There's no citation or research about the laws in question in this article, or the Miami New Times article it cites as a source, or the WFTV article that it sources.
From what I gathered in reading the three articles there's a state code that mandates that homes must be hooked up to the electrical grid. With out seeing the law or it's history (e.g. when it was mandated), it's difficult to say if it's malice on the part of utilities or just a poorly worded law from 50 years ago.
Electricity is regulated, like water, because it's something people have a hard time living without in modern society. It's perfectly reasonable for the state to mandate that properties have power as a protection for tenants.
It certainly sounds like the power company is doing nothing to accommodate those who would like power by having policies in place for reporting solar hookups to protect linemen or offering bi-directional meters to avoid billing irregularities, but there's no evidence presented to support the assertion that they lobbied to prevent solar.
That has nothing to do with powering you own home from you own solar panels.
When the grid-tie inverter senses the grid is down (it could even be scheduled outage for maintenance) - it stops feeding the grid and only powers the house. When it senses the grid is back it ties to the grid again.
If you need to work on the house, there can be a master switch where the panels come into the inverter (law in Australia) so you can manually turn them off, thus ensuring none of the house has power.
Yes, it's required for generators too. You have to install some sort of switch (I forgot what it's called) so the house power doesn't feed back into the grid and kill a lineman.
The title is very misleading as well. Just goes to show that Fox News and their ilk aren't the only ones who do fake news, it's journalism in general.
Also, the title is an outright lie: "Thanks to Lobbying, It's Illegal to Power Your Home with Solar Panels in Florida"
Read the law. It is illegal to have a home not connected to the grid at all. so there is no danger about a backfeed since the 2 systems never meet.
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
Some local power companies had that inserted into city code.
The same state rules require a breaker-switch on the solar panel feed, disconnecting it from the grid [1]. However, customers are not allowed to use that switch - it's for FPL use only.
How come solar panels are ubiquitous elsewhere? Is it that e.g. Germany is risking the lives of line workers? Is Florida doing the right thing, or the wrong thing?
Not just that, but it also can make the whole grid unstable under certain conditions. Electricity is an EM wave and if everybody could leak the out of the phase energy into the grid it would create interferences and oscillations all over it.
I work in the solar industry and can confirm that this is standard safety practice in my state as well. When grid power goes down the inverter is required to shutdown and remain off until a few minutes after normal grid conditions are restored. This is to ensure that the grid equipment is actually de-energized so it can be worked on safely. It's such a ubiquitous policy that all inverters need to be UL Certified to prove that they do this.
Utility companies pull a lot of bullshit, but this policy is actually pretty sound.
If you want to use your PV as backup power, you need to treat is as you would a conventional backup generator and install a manual transfer switch that that isolates disconnects the electrical service as the backup power is engaged. This can nearly double the cost of the solar project, so most people don't do it.
This reddit comment thread [1] explains the issue well.
In short: most households get grid-tied solar power setups with no batteries. If the main grid is off, it creates islands of power where the units can't safely backfeed to the grid. However, you can legally get a battery setup which costs more money and use that when the grid is down.
This seems to be straight from a dystopian movie or book I'm not sure it isn't a joke. Is the "get off my lawn" a thing of the past in US? What business have US gov, or anybody else for that matter, to do with what I do on my property?
The main reference is a page giving guidelines for what sort of equipment is required for connecting a solar system to the grid for net metering.
Of course there will be some requirements for that, and most systems that use the grid for "storage" aren't setup to power the house when the grid is down. Thus the system that isn't capable of powering the house without the grid is off when the grid is off.
The question of whether one can operate a house with solar+battery when the grid is down is not really answered by the article.
The stuff about the bi-directional meter is warblegarble.
What the requirement is talking about is operating a grid tie system before FPL upgrades the meter to one that measures in both directions in a way that meets their requirements. This is a sensible requirement, not a ginned up excuse.
You have to design the system correctly so it does not backfeed grid. https://goo.gl/iw8f8w Look at the marketecture from solar edge. You can add in a generator with a automatic transfer switch. They also highlight a scenario with existing PV and a separate grid tie inverter.
Isn't it necessary to have the grid as a backup consumer?
What happens if you over produce solar energy, but don't have the necessary means to dissipate it?
Solar panels get less efficient as voltage increases, hitting zero at a reasonable point. This is very convenient, since all you need is a buck converter in the battery charger and any unused power can be ignored.
The power still exists, of course. It just ends up heating the panels, which are fine with that.
It looks like FPL has a Net Metering program, which a lot of power companies offer. In short, you get credits on your bill for the power that goes back into the grid. It used to be that some power companies actually write you a check.
