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.
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".
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.
For point 6 a UCL study on Wind energy in the UK suggested that over the 13 year period they studied the new wind power had saved 14 billion in electricity costs, because it was cheaper than gas generation.
But it saved consumers 140 Billion by lowering demand for gas and so cutting prices.
I've half jokingly said it before, but I think by overall impact Trump and Putin's sheer chaos is doing an order of magnitude more to transition the EU to green energy than anything else that was done deliberately to fight climate change lmao.
People don't give a fuck until gasoline is 2€ per liter.
Yeah but then it's your fault, you get voted out in 2 years, and the next government reverts it. Local governments are ever the populists for a reason.
Covid helped a lot with digitalisation and working from home.
But these things don't get momentum in a vacuum. People need to advocate for them beforehand, so that when the time is right, the decision makers will know who to turn to.
Some EU countries, at least Croatia, Hungary, Spain and Greece lowered gas prices to pre Iran war levels. I wish instead EU would lower tariffs on EVs. Xiaomi SU7 would get 45% total duty.
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.
France is notorious for being all-in on nuclear, which they then have to shut down in the summer because the river water they use for cooling gets too hot.
The French seem to have some cool ideas to solve pesky problems. Guillotine for the super rich, nuclear for energy. Though it looks like they stopped doing both.
To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.
New advances in nuclear is what I hope for. First experimental SMRs are being installed in several places of the world, others are in design stage. Looks like a hopeful technology.
> To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.
48 hours in Scandinavia is roughly equivalent to turning all their road vehicles electric. And that's even with Norway using the second highest per-capita rate of electricity in the world let alone Scandinavia (second to Iceland, whose electricity is 100% renewables thanks to abundant geothermal): https://www.statista.com/statistics/383633/worldwide-consump...
Given nobody is suggesting an instantaneous transition, this is not at all unrealistic, and I don't know why anyone might consider it to be.
Good luck with new nuclear, but with all the politics in that domain, I don't expect that to work out even if e.g. Helion Energy supplies working shipping-container-sized aneutronic fusion.
A "peaker" or Open Cycle Gas Turbine is much less efficient which is doubly expensive in Europe. Firstly you need more fuel, and the fuel is expensive, but also you're making more pollution and that's expensive too.
The UK for example basically doesn't have "peakers". Right now it's early evening, demand is high as people cook evening meals but haven't yet retired to bed where they stop using electricity, but renewable generation is reduced as the sun approaches the horizon. So there's 8GW of combined cycle gas power plant production, but only about 100MW of "peakers" and it might grow to 200MW or so at absolute peak.
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.
This is not true. Batteries are cheaper than peaker power plants using fossil fuel. They also allow the operator to fulfill market demands at the minute level versus the hours previously that it took to turn on a peaker plant.
This is being done at scale in California and Texas.
Fore more than 2 hours capacity, batteries are expensive than most other and cost keeps increasing as more hours of capacity needed. Without gas or coal to burn when 1hr battery capacity runs out, battery storage is expensive.
Across a large enough area it's always sunny somewhere. And clouds don't interfere as much as you'd think. Add in wind, hydro, nuclear and some gas and you can handle pretty much anything just fine.
That has nothing to do with where factories, mines, farms etc are already located. You have to buy land to connect the power plant to the load and some guy in the middle wont sell. Handle congestion/maintenance of those lines etc. Lots of issues beyond just generation that the grid already is dealung with even though massive solar plants have been built. But main thing is weather forecasting has to get better because even with existing huge plants constant surprises happen.
There's this thing called the power grid, it transports electricity across great distances.
And everything you're talking about is an issue with any kind of production, I don't know why you're bringing it up as if it's unique to solar. If you're building a factory that needs high amounts of stable power then you plan accordingly. Doesn't change the fact that solar is a useful way to generate electricity. I don't think anyone is saying we have to use it exclusively. We can use different solutions for different problems.
