As someone who recently lost power and water for weeks post Helene, do not discount the power of distributed grids. Distributed core infrastructure will make for much better climate resilience. Don't miss this in your efficiency calculations.
Sure, but that's why my emphasis was on distributed grids. Interlinking local capacity / having one or two neighbors with fully fledged systems is way better than going weeks charging stuff in your car. When you're without power for weeks, you'll probably have enough sun for more than enough days to get yourself sorted. Hurricanes also tend to sweep up any other systems in the region, so once they disperse, it's pretty clear skies. Anecdotally, we didn't get any rain for months after Helene dissipated.
Also, diesel and gas were pretty much inaccessible for the first 5 days of the disaster, so unless you have a stockpile that's been treated for longevity, you might not even be able to run your whole home generator for long.
They have to. Feeding your own home needs some setup but is fine. But electricity companies require you to disconnect generating capacity from the grid when the grid is down to make it easier to effect repairs.
But that's more a policy decision than a technical restriction. We could change it so power can flow on both sides of a fault instead of only the "upstream" grid side.
With battery systems getting so cheap maybe community batteries will become a thing where a neighborhood exports it's solar too and is it's own small grid.
a) government mandates that turn over existing grid infrastructure to such a project, because the existing grid infrastructure is almost all privately owned
OR
b) building new infrastructure to create an isolatable local grid
I mean it isn't though: it's defense in depth - policy is you must disconnect. Line workers will drive a ground stake in on both sides anyway, but if you don't disconnect then they'll just short your inverter to ground.
There's a program involving F150 lighting trucks out in CA that pay you to grid tie them, that way a couple of them in your neighborhood can power the neighborhood for a day or so if wildfires take out the local grid
Anything grid tied is generally required to have phenomenally reliable shutdown if the grid goes down OR proven (and very expensive) automated switching that disconnects it from the grid if the grid goes down.
This is so those F150s are not backfeeding the wires while a repair crew is trying to fix it.
Ergo, if the local grid is "taken out", those F150s cannot be "on the local grid".
Article says "customers will allow their EVs to feed energy back to the grid – helping to balance it during peak demand". It doesn't say anything about what happens when the grid goes down during disasters
>> Grid connected solar goes down when the grid is out though. You need specific inverters to retain power.
Yes, and sort of.
Inverters will prevent power flowing to the grid if the grid is off. However most inverters will continue to supply power into the house while the grid is off.
There are various factors in play here, and you need to do proper homework, but certainly a fraction of the house can be powered, if not all of it.
I'm not sure if this is "special" inverter or not. Every one I researched had the same functionality.
