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Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

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Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#71

Post by wallace_f »

emodendroket wrote: post #53
wallace_f wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point was that it's not a legitimate role of government to interfere in the details of your private life inside your own home, especially when they affect no one else.

Well, I mean, let's say, for the sake of argument, solar panels had a tendency to burst into flames and cause not only the house they were installed in but also neighboring houses to go up in flames. Would it still be unreasonable to ban them? If not then you've conceded the principle and we're back to arguing about the specifics of each case.

As far as I know the historical justification for legitimate government rule is social contract theory -- hand over some of your rights to protect the remainder of them.

There is some debate about how this should play out in the real world. Technically, solar panels, batteries, ovens, etc all can catch on fire and cause my neighbors to as well. Should we ban all of them?

Sometimes what we do is to try to protect rights through a heavy handed authority (outlaw something), and sometimes through the court system (sue for damages).

Anyways, what seems to be clear is that if there is no potential in one harming another's rights, there's no legitimate reason for government to get involved.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#72

Post by dom0 »

jameshart wrote: post #55
AtomicOrbital wrote: post #23

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 uncont…

For an insight into how unregulated electrical grids work, google 'favela electrical wiring'.

Doesn't look significantly worse than the American power grid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#73

Post by wallace_f »

pjc50 wrote: post #65
wallace_f wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point was that it's not a legitimate role of government to interfere in the details of your private life inside your own home, especially when they affect no one else.

It is however legitimate to ensure that you're not going to electrocute nearby power workers who aren't even on your property.

In the article they mention that this probably wouldn't happen, and only became an issue because the utility forced homeowners to connect to the grid.

In Australia lots of people have off-grid systems. You just switch b/w the two.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#74

Post by JshWright »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #54
sddfd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the title is right in spirit. The law forbids you to use power from your own solar panels if the grid is offline. This is a nonsense requirement. Also the law requires you to use the same inhouse wiring as the grid for power from the solar panels. Why should anyone care about how you wire your own home, as long as your interface with the outside world is according to spec?

The future buyer of your home would like to ensure the safety and correctness of the wiring. The future buyer also needs to know what the limits of the system are, so that they don't accidentally overload it, and if it is overloaded that it performs appropriately (i.e. stop instead of catching fire). A future buyer may, thinking the house is to code, attempt to connect the house to the grid. If it is not wired approp…

Firefighters would like to ensure that your house does not catch fire, risking their lives.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#75

Post by todd8 »

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.

[1] http://e360.yale.edu/features/will_new_obstacles_dim_hawaiis...

[2] http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-opens-20-m...

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#76

Post by DiThi »

sumang wrote: post #5

This is what happened in Spain too.

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.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#77

Post by SigmundA »

homero wrote: post #48
grecy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't backfeed the grid when the grid is "off" 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 pan…

You can't run loads from cells directly, you need a battery and inverters. Or every cloud will fluctuate the voltage and watts massively and your electronics will fry. In the olden days, flickering incandescent would be fine.

Not exactly accurate. My Dad has a 7kw array grid-tie no battery system in FL.

It has a single emergency outlet that will provide up 1500w when the grid is down. With the power being down last week from Irma it was able to output at least a 1000w load even with heavy overcast. It will off course shut off if it can't provide the attached load.

If you have a solar system for home its going to have an inverter, but most likely no batteries, some inverters can provide emergency power without them.

Batteries obviously work much better for that scenario allowing them to buffer energy. But nearly all grid tie systems installed do not have batteries due to extra cost and maintenance.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#78

Post by emodendroket »

wallace_f wrote: post #71
emodendroket wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I mean, let's say, for the sake of argument, solar panels had a tendency to burst into flames and cause not only the house they were installed in but also neighboring houses to go up in flames. Would it still be unreasonable to ban them? If not then you've conceded the principle and we're back to arguing about the specifics of each case.

As far as I know the historical justification for legitimate government rule is social contract theory -- hand over some of your rights to protect the remainder of them. There is some debate about how this should play out in the real world. Technically, solar panels, batteries, ovens, etc all can catch on fire and cause my neighbors to as well. Should we ban all of them? Sometimes what we do is to try to protect righ…

> Technically, solar panels, batteries, ovens, etc all can catch on fire and cause my neighbors to as well. Should we ban all of them?

Maybe not, but there are lots of regulations on how they have to be made and installed and I think that's quite reasonable.

> But I think what we can see here is that if there is no potential in one harming another's rights, there's no legitimate reason for government to get involved.

I don't think it's that simple. A lot of things you can do would just be unsafe for the occupants of the home, but since it is likely you are not the only person who will ever live in the home it is harmful to an unwitting next resident if you are doing a bunch of work that is not up to code. And that's before we consider that a lot of work will be done by contractors for people who, let's face it, don't have any idea how to judge whether work is safe. Whether or not this particular regulation is reasonable, I think the government does have a compelling interest in regulating what you do with your home in this way.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#79

Post by martinald »

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.

Re: Florida Power and Light: Regulations for home solar installations

#80

Post by stephen_g »

ivanhoe wrote: post #35
oconnore wrote: post #8

The article is trying so hard it's hard to tell what the actual issue is. 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.

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.

All solar inverters that would meet any kind of standard synchronise to the frequency of the grid. They also cut out when they detect the grid is down.

For battery systems, they can keep going (like a UPS), but require an 'anti-islanding' switch which automatically isolates the system from the grid when it goes into that mode.

At least, this is all the case in in Australia (and Europe I believe), where we have some of the most households feeding the grid from solar in the world (as a percentage of homes).

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