You're not allowed to use the electricity you generate. _All_ power you produce is sold to the utility at wholesale. _All_ power you consume is purchased from the utility at retail. Two separate meters.
If I hypothetically spend a couple hundred bucks on a solar panel, 12v lead acid battery, and basic 12VDC -> 120VAC inverter, put those items on a wagon, and drag it across my yard to use power tools where an extension cord won't reach is the power company going to arrest/fine me? Is it only illegal once I use the batteries/inverter under my own roof?
But nobody wants that. Really, i don't think many people care about selling the power back either. But they've made it already, why waste it? What people want is i'll make the first 5 kwh, and i want to buy any extra from the grid. And i don't want a big switch system for each light in my house. Which seems very normal and sane.
Oh, that's exactly what I want, and have been researching for myself. I'm taking it even further and planning on being able to switch individual circuits between battery and grid.
If that idea is dumb somehow I'd love to know more resources about why. From my perspective it's a better solution than grid tie, but I value resiliency and reliability as well as pure cost alone. If I still lived in a city where the power literally never went out for years at a time, then having a local backup would not be really attractive.
And considering the regulations, it seems like the system I'm considering would also be able to basically satisfy the desire for "i'll make the first 5khw". Select a circuit that draws at least 5 kwh/day, run it off batteries until the battery bank voltage drops below a threshold, and then switch over to the grid.
Hah. Existential quantifiers are hard.
I’m not an electrician, and that’s who you should talk with.
However, it’s way easier to just trip a breaker when the power goes out. The whole neighborhood is drawing from your battery, breaker flips and you are done.
A single meter tie is simple. You use what you generate. Any extra makes the meter run backwards. You draw more, you pay for it. The infrastructure probably can’t handle whole neighborhoods doing this.
IMHO, they should charge a flat monthly fee for the option to connect.
p.s. Even if buy-all-sell-all doesn't make sense, requiring your electrical setup to meet grid standards does make sense. It's be surprisingly easy to cause a blackout, or to kill yourself, by messing it up.