I used to manage solar installations, couple of things: 1. Electrically, solar does feed your house first. It interconnects before the meter and into your ma

I used to manage solar installations, couple of things: 1. Electrically, solar does feed your house first. It interconnects before the meter and into your main electric panel. The reason it doesn't work during an outage is because of regulations requiring solar to turn off during power outages so that electricians fixing downed lines don't have surprise power from random houses after they turn off the grid power. 2. If you want solar to work during an electric outage you need to install a battery backup that can feed it AC power and disconnect it from the grid during a grid failure. However, you need a pretty big battery to power a full house for a long time so it's generally cheaper and easier to have a gas generator backup if you are worried about this. Batteries are really just good for energy arbitrage purposes these days. 3. There are inverters that have an outlet that works during grid outages, even without batteries (https://www.sma-sunny.com/us/how-to-explain-secure-power-supply-to-homeowners/ https://www.sma-sunny.com/us/how-to-explain-secure-power-sup...). They generally cost the same