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Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day

171 points by vrganj 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
testing22321 5mo ago
My roof mount system is saving me $1000 a year in electricity, plus more in natural gas that I I disconnected, and it was $0 of my own money thanks to a grant and interest free loan. Electricity is pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year (it just went up 16% this year for people out of town), so the savings will only increase. I’ll pocket something like $35k in 25 years for $0. Best investment ever. I’m in canada in a tight valley where it snows a boatload.
- toasty228 5mo ago
  > it was $0 of my own money thanks to a grant and interest free loan. Pretty sure it's all tax funded. Where I am as soon as the government introduced subsidies every single installer jacked their price 2-5x, now they all start right at the threshold at which the subsidies kicks in, amazing... it costs twice as much to the community but "0" to the individual
  - baal80spam 5mo ago
    It ALWAYS happens.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - bgirard 5mo ago
    Similarly my friend swaps electric cars every couple of years (Volt -> Bolt -> Equinox) bragging about all the discounts and subsidies he's gotten. Maybe it's still beneficial through the used car market but it doesn't feel like an effective subsidy for the government to be handing out.
    - baq 5mo ago
      it's a way to get infrastructure built up. the tax dollars pay for bootstrapping of the ecosystem. it's actually smart in principle if you think about it, but obviously there's room for abuse and outright fraud.
      - teiferer 5mo ago
        Exactly. Sadly, it gets overlooked how much subsidies nuclear and even oil+gas have received over the years. Nuclear energy wouldn't even be a thing without heavy govt subsidies. And it keeps needing subsidies. No nuclear plant is economical without subsidies. (The operators admit this themselves.) In contrast, the solar and wind industry is eventually carrying itself without subsidies. In many parts of the world that's already the case since tech and market have matured.
        rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
        Not an exaggeration to say that oil and gas is the most subsidized enterprise in human history.
        alexey-salmin 5mo ago
        The total cost of the French nuclear program since the beginning was estimated at 228 billion euros at 2012 prices, including both research and construction costs. By that time Germany cumulatively poured around a trilling euros into the green energy and still had coal power plants and 2x the CO2 per capita compared to France. As of 2026, in Germany 22.5% of electricity still comes from coal and CO2 per capita is still 1.7x of France. The hard numbers so far are extremely favorable towards nuclear. Roughly speaking you get 1.7x better results at a 1/4 of the cost.
        teiferer 5mo ago
        Using German coal dependence as a baseline statistic to prove that nuclear is more economical than green energy is a remarkable stunt.
  - teiferer 5mo ago
    > Pretty sure it's all tax funded. That's too simple of a statement. Sure, govt grants are involved in subsidies for installation and the loan interest. But that thing is then generating electricity, which is what saves them the money. So it's not "all" tax funded. Some of it is the sun's energy, and that was the whole point.
  - 1123581321 5mo ago
    Where do you live? There should still be price competition on types of inverters, aesthetics, focus on highest ROI, etc. I live in a heavily subsidized state and quotes ranged from (after subsidies/incentives) 5-6 year ROI to 20-25 year ROI.
  - testing22321 5mo ago
    > Pretty sure it's all tax funded Yes. I’m very happy my taxes are spent on things that improve the lives of everyday people rather than endless wars. Either spend it on productive things, or have zero taxes.
reedf1 5mo ago
$135M a day is almost nothing (~$50b/yr) for an area with combined GDP of ~$30T. Edit: People's general understanding of the scale of economies is genuinely terrifying to witness.
- chiffre01 5mo ago
  It's not nothing. Plus the fact that it's money not not getting shipped out of Europe to hostile regions is a net win.
  - adamrezich 5mo ago
    Where are the panels sourced from?
    - toomuchtodo 5mo ago
      China. With that said, they have so much solar PV capacity that they’re barely breaking even, even when exporting tens of GW of PV panels a month. I argue it’s a net positive the solar PV printers in China are kept in business to maintain their annual output, the world needs as much solar PV as it can produce as fast as possible.
    - Sayrus 5mo ago
      Most panels are from China. Panels have a very long lifetime. Over their lifetime they generate way more than their price in oil. Europe is not a huge producer of oil and relies on imports to sustain its usage. Sourcing panels is effectively reducing the amount of money leaving Europe in the long term.
- cbg0 5mo ago
  50 billion dollars a year is never "almost nothing".
  - pendenthistory 5mo ago
    It's basically nothing for a entire continent, let's be real.
random3 5mo ago
