This will also happen to people that use residential gas. As less and less people use residential gas, the maintenance of the gas network gets distributed among less and less customers.
> The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing into the grid.
They are subsidized on purchase, but the price they get when pushing energy into the grid is by default fixed at 0. The network accepts the power, but there's no payment. It's also capped at 800W delivery, meaning that at peak power generation, you'd earn a whopping 5 cent an hour with the current subsidy for full scale solar power. So in practice, the only benefit owners have is that they draw less power from the net which is much more attractive because of the pricing structure. You can, optionally, register your balcony power station as a regular solar power plant, but then you're subject to a whole bunch of rules and regulations (for example you need a suitable elctricity meter etc.). This option is generally not attractive for such small power generations.
Fundamentally, though, the same issue as with the water and gas network exists with all localized (solar) power generation. If more and more people use the grid only as a backup, or for winter energy needs, then the overhead of maintaining the grid will have a larger cost contribution to the total cost of electricity.
The reason why personal solar installations are profitable is that you can buy electricity for fixed prices from your local power company. You pay the average of the vastly different low (or negative) prices during the day and the extremely expensive prices on windstill nights. Solar allows you to use your own electricity when the average is below spot prices, and get power for much less when the price you pay is cheaper than spot prices. It's like a state-approved scheme to play the market in the name of decarbonization while actually increasing everybody else's prices and possibly even CO2 emissions.
There are various good websites for showing the UK generation mix, but pricing seems less public. A lot seems to be done on day-ahead, which is pricing for the whole day not minute by minute. Is there a minute-by-minute ticker? Tariff?
(the reason I'm asking is that I'm skeptical as to how true this is for places that aren't California)
It would be nice to have some belated insight into how the bids look. Like maybe a few random hours released from a week ago?
Oh, and it's half hours. You can't buy or sell five minutes of electricity, just half hours, which is why your smart meter also thinks in half hours. 48 periods per day.
Which is never, because even then you are still paying some sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network fees.
The price of electricity from the network also has to include the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to recoup initial investment.
Of course this means given enough home installations (in places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the network will rise, more people will install their own stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already in Pakistan.
You can do exactly that by buying battery packs but (1) they are more expensice pieces of kit than solar panels and (2) capacity and output of DYI/plug in systems is very limited.
A quick check online also says that (in the UK) peak spot prices are usually 7am-10am and 5pm-9pm, which are basically when demand picks up or hasn't dropped yet while solar panels are useless...
Batteries help, but even that is limited in northern countries like the UK. If you look at the data, in July '25, solar produced 2.36 TWh. But in December '25, it was only 0.535 TWh: the output in summer is >4 times the winter output. So either you need to discard 75% of the electricity produced in summer, or you need truly gigantic batteries that store power produced in summer for winter. Both is not economical. Solar is far less efficient in the UK than in, for example, Florida.
With solar specifically you have the obvious day/night cycle, which makes storage required to make the most of it.
Neither of these is going to be true for the UK balcony scheme (you can't get export generation pricing unless it's an MCS-certified install).
> drive up the truck tolls.
The price of diesel is going to do this anyway very soon.
What is this supposed to mean? You flush less water, therefore water price is more expensive, because flushed water needs to be paid too?
I honestly don't see the problem, it's probably still worth it (because society still needs to provide less tap water and saves there).
If you, a single person, cut your water usage in half, you pay half as much. But if everybody uses half as much, the system still needs about the same amount of funding. So now you double the per-unit price, and everybody pays the same they were before spending money on water saving features. In this case, even if each person used half as much water, the total water needed isn't cut in half because the sewers need more water to function.
(Also, water isn't "used"; most of it's transported, cleaned, transported, dirtied, cleaned again, transported)
Or not. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article152318777/Wassersparen...
Edit: parent changed his answer, I have included it now.
It would make much more sense to import (renewable) electricity from Spain to Germany than strawberries.
Grids are not set up to move significant percentages of national consumption over longer distances, and expansion is slow, expensive and prone to nimbyism.
Countries already struggle to move electrical energy inside their own borders (e.g. Germany: north=>south), shifting double digit percentages of national consumption across Europe is not gonna happen any time soon. Germany alone plans to spend at least ~€100bn over the next decade on this (internally, not on connecting Spain!).
Much more effective to focus on local generation first than to try and rely on slightly better conditions for solar panels half a continent away.
That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The web of collaboration between all these far-flung people who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most of our material stuff.
... And in a conventional market system, the core of how those people coordinate their efforts is money. The price that each person is willing to buy something for or sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about it relative to other things. And markets are one popular way of aggregating that information, helping guide society's cooperative efforts in the direction of what people care about.
There are various allocation systems that don't involve money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to discourage freeloading, for example, can be found all over the place in pre-modern history because it worked – as long as your community was small enough that you can realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to scale up operations research toward the level of nations, since suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures were both instructive.)
--
Coordination problems are hugely underrated in political discourse. So when I hear people say things like "The economic system is the ideology holding us back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this person thought about a what a viable alternative would look like?
"I dislike the current system" is only the first and most trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink here.]"
Gold coins? Pesos? Cows? Inferior-quality copper ingots?
It's entirely possible that you have a good point, but if so, it's gonna need a whole hell of a lot more context to elucidate.
All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.
I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels to a large grid scale one.
But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra 12% of installed solar capacity.
Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now. But it's also almost free.
In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.
To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the US only utility scale is competitive with that.
Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.
As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is very different when it comes out of a different account.
(everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers of new homes)
They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.
Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards.
On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.