Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies: Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.
Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies: Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.
Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.
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Not mentioned in the article is that these systems are still illegal in the US.
do you know why they're illegal? is there some danger to them?
FTA:
The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.
So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.
The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.
Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.
I've got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I'd need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I've got all that, but it's not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.
Houses in Europe are connected to the grid too.
These systems are approved in Europe by utilities because they have failsafes implemented to prevent back feeding electricity in the grid.
The fact that these systems are still illegal in the US is a political issue, not a technical one.
[European utilities] have failsafes implemented to prevent back feeding electricity in the grid
Yeah but imagine if you could save money by not doing that? What are the odds that there's going to be cheap(er) personal mass power generation in the next few decades.
These systems are approved in Europe by utilities because they have failsafes implemented to prevent back feeding electricity in the grid.
Sounds like Big Government Regulation of my God Damned Rights to do something on my house as I see fit! Europe's full o' damn communists and their stupid sun grabbin' electro-gibbits. That's why they'll never be the Greatest Bestest Country on da face a dis here Earf.
While it seems like they’d have to, the article makes no mention of such a fail safe. What does it do and how could it work?
From what it sounds like, the safety is in the device not the grid. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a far lesser sense of personal responsibility to those around you in the US than Europe and I don’t know that I’d trust that nobody over here would fudge some bypass to power their house in an outage
Balcony solars are not able to back feed since they need the grid to synchronize, if you want one that is able to work in "island mode" you still need approval from the grid provider/one that isnt connected with the schuko connector.
Individuals owning their own means of energy production is obviously unamerican.
It's a feature of capitalism!
They are VERY DANGEROUS to conservatives and the flawed ideological rafts they're still clinging to.
Are they Chinese solar panels or good ol' American products?
They're from the Evil Bad Country That Does the Genocides. So... uh... idk.
Because fuck us apparently.
No, because you can kill a lineman working on the downed line, who mistakenly thinks the line is dead and has no idea that you're feeding power into it from your solar panel.
I really feel like one of these store-bought solar panels wouldn't put out enough electricity to kill someone
They have enough energy, but they automatically turn off once the grid goes down because they need the grid to synchronize. Balcony solar panels are not able to work in "island mode", so no lineman is at risk.
You really don't need a lot of power to kill someone, especially with AC you really don't need much to induce ventricular fibrillation.
A 120W panel at full sunlight easily has enough power to kill someone. That's 1A at 120V, minus some conversion losses. 120W is pretty low end these days.
The inverters are built with an automatic shut off during grid outages, specifically for lineman safety.
Those inverters can't backfeed, they need a grid to synchronise to.
Largely illegal by way of import. The Americans don't want cheap foreign panels dominating their still-nascent domestic solar industry.