[pyrale]

Balcony solar is likely to make this worse, given Germany has low/zero electricity market prices when the sun shines.

Balcony solar production means Germans don't buy solar from their utility when utility costs are low, and they do want to buy some when utility costs are high.

Unsurprisingly, fixed contract prices are bound to be an average of electricity price at different times. With balcony solar, the times where it costs the least will be weighted less in the average, so contract price is bound to go up.

[toomuchtodo]

Germany needs more battery storage, full stop. It is rapidly declining in cost, it is fast to deploy, and it will soak up excess low carbon energy (both domestic and imported from interconnectors) versus curtailment as more generation comes online.

> Germany’s solar industry calls for 100 GWh 2030 grid battery target

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-industry...

> German battery storage hits 22.1 GWh in [2025]H1

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r...

> PV curtailment jumps 97% in Germany in 2024

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/03/pv-curtailment-jumps-...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/

[pyrale]

Yup. Flexibility should be the thing that’s subsidized. However, I would advise against "balcony" battery subsidies, and I assume balcony solar is an electoral strategy more than an energy strategy.

[toomuchtodo]

Lots of residential batteries being installed, as mentioned in the link https://www.ess-news.com/2025/07/18/german-battery-storage-r... above.

> By the end of the first half of 2025, Germany’s official registry of energy installations recorded nearly two million battery storage systems in operation. This figure, now unofficially but safely surpassed into July , includes a gross power capacity of 14.535 gigawatts (GW) and a usable storage capacity of nearly 22.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh).

> Photovoltaic home storage systems constitute the majority of these installations, with 1.967 million small battery storage units (up to 20 kilowatts) accounting for 11.5 GW of gross power and almost 18.3 GWh of usable capacity.

> Small photovoltaic home storage units made up the bulk of new additions, with 251,948 systems providing 1.34 GW and almost 2.7 GWh. In the medium segment, 2,418 new systems added 117.7 MW of power and 160 MWh of capacity.

> The expansion of battery storage is driven by increasing demand, highlighted by 389 hours of negative wholesale electricity prices in the first half of the year. Germany has also significantly expanded its solar power generation, with approximately 107.4 GW of photovoltaic capacity installed and over 7 GW added in the first six months of 2025.

The future of electrification is distributed, broadly speaking. Distributed assets can be orchestrated to optimize for both cost and grid stability ("VPP" aka virtual power plants). Get generation and storage as close to the load as you can.