Doesn't the whole solar thing have to do with how solar city (et all) wrote your contract? If they own the system, they set it up so that they get paid for every watt the panels produce, which are all thrown on the grid, right? So they don't want or care about you having power during an outage. On the other hand, if you own the panels outright, wouldn't you want them on your side of the meter, so that you actually use the power your panels produce and also get the benefit of off-grid power? I know one friend who is a lawyer and well-versed in the solar game. He bought and used every trick in the book to get his panels owned outright and with all the rebates and credits available to him, paid something like 25% of their "listed" price. He told me his roof has 3 times the panels that the house "needs" as explained to him by the "experts". He showed me the app that he uses and 100% of his power is produced by the panels (includes net metering to cover him at night when he draws from the grid). He has a 9k square foot house too. I do know a little about the frequency thing having worked for PG&E for 10 years. I would think you could do this locally with some extra electronics for grid frequency matching. Are these electronics available?
I own my PV system, so no contract issues with the original installer. I got my system for 66% of cost. And I have all the panels I need to produce all the electricity I need all year round, but not without the grid.
My solar system cannot run my house minute to minute, let alone day to day or week to week. I think you know this, but maybe for others (as it was a surprise to me when I learned this): my panels might be able to run some lights, maybe my coffee pot. I don't know where the cut off is. They can't run big appliances, not without the grid. They might work all day to "bank" enough juice on the grid to run the refrigerator and the laundry. And that's when the sun is out in the summer. In the winter it might take days to bank all the necessary watts. The system relies on the grid to "distribute" the total I generate across the peak moments here and there I need it. So I'm not sure how much my panels would even help in a 6 hour outage, or even across six days. A few dollars of gas? Even if the back feed issue could be negated somehow, running panels and the gennie at the same time is of questionable value. The money it
might save me in gas would never pay for the equipment I'd have to buy to make it work (I'm guessing I'd have to replace or augment my existing converter with something that could handle the back feed and allow off-grid use). Now if I had a battery, that's a different tune, but there would be some circuitry involved somewhere that could negotiate all the extra power flying around. But that would triple, or more, the cost of adding a gennie.
The notion of having a system that could get me off the grid is interesting, but the facts are, even with all the b--ching I do about PG&E, using their grid as my "battery" is a really good deal.
Really good. I don't pay anything annually for electricity, and that savings is quickly paying off my panels. I only have a few years to go. Once I break even, I'll be using PG&E's grid for free, not watching my $5-10K battery wall degrade. Farther down the road, when battery tech ups capacity at cheaper prices, and when CA lets PG&E renege on my deal with them, then I'll take another look at batteries.
