Fellow-Child-of-Atom t1_j50a7lb wrote on January 19, 2023 at 2:40 PM

Reply to comment by Finarous in Germany says it is no longer reliant on Russian energy by scot816

I don't have numbers unfortunately. All I can say is that photovoltaic is the default rather than the exception for new buildings and that all people I know with photovoltaic talk very highly about the returns.

Obviously in more southern countries it works even better and countries in scandinavia will have less returns. I think photovoltaic is pretty much nonexistent in Norway or Sweden for example. But from what I know, photovoltaic is a riskfree, profitable investment here.

I'm not sure how widely it is known, but Germany has been the worldleading producer for photovoltaic around ~2010 thanks to the subsidies by the past progressive government until - as always - Merkel and other corrupt conservatives destroyed the industry with over 100.000 workers shortly before it became profitable by itself by cutting all of the funding.
If people had been smarter in the past elections, this whole current mess would have been very different and maybe Putin wouldn't even have dared to wage war because Germany would have been way more independant of their energy supplies.

Finarous t1_j50cbfr wrote on January 19, 2023 at 2:55 PM

In fairness, adding PV to buildings seems sensible even if it weren't terribly efficient because to not do it simply seems to be wasting energy that is literally falling from the sky for free. And I would agree that a major country such as Germany being dependent on other countries for something as significant energy is rather poor as a policy decision, given how it allows other countries to use that as leverage. Always good to have leverage over others, not so good for them to have it over you.