It's not necessary. If you produce more than you use consistently then a good sized battery bank may be all that you need. A lot of new home appliances are so energy efficient they are starting to see use on sailboats.
Solar cells can produce at load. It's not like panels that aren't connected are melting down, like nuclear.
You need to design system correctly. Look at literature from solar edge. You could also add generator with automatic transfer switch. Also, you can modify existing system. https://goo.gl/iw8f8w
In 2015 about 10% of Hawaii's residential customers had solar installations (0.5% is the national average). Such a large intermittent source of electricity caused problems for the utility companies and led to limitation on buying back electricity from these solar installations. Naturally, this has slowed installation of additional residential solar in Hawaii. See [1] and [2].
Hawaii has a goal of 40% renewable by 2030 but they have a number of technical hurdles to get over.
In Africa we've built small home/lab/datacenter power systems that charge a battery bank off utility mains plus on-site generation. It's basically a gigantic UPS that can automatically switch among a variety of power inputs. What's stopping someone from building something like that here in the U.S.? Charge batteries from solar, supplement with mains power, maybe even add a diesel generator for extreme emergencies, and use an automatic transfer switch to prevent backfeeding the utility mains (which is super dangerous to line workers and probably the reason for Florida's regulation). Not being a power systems guy myself, I don't see where the flaws in such a design are. Any EEs out there who care to comment?
If the system is technically correct (won't back-feed power into the network because it has a transfer switch) it's a licensing and regulatory issue. In this case, Florida Power & Light objects to systems like this and won't certify them.
When generating emergency power is outlawed, only outlaws will have emergency power.
I can't see how anyone would think this was a good idea. I expect respect for the law to plummet faster than you can say "Dad. Can you please give us non-rotten food?"
So far it's just been technical reasons that would be a problem if pretty much all standards-compliant inverters didn't already have safety features to mitigate them...
Rather, thanks to regulation it is illegal to power your home with solar panels in Florida. Lobbyists are not legislators.
That said, power grids are incredibly difficult to coordinate, there is almost no describing it. You need extra installed capacity if some endpoints are also generating stations.
Personally I would not really want to backfeed to the grid anyway, so if this regulation applies even when you don't hook up to the grid, that seems pretty ridiculous.
Either way it doesn't seem like you'd need laws to keep people from hooking up their panels to the grid, unless they need to cancel out a law that says they must be able to hook up their solar arrays to a grid.
I can see an opportunity here for the grid to become owned/operated by the people, not massive corporate greed machines. A house who has excess sells it to neighbors who do not have the solar capacity where neither are connected to the normal grid. Throw some technology into automatically shutting down the generator side every X hours unless its given authorization wirelessly. This foolproofs the root cause of uncontrollable distributed hot lines.
It's illegal to occupy a house that is not connected to the local power grid. The power wall would effectively be redundant and mostly useless. You have to get your power from the power company.
Only for installations that are connected to the grid, which pays taxes (the so called "sun tax"). AFAIK installations not connected to the grid are legal and don't have to pay taxes.
The difference seems to be that in Florida you can't live in a house that is not connected to the grid.
TBH I think it makes sense that all houses should be connected to the electrical grid. Just like all houses should have proper sanitation facilities.
This is a small edge case for people who want to be self sufficient even though it makes no economic sense, as FPL does have net metering in place.
If they didn't have net metering in place I'd understand this, but considering they do and at first glance looks like a very reasonable program, is it really worth altering city and state building codes to allow it? The city/state would have to pay for very expensive specialists in off grid solar/battery/inverter setups to ensure they were at parity as a simple grid connection.
[+] [-] oconnore|8 years ago|reply
It is dangerous to backfeed the grid -- you may kill the line worker coming to fix a blown transformer or downed line.
In some places a grid connection is considered necessary by the building code. If so, you must use proper equipment.
[+] [-] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
From what I gathered in reading the three articles there's a state code that mandates that homes must be hooked up to the electrical grid. With out seeing the law or it's history (e.g. when it was mandated), it's difficult to say if it's malice on the part of utilities or just a poorly worded law from 50 years ago.
Electricity is regulated, like water, because it's something people have a hard time living without in modern society. It's perfectly reasonable for the state to mandate that properties have power as a protection for tenants.
It certainly sounds like the power company is doing nothing to accommodate those who would like power by having policies in place for reporting solar hookups to protect linemen or offering bi-directional meters to avoid billing irregularities, but there's no evidence presented to support the assertion that they lobbied to prevent solar.
[+] [-] grecy|8 years ago|reply
That has nothing to do with powering you own home from you own solar panels.