There's virtually an infinite number ways to assess something like this, and a single figure out of context is meaningless. What's the deprecation schedule? Which financial "context" is it calculated within? A household may benefit from governmental support and profitable, while the aggregate financial situation may or may not be so. What timeline is it calculated on? A 5-10 year window may be unprofitable, while a larger one may be. An even longer one may change numbers completely...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
photonair 5mo ago
With oil prices and wars, the adoption for renewables and not just solar should accelerate to wean the world off oil.
- ndhbxyd 5mo ago
  It will happen when we have better weather forecasting models. If it gets randomly cloudy for 5 days this month and 17 days next months screws up planning for factories, farms, datacenters etc.
  - runtime_terror 5mo ago
    Batteries, having a mixed grid of renewables, and new advances in nuclear solves this
    - lopis 5mo ago
      Batteries help, but they still cost way more than direct solar and wind. We still need way more solar and wind to use directly.
      - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
        Costing less than the most expensive thing they replace is the interesting threshold. That's evening peaker gas plants in most places. After batteries push gas out of that market they go on to morning peaks and so on.
        outside2344 5mo ago
        This is the exact scenario they are being used in at scale. The company removes their gas peaker plant infrastructure and replaces them with batteries. Already have the grid interconnect and now can dispatch power on the millisecond level instead of hour level.
        tialaramex 5mo ago
SkitterKherpi 5mo ago
Since the EU has been under investing in nuclear, solar + batteries investments is the only way forward. While the EU is making good progress, I still think it should invest a lot more a lot faster. EDIT: I just found out that my comments show up as dead to everyone else. Can you please change that or let me know what to do? I am not a bot...
lnsru 5mo ago
And yet all solar gear installed comes from China. Source: I am electrician installing it.
- nemomarx 5mo ago
  Is anyone else manufacturing it at comparable prices yet?
  - superxpro12 5mo ago
    It's hard to compete with slave wages
    - RetroTechie 5mo ago
      It's hard to compete with dark factories. Going forward, a big factor in (lack of) "made in Europe" isn't high wages. It's that a) much manufacturing capacity was lost because it was offshored decades ago. It takes ages to restore that. And b) "how many jobs does it provide?" has traditionally weighed heavily in policy decisions. Once robotization kicks in bigtime, it doesn't matter where labor is cheap. It matters where energy or raw materials are cheap. Or supply lines are short. Like it or not, China is way ahead on that curve.
- slaw 5mo ago
  Is it good or bad or it doesn't matter for climate?
- triceratops 5mo ago
  So? Does every country that has oil also manufacture their own drills, rigs, and oil tankers?
- runtime_terror 5mo ago
  Curious; why is that an issue?
- kristopolous 5mo ago
  I'm sorry, that really just comes across as racism.
wseadowntown 5mo ago
[dead]
yoran 5mo ago
Just installed my plug-and-play panel this week in my small garden. 400W so not enough to power all my appliances. But I'm happy that I'm at least a little hedged against the negative geopolitical developments we're going through.
- testing22321 5mo ago
  Can I ask where you are in the world? I wish they were legal here.
tapoxi 5mo ago
I installed a solar system at my home in Massachusetts for 17k last year (after tax credits), 7.82 kw. So far it's covered about 70% of my usage and 5.7 Mwh. I don't have a full year of data yet so I expect that number to grow as it includes the summer months. I drive an EV and this includes the car.
- seidleroni 5mo ago
  Curious who you ended up using and if you recommend them.
  - tapoxi 5mo ago
    Great Sky Solar, they're a small local company and I had a great experience with them.
- ramesh31 5mo ago
  >I installed a solar system at my home in Massachusetts for 17k last year (after tax credits), 7.82 kw. This is the problem still in the US. Even at ~$0.23/kwh delivered in the northeast, you're looking at an ROI of nearly five years. Fine if you can float that kind of cash to feel better about yourself, but the economics just aren't there for most people, especially in cheaper parts of the country where rates are ~$0.12. Even financing you're looking at a monthly payment equal to or greater than an electric bill. Of course if you have the time to amortize it you'll come out ahead, but there's simply no cheap solution that can actually save real money out of pocket in any reasonable amount of time beyond theoretical future savings on paper. It will never be a true solution without massive subsidisation that reduces out of pocket to a 1-2 year horizon.
  - Kirby64 5mo ago
    Is a 5 year ROI really that crazy? Seems very reasonable considering lifespan of solar is more like 15-20 years (or more).
    - testing22321 5mo ago
ifjfkfkfkfj 5mo ago
[flagged]
cubefox 5mo ago
This seems highly doubtful. If solar saves money, why does Germany (with a lot of solar) have higher rather than lower energy prices?
- Tade0 5mo ago
  Partly because they still use coal, which is heavily taxed under the emissions trading scheme and partly because of the way electricity auctions work in most of Europe, namely every participant sells at the price offered by the highest bidder. Spain opted out of this system and is now enjoying cheap wholesale electricity, which is fueling an industrial revival.
