Balcony Solar Is Booming In Germany
In the last 5 years, Germans have installed one million solar systems on their balconies
While America was busy dismantling its most important clean energy policies last month, Germany reached a big milestone: The country now has one million balcony rooftop solar systems.
Balcony solar is dead simple. Germans can buy panels at the supermarket for as little as 200 euros and install them on their own. Plug it into a normal outlet and you're good to go.
The technology boomed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when electricity and natural gas prices skyrocketed across Europe. As energy prices were rising, the cost of solar panels continued to fall, making the economics of balcony solar attractive.
Over the last 5 years, Germans have installed one million balcony solar systems with a combined capacity of 1 GW.
Balcony solar is an unexpected technology in many ways. 10 years ago, no one would have predicted that a million people would slap solar panels on their balcony. But over that time period the cost of solar plummeted enabling new—and sometimes weird—innovations.
One lesson from the clean energy revolution is that when technologies become cheap, you can expect people to find surprising new ways to put them to use.
I love this. There’s something so hopeful about the image of a million balconies quietly generating power. It shows how energy transitions don’t always need to come from the top down.
As a climate fiction author, I’m fascinated by these small but radical shifts in how people live. A balcony solar panel may not seem like much, but multiplied across a city or a nation, it becomes a force that rewrites our future.
What I like about this, balcony solar, is that it is people on an individual level, taking charge of their energy use. The more balcony solar panels, the fewer solar industrial facilities spanning the deserts.