I spent the last three days in Munich....spending an entire day at the Solar Messe (the solar energy trade-show).
I will offer the five observations of the episode:
1. Generally, Germany is in the top three countries of the EU for electrical cost. Various reasons are given for this....with disbelief by the general public on logic of the cost. In general, you can expect a 50-percent cost rise every seven years. So for this reason, a lot of people are convinced to load up on solar panels.
2. The weather pattern affecting solar collection? Well....yeah. After walking around, this is the one item that they tend to avoid discussing in the sales pitch. Where I live, my impression is that you might be able to get eight-plus hours a day of sun....for about a hundred days out of the year. From November to March......in an average week, I'd be guessing that you'd collect no more than 20 hours per week of solar energy. No one can say if it's enough.
3. Having your house face a direction with the path of the sun. Well....most folks can put up stationary panels to handle one single 'path'. So a full day of 16 hours (like in June) isn't going to happen.
4. No one talks about disposal cost of the batteries or the panels (when they finally go bad). Maybe there is real cost of 'dumping' them. But these are Germans, and I have this odd feeling that you'd face a total bill of 1,000 Euro by the time you toss in the batteries and panels.
5. The factor on everyone's minds....2030 will arrive and only battery-cars will be sold. Will the grid be cheap enough, and have enough power? No one is absolute on how this will work out.
It was a great show, and featured a lot of new technology.
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