Lots of probs with existing grid . Certain routes are already overloaded/congested, building new ones is not as easy because of land acquisition costs compared to the past. Repairing, upgrading and maintaining old routes to handle new loads raises costs of moving electrons to your factory etc. One hurricane or blizzard can shut a route down so redundant routes have to be built. People just under estimate how complex things have become.
China might produce the most panels at volume but this isn't a hardline monopoly like being able to cut off oil pipelines. We can produce panels ourselves if we _need_ to (as a coalition of friendly countries), it will of course be more expensive, but expensive is better than not possible.
Also, the more panels we already have, the less reliant we are. Energy doesn't stop flowing because deliveries of new panels stop during a conflict. You just pause expansion. A very different scenario to fuel reserves running dry in weeks.
> Also, the more panels we already have, the less reliant we are. Energy doesn't stop flowing because deliveries of new panels stop during a conflict. You just pause expansion. A very different scenario to fuel reserves running dry in weeks.
If someone is genuinely worried about China cutting off their power, the fact my very cheap solar inverter came with an app should probably be a consideration here.
I'm not saying the Chinese did put a kill switch into it, but I am saying that we all know what Snowden reported about the US, and given that it really wouldn't be a surprise.
> this isn't a hardline monopoly like being able to cut off oil pipelines
"Solar panels come from China" is a made-up problem. Oil pipelines and oil production equipment already have supply chains rooted in China and no one worries about that.
Unlike the oil dependency system, where there's actual scarcity of the thing you need (oil), there's nothing special about building solar panels that locks you to China. Basically any country could build it, but they need to figure out how to build stuff in general (as opposed to outsourcing like the last three decades)
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.
Not sure what the actual cost was, but in 2015 my parents got a solar system in California that covers the entire house plus an EV. I remember looking at the time to payoff and I think it took maybe five years, now day to day power and all their driving is essentially free.
>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.
This perspective is always so myopic to me. I say this as someone who doesn't make much money who's in the middle of a massive solar install (DIY). I made some simulations and a spreadsheet to work out all of the scenarios and I figured out that with a loan I can come out at monthly financing costs nearly exactly my electrical bill every month. That's right, I can have a 12 kWh battery backed 18 kW whole-home installation at no additional monthly cost.
The way that these discussions get contorted online will never make sense to me. The same people who make comments about ROI and it not making financial sense also have new car-loans on vehicles that depreciate catastrophically and are worth nearly nothing in 10 years. After 10 years my solar install will have been paid off for three years, I will get free electricity, and I will have the following benefits along the way:
Additional home value/equity
Backup power in case of grid problems or catastrophe.
Free fuel for my used battery electric vehicle. (compared to ~$200 a month in gas)
As close to zero carbon footprint as you can have in our contemporary world
And that's all assuming electricity prices stay the same. That's not even talking about how hydrocarbons are a very finite resource. Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses. It's the best decision anyone with a home who has the climate can possibly make. If you value your independence and personal security you'd be crazy to not do it. What would you pay, if you have the kind of money most people on these forums do, to ensure your home operates independent of external inputs? Imagine a new great depression? Or other such event?
>"Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses."
That's the reality of life for most people outside of our little bubble of six figure earners. If it's a higher monthly price, it's a nonstarter.
>"Additional home value/equity"
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid. Fine if you find the right one willing to pay a premium, but how much more are they going to pay for an old system vs. installing their own?
I'm not a six figure earner, and have never been close. Your mentality is not everyone's mentality. And there are many people, my neighbors and friends, who are willing to pay more for energy security and independence who are not in a bubble of six figure earners.
For your equity comment, it reads like astroturfing. Every single report with real-world data shows that it's positive equity and that homes with installations sell for more than those without. It's not a "vibe" I have, it's a cold hard fact. There's a million things you maintain when you own a house, and free energy is literally the easiest thing to want to maintain. Compare that to siding, or septic, or anything else....
> Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid
My parents put up solar in 2005 when it was very expensive. The original panels, inverters, cables are all still there, nothing had to be replaced in the last 21 years. The only maintenance task is a recommended (not mandatory) yearly cleaning that is probably in the 300€ range and takes maybe 1h, but since 5 years they have 2x EVs and 2x Powerwalls and are self-sufficient for 80% of the year, so that cost is negligible. The area where they live also has enough rain that if they skip cleaning for 1 or 2 years, the average total output is still close to the max they can get.