  - cubefox 5mo ago
    > Partly because they still use coal, which is heavily taxed under the emissions trading scheme ... and solar is heavily subsidized, which could outweigh this effect. So this doesn't explain the high energy prices. > partly because of the way electricity auctions work in most of Europe, namely every participant sells at the price offered by the highest bidder. This doesn't explain why Germany has so high electricity prices.
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      > This doesn't explain why Germany has so high electricity prices. It's the main thing which does. Say you have two energy sources, Alice Electric can deliver at €0.03/kWh but only up to 10% of your demand, while Bob Energy can deliver 200% of your demand but all units will cost €0.5/kWh. The net result of the electricity auction, as described, is that the consumers pay Alice and Bob €0.5/kWh each, which gives Alice a €0.47/kWh profit margin and therefore lot of money to expand operations if she wants to, but until she can actually supply 100% of demand, it's priced by what Bob charges.
      - cubefox 5mo ago
        This doesn't explain why energy costs are higher in Germany. You have to replace the words "Alice" and "Bob" with something that is relevant to the topic at hand.
brk 5mo ago
This equates to about 20 cents per day per person, or about $73/year. It is a move in the right direction for sure, but I'm not sure I'd call this a significant statistic.
alexey-salmin 5mo ago
The title is misleading. $135 is not "money saved", it's "money not spent on fossil fuels" (even for that I couldn't find how it was calculated by solarpowereurope, but the number seems plausible). To the discussion of whether $50B/y is a big figure or not. EU has around 400GW of PV installed. Cost to install per 1kW ranged between $600 and up to $4000 because a big chunk of that capacity was built when prices were much higher. If we consider average price at $1000 this means $400B on capex alone + yearly operational expenses. It can still be profitable (assuming current PV prices can be sustained + installed capacity doesn't grow faster than storage) but it's going to be many years until the investment is recouped and it starts to actually "save money for Europeans". In any case, of course it's still nice to depend less on imported oil, even if not for money savings.
- nonethewiser 5mo ago
  Cleantechnica is a solar advocacy group and they consistently frame things in misleading ways like this.
- random3 5mo ago
  I was making a related point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462628 Got downvoted as I assume some didn't parse past the first line.
- pshirshov 5mo ago
  Over last several years the cost to install 1kW was, ehm, less than €200 if you do it the retail way - 2..4 500W panels from the warehouse next street and a microinverter. Thanks, China. In addition to my primary system, I have a toy installation with 6 500W panels and a micro. I paid around 500 euros for that last August and by this time this toy installation generated me 1281 kWh. That's around €400 in terms of retail energy prices. So, I'll break even this August. So, everything generated after would be exactly the "money saved".
- thelastgallon 5mo ago
  Yes, you are right. The money saved is not just $50B. 1) Add the money saved from fossil fuel subsidies, that don't need to be spent 2) Add ethanol/biodiesel subsidies 3) Add defense spending to protect oil pipelines and fossil fuel assets 4) Add healthcare spending, fossil fuels are linked to nearly every kind of disease (except STIs, mad cow, polio, etc) 5) Add deaths/injuries from fossil fuels and the associated hospitalization costs, lost productive human years. Fossil fuels have the highest deaths/TWH. 6) Add the money saved from demand destruction (Less demand --> cheaper oil) 6a) Immediately, decreasing the price of fuel. 6b) Slows down fossil fuel multibillionaires becoming richer. Oil is profitable at $10/barrel, but with global demand skyrocketing, Oil is extracted from costlier sources (fracking/sands) which need a minimum price. However, the cheapest extraction (Saudi) will profit immensely and with that money buy everything else in the world, extracting wealth via rentier capitalism or stock market, making housing, healthcare, everything else costlier for all of us. 7) Creating the initial demand for solar panels, enabling scale production, making solar panels dirt cheap now and forever. There are probably more.
outside2344 5mo ago
My solar panels amaze me every day. It is just crazy that a flat panel, that doesn't have any moving parts, and requires a once a year cleaning (at most), just eliminated my power bill completely.
- RetroTechie 5mo ago
  The amazing bit is the Sun it gets its energy from. Doesn't make the solar panel(s) any less great to have though.
belorn 5mo ago
If I look at a electricity bills the last year, consumption costs sits around 20-25% of the total (with tax). The remaining 75% is grid connection fees and infrastructure fees that pay for expansion of future transmissions. The argument why those grid and infrastructure fees exist is primarily because of the intermittence problem cause by solar and wind. This makes calculating the cost saving from solar and wind a bit complex.

