Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies

At a Berlin trade fair for sustainability, a new gadget caught Waltraud Berg’s eye — a solar panel small enough to be easily installed on the side of a balcony and then plugged into a wall socket to feed energy produced by the sun directly into her home.

“I was absolutely thrilled to learn that such a thing even existed, that you can generate your own power and be more independent,” said Ms. Berg, a retiree who installed several panels on the south-facing balcony of her Berlin apartment by herself.

Each of the lightweight panels produces only enough electricity to charge a laptop or run a small refrigerator. But in homes across Germany, they are powering a quiet transformation, bringing the green revolution into the hands of people without requiring them to make a large investment, find an electrician or use heavy tools.

“You don’t need to drill or hammer anything,” Ms. Berg said. “You just hang them from the balcony like wet laundry in Italy.”

More than 500,000 of the systems have already been set up across Germany, and new laws that relaxed rules around solar panel installation have contributed to a boom in use. In the first six months of the year, the country added nine gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity, the amount of solar power a system produces, according to the Federal Network Agency, a German regulator.