lxm • 4 months ago

90 38 4 months ago

SoftTalker2• 4 months ago

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.

telotortium• 4 months ago

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?

namibj• 4 months ago

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.

adrianN3• 4 months ago

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.

InvisibleUp• 4 months ago

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.

couchand• 4 months ago

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

jacquesm• 4 months ago

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.

testing22321• 4 months ago

I really hope these become legal in Canada.

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

bigthymer• 4 months ago

Virginia recently became the 2nd state to allow it.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/virginia-to-becom...

rickydroll2• 4 months ago

There are two types of balcony solar. One is bidirectional power flow, i.e., classical balcony solar, and the other is called "zero export", in which a current flow direction sensor on your mains throttles back your inverter if you start to reverse the current flow and export power.

Where I live, in the US, National Grid is okay with balcony solar as long as it's a zero-export balcony solar. Your power utility may take a similar approach. They might also take a "if it doesn't cross the meter, and we can't tell what you're doing, then we can't tell you not to do it"

gizmo686• 4 months ago

Anything that requires an electrician to come and modify your mains connections (followed, presumably by a municipal inspection), defeats the main benefit of balcony solar, which is that it is a commodity unit that can be installed by non-experts without any red tape.

Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.

The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.

bamboozled3• 4 months ago

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?

SoftTalker2• 4 months ago

Solar panels were expensive and not very efficient then.

bamboozled3• 4 months ago

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

GoToRO• 4 months ago

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.

adrianN3• 4 months ago

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

acdha• 4 months ago

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.

adrianN3• 4 months ago

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.

effdee• 4 months ago

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".

herbst• 4 months ago

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.

xigurat• 4 months ago

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

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

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

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

bamboozled3• 4 months ago

Drill baby drill...

M95D• 4 months ago

... holes into the balcony railing.

mudil• 4 months ago

Is this supposed to be a revolutionary European invention?

widdershins• 4 months ago

Neither the title nor the article implied so.

WithinReason• 4 months ago

"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

inejge• 4 months ago

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

Markoff• 4 months ago

dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598378

kkfx• 4 months ago

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.

muskstinks2• 4 months ago

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)

Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm

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