171 points by vrganj 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

My roof mount system is saving me $1000 a year in electricity, plus more in natural gas that I I disconnected, and it was $0 of my own money thanks to a grant and interest free loan. Electricity is pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year (it just went up 16% this year for people out of town), so the savings will only increase. I’ll pocket something like $35k in 25 years for $0. Best investment ever. I’m in canada in a tight valley where it snows a boatload.

toasty228 5mo ago
> it was $0 of my own money thanks to a grant and interest free loan. Pretty sure it's all tax funded. Where I am as soon as the government introduced subsidies every single installer jacked their price 2-5x, now they all start right at the threshold at which the subsidies kicks in, amazing... it costs twice as much to the community but "0" to the individual
- baal80spam 5mo ago
  It ALWAYS happens.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- bgirard 5mo ago
  Similarly my friend swaps electric cars every couple of years (Volt -> Bolt -> Equinox) bragging about all the discounts and subsidies he's gotten. Maybe it's still beneficial through the used car market but it doesn't feel like an effective subsidy for the government to be handing out.
  - baq 5mo ago
    it's a way to get infrastructure built up. the tax dollars pay for bootstrapping of the ecosystem. it's actually smart in principle if you think about it, but obviously there's room for abuse and outright fraud.
    - teiferer 5mo ago
      Exactly. Sadly, it gets overlooked how much subsidies nuclear and even oil+gas have received over the years. Nuclear energy wouldn't even be a thing without heavy govt subsidies. And it keeps needing subsidies. No nuclear plant is economical without subsidies. (The operators admit this themselves.) In contrast, the solar and wind industry is eventually carrying itself without subsidies. In many parts of the world that's already the case since tech and market have matured.
      - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
        Not an exaggeration to say that oil and gas is the most subsidized enterprise in human history.
      - alexey-salmin 5mo ago
        The total cost of the French nuclear program since the beginning was estimated at 228 billion euros at 2012 prices, including both research and construction costs. By that time Germany cumulatively poured around a trilling euros into the green energy and still had coal power plants and 2x the CO2 per capita compared to France. As of 2026, in Germany 22.5% of electricity still comes from coal and CO2 per capita is still 1.7x of France. The hard numbers so far are extremely favorable towards nuclear. Roughly speaking you get 1.7x better results at a 1/4 of the cost.
        teiferer 5mo ago
        Using German coal dependence as a baseline statistic to prove that nuclear is more economical than green energy is a remarkable stunt.
- teiferer 5mo ago
  > Pretty sure it's all tax funded. That's too simple of a statement. Sure, govt grants are involved in subsidies for installation and the loan interest. But that thing is then generating electricity, which is what saves them the money. So it's not "all" tax funded. Some of it is the sun's energy, and that was the whole point.
- 1123581321 5mo ago
  Where do you live? There should still be price competition on types of inverters, aesthetics, focus on highest ROI, etc. I live in a heavily subsidized state and quotes ranged from (after subsidies/incentives) 5-6 year ROI to 20-25 year ROI.
- testing22321 5mo ago
  > Pretty sure it's all tax funded Yes. I’m very happy my taxes are spent on things that improve the lives of everyday people rather than endless wars. Either spend it on productive things, or have zero taxes.

