That's strange. We are on some grain elevators that have both solar and battery storage (obviously bigger than balcony solar). The electricians told me it can only backfeed the grid. If commercial power fails, it doesn't provide backup for the site. I guess it's to prevent frying some linesman working on the outage.
Just seems a shame to have a hundred solar panels and a big Tesla BESS the size of a shipping container, and no power when the grid goes down. -----Original Message----- From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Prince Sent: Friday, September 5, 2025 2:07 PM To: AFMUG <[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] OT: Balcony solar I just read about this. It's apparently been a big thing in the EU, and Utah just approved it for residential installations with "almost" no permit requirements. A company (forget the name) is trying to get it going in several municipalities around the SF Bay Area. You just plug the whole thing into a dedicated circuit, and you have a small-scale solar installation. Bada bing. Probably only good for a few hundred watts, but the simple permitting eliminates the one big hurdle for most solar installs. The one thing I don't understand is it requires an "islanding device" that prevents it from backfeeding onto the grid. What happens when the islanding device fails? Does it have some kind of fail safe? -- bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