What maintenance for solar panels? Please share your videos of oil changes on your solar panels.
As opposed to equipment for fossil fuel which (a) doesn't burn fuel (b) has no moving parts (c) doesn't have thousands of parts and therefore runs free of any maintenance forever?
I wonder where these kind of people come from and what kind of education they have? Even Pakistan seems far more technologically advanced, they've been rapidly deploying solar with no issues.
> Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid.
That's not at all true where I live (Seattle): the cost of a solar system goes almost straight over into home equity. Solar energy is a feature - a real selling point. No idea what maintenance liability you could have in mind; one can have panels cleaned once a year, for maximum output, but they still just work if you don't. Other than that there is literally nothing to maintain.
... Wait, which maintenance is this? You'll probably eventually have to replace the inverter (or, at least, solar panel warranties are normally considerably longer than inverter warranties), but that's probably about it.
(Theoretically you can get a minor efficiency improvement by cleaning them regularly, but it really is minor to the point of "arguably not worth doing at all" in most conditions.)
I’ve had my system in Canada for 2.5 years, flawless, not one second of maintenance.
Family in Australia have had systems for over 10 years with zero maintenance
Also electricity here is ore approved to increase by a minimum of 5% a year, so a solar install on a house is huge for equity. Most people here spend around $2k to $3k a year on heat. I spend $400.
A 5 year ROI on a system that should last at least 20 years isn't an investment to feel better about yourself. It's a way to save money.
Three years ago, I was paying about $0.12/kWh, now it's about $0.22/kWh and installing a system makes sense.
It's cash up front for a savings later. My roof was due for replacement 'soon' but not immediately, and I didn't model the cost of moving that 3-5 years from the future to the present.
If you can't manage a 5 year planning horizon on a house, I'm not sure that home ownership is a great idea.
I get it if the ROI is 10+ years... too much uncertainty to put a lot of capital in.
> you're looking at an ROI of nearly five years. Fine if you can float that kind of cash to feel better about yourself,
Huh? 5 years to ROI, _after which you get free energy for the next 20 years_, seems like a pretty good investment.
> 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.
I, ah, disagree that five years is not a reasonable amount of time.
That 5 years assumes you can provide 100% of your electricity usage via solar, which is a complete fantasy outside the south/southwest US, and would realistically require a >10kw system. But again, it's also the out of pocket money we're talking about. Very few normal people can float that, and opportunity cost is real.
It's all about the all-in cost of the system vs the reduction in utility bill.
If your system runs 20% of your usage, it still has whatever ROI it has.
Building to cover 100% usage isn't a typical goal if you're planning to keep the utility anyway. Most net metering doesn't pay you if you make more than you use, so if you go over, you spent too much on your system.
Same. I installed 9kw plus BYD batteries this year (finished first week January) for €19K. Completely self sufficient, even surplus which I distribute to the public net and they pay me for. I hope to have complete data by next year but it looks like I can reduce electricity bills by 85% which is for Europe with really high costs/kw a bargain. Expected ROI 10 years.
As an adult, one of the things that fascinate me is self-sufficiency: the idea that you can buy a solar power system, install it, and use your own power -- without getting a bill in the mail every month, many times feeling like a victim of modern day suburban subjugation.
I'm still a good little obedient peasant, but I hope one day I can rely more on well water/rain catchment system, solar power, and propane.
Getting 70% of your electrical usage from your own solar power system has to be a good feeling.
> one day I can rely more on well water/rain catchment system
There are some fascinating youtube videos on digging your own backyard shallow well (12-40'). This close to the surface, the water is considered non-potable, and you should have yours tested, but you can pump up what you need for backyard garden irrigation. Wells like this can be seasonal, as it is essential a rainwater catchment system using the permeable ground as your reservoir. Still, a neat concept for a relatively low cost.
> There are some fascinating youtube videos on digging your own backyard shallow well (12-40').