reedf1 5mo ago

$135M a day is almost nothing (~$50b/yr) for an area with combined GDP of ~$30T. Edit: People's general understanding of the scale of economies is genuinely terrifying to witness.

chiffre01 5mo ago
It's not nothing. Plus the fact that it's money not not getting shipped out of Europe to hostile regions is a net win.
- adamrezich 5mo ago
  Where are the panels sourced from?
  - toomuchtodo 5mo ago
    China. With that said, they have so much solar PV capacity that they’re barely breaking even, even when exporting tens of GW of PV panels a month. I argue it’s a net positive the solar PV printers in China are kept in business to maintain their annual output, the world needs as much solar PV as it can produce as fast as possible.
  - Sayrus 5mo ago
    Most panels are from China. Panels have a very long lifetime. Over their lifetime they generate way more than their price in oil. Europe is not a huge producer of oil and relies on imports to sustain its usage. Sourcing panels is effectively reducing the amount of money leaving Europe in the long term.
cbg0 5mo ago
50 billion dollars a year is never "almost nothing".
- pendenthistory 5mo ago
  It's basically nothing for a entire continent, let's be real.

random3 5mo ago

There's virtually an infinite number ways to assess something like this, and a single figure out of context is meaningless. What's the deprecation schedule? Which financial "context" is it calculated within? A household may benefit from governmental support and profitable, while the aggregate financial situation may or may not be so. What timeline is it calculated on? A 5-10 year window may be unprofitable, while a larger one may be. An even longer one may change numbers completely...

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

photonair 5mo ago

With oil prices and wars, the adoption for renewables and not just solar should accelerate to wean the world off oil.

ndhbxyd 5mo ago
It will happen when we have better weather forecasting models. If it gets randomly cloudy for 5 days this month and 17 days next months screws up planning for factories, farms, datacenters etc.
- runtime_terror 5mo ago
  Batteries, having a mixed grid of renewables, and new advances in nuclear solves this
  - lopis 5mo ago
    Batteries help, but they still cost way more than direct solar and wind. We still need way more solar and wind to use directly.
    - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
      Costing less than the most expensive thing they replace is the interesting threshold. That's evening peaker gas plants in most places. After batteries push gas out of that market they go on to morning peaks and so on.
      - outside2344 5mo ago
        This is the exact scenario they are being used in at scale. The company removes their gas peaker plant infrastructure and replaces them with batteries. Already have the grid interconnect and now can dispatch power on the millisecond level instead of hour level.
      - tialaramex 5mo ago

SkitterKherpi 5mo ago

Since the EU has been under investing in nuclear, solar + batteries investments is the only way forward. While the EU is making good progress, I still think it should invest a lot more a lot faster. EDIT: I just found out that my comments show up as dead to everyone else. Can you please change that or let me know what to do? I am not a bot...

