this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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We are 90% there already. In many states, solar panels and usage have extra taxes. Most solar installations are grid tied and electricity sale prices to the company are fixed at a small fraction of their sale prices from those companies. Worse, if power goes out, you can't use solar to stay electrified because electricity would leak out and potentially electrocute nearby line men.
Ever hear of a power invertor and an interlock switch? You're only partially right.
All mains connected solar has an inverter. Hell, most wind is part or fully converted, to smooth out the raw waveform, and thus is inverter driven.
Where I'm from your "interlock switch" would be called "island mode". It can be a thing, but distribution network operators have a legal obligation to maintain supply (or else they face harsh financial penalties) and as such they are reluctant to allow even the possibility of unintentional backfeed to their network, especially when they need to work quickly to keep supplies up. Safely regulating every single household is just too burdensome, not without extensive modification that no one wants to pay for.
Has this... really ever been true? We've had gas powered generators people can plug into their homes for a rather long time now, and they would be doing the exact same thing as solar installations.
It depends on where you are mainly, but I do believe the kit that prevents what you describe, is functionally mandatory to have for solar. Not certain on that, and it definitely still depends on locale, but I haven't seen any without that lockout in a loooonging time.
Yes any professionally installed solar kit is going to have that liability prevention included with the design. That person is just spouting bullshit from some half-learned information.
I built my own solar offgrid power station, and I didn't install that protection, but it's also a completely off the grid power source so it doesn't matter. I installed a dedicated ground and breaker for it and it works as a standalone power source.
Your info is a bit out of date. With a single battery you can use nearly any solar system to generate and consume that energy during a grid outage. With a couple brands of gear (such as Enphase IQ8) you don't even need any battery to generate and consume energy from solar during a grid outage. The term to look for for batteryless is called "self grid forming".
Grid forming typically refers to inverters connected to a large electricity network. What you're talking about is islanding, ie running a system separate to the grid when it would normally be grid following. The principles are similar, in that both involve using internal voltage measurements to control the generation output (rather than externally chasing the grid voltage), but the practical nature is different - grid forming systems have to deal with large fluctuations from the network, well beyond what you would see in a domestic system. The terminologies overlap a lot, but grid forming specifically refers to large scale systems and more complicated networks.