For balcony panels you only have to do a very small registration, but no large bureaucratic process or getting a permit.
For larger ones you still must get a permit for a very simple reason: even if you don't get your power into the general network, you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability.
We have so much power on sunny days now that we can barely deal with it. Which in turn occasionally even causes power prices to go negative - you can get paid for drawing power.
Dealing with power from solar panels is easy: you disconnect them (curtailment). So it's not a problem.
Have you ever wondered how is it possible that the price goes negative?
Why would someone pay you to use the energy they produce? Logically, the price shouldn't go below 0 (*) .
The reason is that the government gives incentives for each kWh produ ed. So if they pay you 0.10€/kWh, you'll be happy to pay people up to 0.09€/kWh as long as you can keep producing, since your marginal cost is 0.
Basically government incentives are producing this situation, paying people to produce electricity nobody wants.
It's also the reason why production is far from consumption: the incentives never were designed to push to generate useful electrons, just electrons, even if they cannot be moved to where they are useful.
We need to rework how incentives are provided, because this is ending up wasting a ton of public money!
(*) except for power stations were they cannot physically turn it off, but generally they wouldn't be able to produce enough energy to define the marginal price
In that case the government should pay incentives when purchasing an electric car. That way the electricity being produced on sunny days can be stored and used when it is cloudy. Electric cars will also be spread out geographically, quite in line with solar panel installations so that solves for regional and network issues too. And as an added benefit we use less oil (less combustion cars) and less gas (we charge when it is sunny and not when we produce electricity with gas generators).
By using less oil and less gas we reduce CO2 emmissions, save money and are less dependent on other regions far away.
I wonder if the excess energy could be used to do things like run carbon capture (although I've read that this is very much a pipe dream, that it'll take several magnitudes more carbon capture facilities to counter what we're currently producing).
Adherence to regulations is one of the reasons why the German grid is so reliable.
The Germans manage their electric grid very well, the last major electric blackout in Germany was in 2006. (More than 15 million clients of the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) did not have access to electricity for about two hours on this date.)
Regarding reliability: Absolutely. I honestly didn't experience a major blackout in my entire life in germany. I always forget just how big of a problem that still is for many countries and areas.
On grid-scale this very much has an influence. Obviously not on individual scale. Is the influence big enough to warrant needing permits? Not sure, but I certainly see the problem.
In many areas solar panels get turned of by grid operators remotely for many hours on sunny days. In an area in the south I worked in around 50-70% of the produced power of larger installations (>30kwp) is essentially thrown away because the grid simply doesn't have enough capacity.
Every day people go to work and turn off their electrical devices. Switching your home to off-grid solar + batteries is just like going to work and not coming back. The grid can handle it.
If many houses install off-grid solar, it's still not going to have a negative effect on the grid because the change is spread out over time.
It does mean that less generating capacity is needed over the long term, but decision makers can just get that data directly from the grid. I don't see what extra information the permit is adding.
Every wire, small or large, has a maximum current which can safely pass through. Circuit breakers are used prevent overloading of power lines and potential fire.
That's patronizing. My point is that electrical code requires the use of safety devices (breakers are only one). Idiots plugging wires together without oversight cause fires.
For balcony panels you only have to do a very small registration, but no large bureaucratic process or getting a permit.
For larger ones you still must get a permit for a very simple reason: even if you don't get your power into the general network, you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability.
We have so much power on sunny days now that we can barely deal with it. Which in turn occasionally even causes power prices to go negative - you can get paid for drawing power.