lnsru 5mo ago

And yet all solar gear installed comes from China. Source: I am electrician installing it.

nemomarx 5mo ago
Is anyone else manufacturing it at comparable prices yet?
- superxpro12 5mo ago
  It's hard to compete with slave wages
  - RetroTechie 5mo ago
    It's hard to compete with dark factories. Going forward, a big factor in (lack of) "made in Europe" isn't high wages. It's that a) much manufacturing capacity was lost because it was offshored decades ago. It takes ages to restore that. And b) "how many jobs does it provide?" has traditionally weighed heavily in policy decisions. Once robotization kicks in bigtime, it doesn't matter where labor is cheap. It matters where energy or raw materials are cheap. Or supply lines are short. Like it or not, China is way ahead on that curve.
slaw 5mo ago
Is it good or bad or it doesn't matter for climate?
triceratops 5mo ago
So? Does every country that has oil also manufacture their own drills, rigs, and oil tankers?
runtime_terror 5mo ago
Curious; why is that an issue?
kristopolous 5mo ago
I'm sorry, that really just comes across as racism.

wseadowntown 5mo ago

[dead]

yoran 5mo ago

Just installed my plug-and-play panel this week in my small garden. 400W so not enough to power all my appliances. But I'm happy that I'm at least a little hedged against the negative geopolitical developments we're going through.

testing22321 5mo ago
Can I ask where you are in the world? I wish they were legal here.

tapoxi 5mo ago

I installed a solar system at my home in Massachusetts for 17k last year (after tax credits), 7.82 kw. So far it's covered about 70% of my usage and 5.7 Mwh. I don't have a full year of data yet so I expect that number to grow as it includes the summer months. I drive an EV and this includes the car.

seidleroni 5mo ago
Curious who you ended up using and if you recommend them.
- tapoxi 5mo ago
  Great Sky Solar, they're a small local company and I had a great experience with them.
ramesh31 5mo ago
>I installed a solar system at my home in Massachusetts for 17k last year (after tax credits), 7.82 kw. This is the problem still in the US. Even at ~$0.23/kwh delivered in the northeast, you're looking at an ROI of nearly five years. Fine if you can float that kind of cash to feel better about yourself, but the economics just aren't there for most people, especially in cheaper parts of the country where rates are ~$0.12. Even financing you're looking at a monthly payment equal to or greater than an electric bill. Of course if you have the time to amortize it you'll come out ahead, but there's simply no cheap solution that can actually save real money out of pocket in any reasonable amount of time beyond theoretical future savings on paper. It will never be a true solution without massive subsidisation that reduces out of pocket to a 1-2 year horizon.
- Kirby64 5mo ago
  Is a 5 year ROI really that crazy? Seems very reasonable considering lifespan of solar is more like 15-20 years (or more).
  - testing22321 5mo ago

ifjfkfkfkfj 5mo ago

[flagged]

cubefox 5mo ago

This seems highly doubtful. If solar saves money, why does Germany (with a lot of solar) have higher rather than lower energy prices?

Tade0 5mo ago
Partly because they still use coal, which is heavily taxed under the emissions trading scheme and partly because of the way electricity auctions work in most of Europe, namely every participant sells at the price offered by the highest bidder. Spain opted out of this system and is now enjoying cheap wholesale electricity, which is fueling an industrial revival.
- cubefox 5mo ago
  > Partly because they still use coal, which is heavily taxed under the emissions trading scheme ... and solar is heavily subsidized, which could outweigh this effect. So this doesn't explain the high energy prices. > partly because of the way electricity auctions work in most of Europe, namely every participant sells at the price offered by the highest bidder. This doesn't explain why Germany has so high electricity prices.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    > This doesn't explain why Germany has so high electricity prices. It's the main thing which does. Say you have two energy sources, Alice Electric can deliver at €0.03/kWh but only up to 10% of your demand, while Bob Energy can deliver 200% of your demand but all units will cost €0.5/kWh. The net result of the electricity auction, as described, is that the consumers pay Alice and Bob €0.5/kWh each, which gives Alice a €0.47/kWh profit margin and therefore lot of money to expand operations if she wants to, but until she can actually supply 100% of demand, it's priced by what Bob charges.
    - cubefox 5mo ago
      This doesn't explain why energy costs are higher in Germany. You have to replace the words "Alice" and "Bob" with something that is relevant to the topic at hand.

