Comment by ahartmetz
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.
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.