3 ms·
It will be interesting to see how this works in California. Everyone I know who has Photovoltaics, also has a switch which is required to disable them the inst
by ghshephard 12y ago
It will be interesting to see how this works in California. Everyone I know who has Photovoltaics, also has a switch which is required to disable them the instant the mains power goes down. The battery is still quite useful in that scenario, but it would be even more useful if you could supply your house with power from batteries, after an event results in the grid losing power.
- tempestn 12y agoThat requirement (appropriately called "anti-islanding") is to avoid islanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding An alternative is to automatically disconnect your home from the grid in that situation, rather than disabling the PV. This is referred to as intentional islanding. (Although I suppose that could be disallowed in some jurisdictions, for no good reason that I can think of. At the very least though, you should be able to manually disconnect once the anti-islanding has kicked in, and then fire the PV and/or battery-powered inverter back up.) Depending on your equipment you may still have to shut down before reconnecting to the grid, once grid power is back up. (Depends on whether your inverter is capable of re-synchronizing with the grid, and again I suppose based on regulations in your jurisdiction.)
- ghshephard 12y agoThis sounds a lot like the ATS (Automatic Transfer Switch) which, is a massive switch that switches from Mains grid to generator during a power outage in some of the buildings I've worked at (And scares the crap out of you if you are in the same room when it switches over - very, very loud).