You can get some, but as you suggest it’s not terribly cost effective. As Pete noted upthread the capacity factor for German solar this month is a measly 2.5%.
DB2
And, as Gh noted a week or two ago, he knows someone who gets enough in MA. It really is location-dependent. If you don’t get sun for weeks at a time, it may not be cost effective. As suggested in this thread, in the summer Germany gets lots of sun. You have to figure all that in to determine if it’s cost effective.
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In the early days Germany also subsidized solar investment by guaranteeing good prices for the power. Individuals invested to take advantage. But the subsidies were later eliminated. As a result you expect Germany to have much solar installed.
Clouds may be a problem in the north but not in the south.
Germany, of course, gets less sun than Massachusetts (as noted, it is as far north as Labrador). Back in November XMFBigFrog wrote that his home system in Ohio had a payback period of 14 years (and that was with the federal tax credit). An intermittent power source that has a payback period measured in decades doesn’t sound like a great idea.
DB2
If it actually pays back, then why not? It sounds like US corporate thinking. One quarter at a time. If it pays back in 15 years, then it does. And it’s printing money after that.
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For home owners major questions are what is the expected service life? How much maintenance is required? Will panels survive a major hail storm? Will your buyer be willing to pay a premium for the solar capability?
This works best if you plan to use solar panels long term. If you plan to move getting premium price for old solar panels can be problematic.
Something new is now popping up with solar panels – thin glass breakage.
To meet global demand and reduce costs, many manufacturers have opted for larger, more powerful, but also lighter modules. A lighter module has the undeniable advantage of reducing the weight on structures, and therefore the costs of the building structure. With glass representing more than half the module’s weight, this quest for lightness has naturally led to the use of increasingly thinner glass…
Independent quality tests, such as those conducted by RETC or Kiwa PVEL, indicate increased fragility in the modules (Kiwa PVEL’s 2025 scorecard indicates that 83% of manufacturers failed at least one module reliability test, compared to 66% in 2024). This trend is also supported by feedback from the field. Cases of cracked or broken modules, sometimes just weeks after installation, occur without any external shock or exceptional weather event being implicated.
Reduced impact resistance also increases breakage during module installation and maintenance, particularly when cutting vegetation with stones, which can damage the panels. In some projects, the breakage rate reaches significant levels, leading to production losses, replacement costs, and safety risks for personnel. It’s important to remember that a broken module is no longer a Class 4 live appliance (like a washing machine, for example), and therefore poses a risk of electrocution to on-site personnel.
DB2
For those who might be interested, the solar power capacity factor in June of 2025 in Germany was 17%. The summer solstice is on June 21, so the days in June in the northern hemisphere are the longest. The average solar capacity factor in June in the United States is usually around 31%. Germany is just not a very good location for a lot of solar power, but the Germans have gone all-in with it, and they also have the highest priced electricity in the EU.
The full-year solar capacity factor in Germany for 2025 was 10%. This compares to around 23% for solar power in the US for the full year. (Final data for the US will be out later this month.)
_ Pete
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That is something that can be resolved with use of better materials.
All new products are going to have problems and required fixes. This is not unique to the solar panel industry. Remember all the problems with automobile air bags and tires, nuclear power plants, pharma drugs, lithium ion batteries, lead contamination, forever chemicals, foreign objects in food, wide spread food contamination, etc.
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Look at the bright side of German electricity generation. Solar and wind generated more electricity that fossil fuels:
Year 2025
Solar 87.5 TWh (17.4%)
Wind 132.0 (26.3%)
Biomass 41.1 (8.2%)
Hydro 17.8 (3.5%)
2025 Total Fossil Fuels = 181.5 TWh (36.2% of total)
In comparison USA lags Germany in clean electricity generation: USA clean electrical energy is 42% and USA fossil electrical energy is 59%.
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Not just home owners, of course, but all PV owners and operators. There are significant financial risks for solar farms as seen in the article below.
Some new research out of Australia:
After analysing performance data from nearly 11,000 photovoltaic systems worldwide, researchers identified a “long tail” in degradation rates. While the average system loses about 0.9% of output per year, up to 20% of panels degrade at least 1.5 times faster and around one in 12 degrade twice as fast. Lead author Yang Tang says this has serious implications for system longevity…
The study drew on global production data compiled by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and found that the accelerated degradation is not linked to climate conditions, including extreme heat. Instead, the researchers identified three main causes.
The first is interconnected failures, where one fault triggers others…The second is so-called infant mortality, where panels fail early due to manufacturing or material defects that are not detected during quality control…The third involves minor defects, such as hairline cell cracks or imperfect soldering, that remain dormant before causing sudden and severe performance loss later in a panel’s life.
DB2
Also increased are waste and recycling problems.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year life cycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement…
Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios…
The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar.
…we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031. By 2035, discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection.
DB2
I don’t think disposal of solar panels is a major issue. You can probably grind them up and use them as aggregate in concrete or asphalt road tar. Their value as silicon is about the same as that of meturlurgical grade silicon, the first step on the way to high purity silicon.
Meturlurgical silicon is made by reducing sand in an electric furnace with carbon electrodes.
In the Siemens process, the next step is conversion to trichlorsilane which is then distilled and highly purified before conversion back to polysilicon.
The problem is the high cost of collection. Not much potential for profit. Better ground up and used as aggregate.