When the grid-tie inverter senses the grid is down (it could even be scheduled outage for maintenance) - it stops feeding the grid and only powers the house. When it senses the grid is back it ties to the grid again.
If you need to work on the house, there can be a master switch where the panels come into the inverter (law in Australia) so you can manually turn them off, thus ensuring none of the house has power.
Simple.
[+] [-] Clubber|8 years ago|reply
The title is very misleading as well. Just goes to show that Fox News and their ilk aren't the only ones who do fake news, it's journalism in general.
Also, the title is an outright lie: "Thanks to Lobbying, It's Illegal to Power Your Home with Solar Panels in Florida"
[+] [-] yardie|8 years ago|reply
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
Some local power companies had that inserted into city code.
[+] [-] manarth|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-18/florida-you-cant-us...
[+] [-] willvarfar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pidge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madshiva|8 years ago|reply
Also you can run the system in autonomous mode, no risk at all for worker, even it's a lie.
[+] [-] veryrad|8 years ago|reply
Utility companies pull a lot of bullshit, but this policy is actually pretty sound.
If you want to use your PV as backup power, you need to treat is as you would a conventional backup generator and install a manual transfer switch that that isolates disconnects the electrical service as the backup power is engaged. This can nearly double the cost of the solar project, so most people don't do it.
[+] [-] turbohedgehog|8 years ago|reply
In short: most households get grid-tied solar power setups with no batteries. If the main grid is off, it creates islands of power where the units can't safely backfeed to the grid. However, you can legally get a battery setup which costs more money and use that when the grid is down.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/70oz3k/due_to_e...
[+] [-] crististm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallace_f|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
Of course there will be some requirements for that, and most systems that use the grid for "storage" aren't setup to power the house when the grid is down. Thus the system that isn't capable of powering the house without the grid is off when the grid is off.
The question of whether one can operate a house with solar+battery when the grid is down is not really answered by the article.
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
What the requirement is talking about is operating a grid tie system before FPL upgrades the meter to one that measures in both directions in a way that meets their requirements. This is a sensible requirement, not a ginned up excuse.
(all the quotes are coming from a linked grid interconnection guideline https://www.fpl.com/clean-energy/net-metering/guidelines.htm... )
I wonder if there is actually any legal requirement to have a grid interconnection. The article isn't real convincing.
[+] [-] rb1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smndelphi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d--b|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Filligree|8 years ago|reply
The power still exists, of course. It just ends up heating the panels, which are fine with that.
[+] [-] rahible|8 years ago|reply
https://www.fpl.com/clean-energy/net-metering.html
[+] [-] yardie|8 years ago|reply
Solar cells can produce at load. It's not like panels that aren't connected are melting down, like nuclear.
[+] [-] dom0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smndelphi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todd8|8 years ago|reply
Hawaii has a goal of 40% renewable by 2030 but they have a number of technical hurdles to get over.
[1] http://e360.yale.edu/features/will_new_obstacles_dim_hawaiis...
[2] http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-opens-20-m...
[+] [-] thriftwy|8 years ago|reply
The same thing WRT rain water which is mentioned in comments.
To me it seems like an unreasonable invasion of household borders: trying to regulate something confined in a household.
[+] [-] criddell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xenophonf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|8 years ago|reply
I can't see how anyone would think this was a good idea. I expect respect for the law to plummet faster than you can say "Dad. Can you please give us non-rotten food?"
[+] [-] denzil_correa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
That said, power grids are incredibly difficult to coordinate, there is almost no describing it. You need extra installed capacity if some endpoints are also generating stations.
Personally I would not really want to backfeed to the grid anyway, so if this regulation applies even when you don't hook up to the grid, that seems pretty ridiculous.
Either way it doesn't seem like you'd need laws to keep people from hooking up their panels to the grid, unless they need to cancel out a law that says they must be able to hook up their solar arrays to a grid.
[+] [-] AtomicOrbital|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaimex2|8 years ago|reply
Powerwalls would still be viable and legal right?
[+] [-] yardie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sumang|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiThi|8 years ago|reply
The difference seems to be that in Florida you can't live in a house that is not connected to the grid.
[+] [-] ndespres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvannistelrooy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinald|8 years ago|reply
This is a small edge case for people who want to be self sufficient even though it makes no economic sense, as FPL does have net metering in place.
If they didn't have net metering in place I'd understand this, but considering they do and at first glance looks like a very reasonable program, is it really worth altering city and state building codes to allow it? The city/state would have to pay for very expensive specialists in off grid solar/battery/inverter setups to ensure they were at parity as a simple grid connection.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] radisb|8 years ago|reply
Is it illegal to even just own a solar panel that is not connected to the grid?