Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm(hackaday.com) |
Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm(hackaday.com) |
My rebranded Fox ESS hardware has it enabled and there's even official documentation of the so-called "registers".
For both victron and litime plenty of examples exist, including home assistant integrations.
Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs
Right now it seems Utah is the only jurisdiction in North America where they are
Where I live, in the US, National Grid is okay with balcony solar as long as it's a zero-export balcony solar. Your power utility may take a similar approach. They might also take a "if it doesn't cross the meter, and we can't tell what you're doing, then we can't tell you not to do it"
Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.
The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/virginia-to-becom...
The social problem is that fossil fuel usage was very profitable and employed enough people that polluters were allowed not to pay for externalities and a lot of climate change denial funded by the oil companies proved effective at getting politicians and the public to downplay the risk. Even today, even on HN, you can find people who’ll say it’s no big deal, the earth has been this warm in the past, that it’ll cost too much, that they can never drive an EV because their daily commute is 11 hours each way without stopping, etc.
Because fossil fuel lobbyists so successfully captured most right-wing parties, millions of people added that to their self identity and thus will struggle to admit they were wrong because that more or less means admitting that the same people who lied to them about the climate also lied about other things.
So yes
Hopefully these inverters are smart enough to cut the feed if the AC mains power goes out, to avoid backfeeding utility lines that may be under repair.
See for instance:
https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/sites/default/files/2024-0...
Every region has their own set of rules which requires inverter manufacturers to have a bunch of different settings depending on where the inverter is installed.
The 800W is about grid management impact limitation to levels that do not warrant the utility imposing any "but we first have to upgrade the substation before we can get you your local transformer with the higher speed EV charging and McMansion winter full heat pump setup" delays before you are allowed to turn it on/grid-tie it.
Net metering is common, but not everywhere and frequently there's a pricing differential between what you buy and what you sell. My mother leased her solar panels from SolarCity/Tesla. She buys electricity at $0.12 a kilowatt hour, but sells at $.09/kwh. Some of the regulatory shenanigans I've seen regarding balcony solar include no net metering. If you produce excess power, you get no credit for it.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/18/chinas-cheap-electric...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5_Largest_Producers_...
Right around that time Germany's solar boom started in earnest:
https://www.statista.com/chart/2397/solar-power-made-massive...
Which was powered largely by Chinese panels. Since we can't have nice things, tariffs were imposed:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_13_...
