Comment by pyrale

Comment by pyrale 18 hours ago

> It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity

The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.

The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.

pmontra 16 hours ago

I'd agree with you if I'd setup my solar panels. But if I'd ever install solar at home I'd hire a company to do all the setup. I believe that it would fulfill industry standards.

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pyrale an hour ago

It wouldn’t. Just like hiring the best pros to make an extremely fancy kitchen wouldn’t make it equivalent to a restaurant kitchen.

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ahartmetz 11 hours ago

Probably taking the "someone gets hurt" part too literally, but inverters do turn off their outputs when the grid goes down. It would take a lot of inverters to make all the other inverters believe that the local part of grid hasn't bee disconnected. I wouldn't be surprised if they had special logic to detect even that case. Of course, there is the case of simply having too much unregulated input to the grid, causing instability. But AFAIK that has never happened anywhere, at least not in a way bad enough to make the news. It is bound to happen if current trends continue, but appropriate actions will be taken at that point and have been taken in large solar installations.

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pyrale 36 minutes ago

First off, I’d like to state that the following post is about the challenges of handling residential production, not about industrial renewable setups.
The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.
The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).
The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.

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