What's more fascinating is that you would have to dig your own - here in the backyard of Europe you can call a specialised company, they will arrive with a rig and drill a well for you to basically any depth/diameter you want (for heat pumps you can go to 100m) cheap and fast, so it's basically never worth it doing it yourself.
If you own a home you should genuinely spend time calculating and thinking about it. It's not near as far fetched as you think. You can benefit from the same technical advancements in engineering and manufacturing that have benefited every single industrial sector. It has never been easier. The number of plug and play components out there is unreal.
These days it's very much sun-legos. You decide what you can afford and what you think you need, and then you bolt the stuff together. Anyone who is willing to put time into it is capable.
I 100% believe you! We're planning on doing a custom build for our next home, and I'm going to budget for solar. Like you said, it's gotten so much easier these days and I think that we don't take advantage of this because it requires budgeting/saving and because paying a monthly bill can be so much easier in the short-term. But I'm 100% going to do this.
If you're building a place, consider how you could arrange some of your basement for effective food storage.
This family[0] appears to be 90% agriculturally self-sufficient: they occasionally eat out, but grow most of what they eat. They store a lot of food in their basement, critically, with a DIY ventilation system. If you're building a home from scratch, and you're independently minded, it's the ideal time to build in some food storage and ventilation access in your floor plan.
When I showed this video to a coworker who also eats mostly off her own land, she recommended beginning by experimenting with preserving store-bought produce before planting an ambitious garden that yields more food than you know how to store.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The price of electricity is set by the marginal cost of the most expensive individual source - if your grid is 80% solar, 20% coal, the price you pay is the price of coal, because the solar providers can increase their prices to just below that of coal. Obviously I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's the general dynamic.
This is "by design" in the sense that it offers big subsidies to more solar generation to come online, but you won't see the biggest price cuts until the last expensive sources are pushed off the grid entirely. Because Germany's marginal source is coal, they pay way more than countries whose marginal source is gas or nuclear.
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.
> 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.
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.
Bob is the marginal generator: the most expensive power plant that still has to run to satisfy demand in a given hour (or whatever the auction period is, I assume it's per hour).
Bob is not one single concrete thing, it's the abstract concept, anthropomorphised.
Germany's energy is expensive because the marginal generator is so expensive.
Bob is gas, here, generally. Gas is the supply of last resort pretty much everywhere. Though in Germany in particular, Alice is beginning to be big enough that the dynamic is beginning to break down; this March spot prices started to go zero or even negative at midday.
That's not how it went through. The Green party in Germany heavily pushed against nuclear energy and coal energy and for solar energy. Now nuclear has been phased out and solar is here. Energy prices have gone up. Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days, so expensive gas power plants have to be used during that time. The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.
You can't really blame solar for phasing out nuclear. That was a political decision. Uranium mostly comes from Russia and China too, so it's not like it was geopolitically "safer" than gas.
> The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.
Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.
That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?
> Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days
Today gas power plants cover the shortage. As I've already showed you, Germany isn't using meaningfully more gas than it used to even during nuclear's heyday (which was in 2006, when nuclear generated 167 TWh and 74.6TWh came from gas).
Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.
You're operating on information from 3 years ago and haven't changed your mind since then.
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.
I mean... so? The immediate alternative is gas, where most of the _fuel_ comes from various dubiously-friendly regimes. At least once the solar panels are in place, China's permission isn't required for them to produce power.
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...
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.
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.
It's enough to fund more than a 10% increase in installed solar capacity in the EU, so if all that energy were to be used to save money, double solar capacity every 7 years - or 10 years if assuming that 3% of all panels are retired annually.
If we're talking about money not spent, aren't savings almost unlimited just from mechanization? The train, the car, the shopping cart, the dishwasher may be saving us all several economies worth of work on a daily basis
This capital saved (~$50B/year) can be recycled into more renewables, storage, transmission, and EVs to further drive down future petroleum demand, creating even more savings into the future. Stocks vs flows. Price of clean tech keeps rapidly falling, investment will continue to ramp. Think like a flywheel.
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.