5 ms·

But they could, though, with a small increase in complexity and cost. People didn’t find it worthwhile because the grid in the US has been fantastically reliabl

But they could, though, with a small increase in complexity and cost. People didn’t find it worthwhile because the grid in the US has been fantastically reliable, until now.

rtkwe 7y ago
It's not really low cost, to truly do off grid solar you need to have a battery pack plus the isolator (so you don't fry the people trying to fix the system with back-fed current) and a true sine wave inverter which is pretty expensive. You have to have the battery pack because solar has a very harsh drop off in produced energy if you try to extract too much and that level moves around a lot as the light level on the cell changes. Because of this you have to have a reserve that can power the entire house by itself since a cloud can drop out 90% of the solar energy completely randomly.