brk 5mo ago

This equates to about 20 cents per day per person, or about $73/year. It is a move in the right direction for sure, but I'm not sure I'd call this a significant statistic.

alexey-salmin 5mo ago

The title is misleading. $135 is not "money saved", it's "money not spent on fossil fuels" (even for that I couldn't find how it was calculated by solarpowereurope, but the number seems plausible). To the discussion of whether $50B/y is a big figure or not. EU has around 400GW of PV installed. Cost to install per 1kW ranged between $600 and up to $4000 because a big chunk of that capacity was built when prices were much higher. If we consider average price at $1000 this means $400B on capex alone + yearly operational expenses. It can still be profitable (assuming current PV prices can be sustained + installed capacity doesn't grow faster than storage) but it's going to be many years until the investment is recouped and it starts to actually "save money for Europeans". In any case, of course it's still nice to depend less on imported oil, even if not for money savings.

nonethewiser 5mo ago
Cleantechnica is a solar advocacy group and they consistently frame things in misleading ways like this.
random3 5mo ago
I was making a related point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462628 Got downvoted as I assume some didn't parse past the first line.
pshirshov 5mo ago
Over last several years the cost to install 1kW was, ehm, less than €200 if you do it the retail way - 2..4 500W panels from the warehouse next street and a microinverter. Thanks, China. In addition to my primary system, I have a toy installation with 6 500W panels and a micro. I paid around 500 euros for that last August and by this time this toy installation generated me 1281 kWh. That's around €400 in terms of retail energy prices. So, I'll break even this August. So, everything generated after would be exactly the "money saved".
thelastgallon 5mo ago
Yes, you are right. The money saved is not just $50B. 1) Add the money saved from fossil fuel subsidies, that don't need to be spent 2) Add ethanol/biodiesel subsidies 3) Add defense spending to protect oil pipelines and fossil fuel assets 4) Add healthcare spending, fossil fuels are linked to nearly every kind of disease (except STIs, mad cow, polio, etc) 5) Add deaths/injuries from fossil fuels and the associated hospitalization costs, lost productive human years. Fossil fuels have the highest deaths/TWH. 6) Add the money saved from demand destruction (Less demand --> cheaper oil) 6a) Immediately, decreasing the price of fuel. 6b) Slows down fossil fuel multibillionaires becoming richer. Oil is profitable at $10/barrel, but with global demand skyrocketing, Oil is extracted from costlier sources (fracking/sands) which need a minimum price. However, the cheapest extraction (Saudi) will profit immensely and with that money buy everything else in the world, extracting wealth via rentier capitalism or stock market, making housing, healthcare, everything else costlier for all of us. 7) Creating the initial demand for solar panels, enabling scale production, making solar panels dirt cheap now and forever. There are probably more.

outside2344 5mo ago

My solar panels amaze me every day. It is just crazy that a flat panel, that doesn't have any moving parts, and requires a once a year cleaning (at most), just eliminated my power bill completely.

RetroTechie 5mo ago
The amazing bit is the Sun it gets its energy from. Doesn't make the solar panel(s) any less great to have though.

belorn 5mo ago

If I look at a electricity bills the last year, consumption costs sits around 20-25% of the total (with tax). The remaining 75% is grid connection fees and infrastructure fees that pay for expansion of future transmissions. The argument why those grid and infrastructure fees exist is primarily because of the intermittence problem cause by solar and wind. This makes calculating the cost saving from solar and wind a bit complex.