> Unlike Lebanon, though, one cannot legally operate their solar panels to power a home while the electric grid is down in Israel.
That’s fascinating! Can you say more?
That’s fascinating! Can you say more?
It's likely a safety issue in the case of grid-connected solar installations. These panels are designed to send excess electricity to the grid, and if the grid is down, the utility needs to make sure that busted cables are not carrying electricity... for the safety of the repairmen.
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/do-blackouts-...
You need to move up to more expensive models that support “islanding” to be able to use solar power while the grid is down. For some reason it appears that this type of inverter isn’t legal in Israel?
In case the main grid goes off, your equipment is supposed to stop working so that it doesn't feed power backwards into the grid while some person is trying to fix whatever broke, so unless you have a battery/UPS and a large switch to flip, your solar panels "die" along with the grid.
The alternative would be to have totally separated panels, but many opt in to selling excess back, since it gets more and more profitable as prices go up.
Totally separated solar panels would also mean you barely have any electricity on that circuit for half of the year.
Another option is an inverter that can sense the net and switch that flip automatically, but they are more expensive and still not legal everywhere because it's not really needed in Western European countries.
The installation had to be certified by the electricity company to ensure that it operates safely in the event of a grid power outage, but (in theory as we've not had a power cut since installation) it should all work fine.
Many a datacenter outage could have been prevented had there been more regular testing of all the components involved.
AFAIK the latter part is now less and less true in Germany because the price for selling excess back is only a fraction of the cost of getting power out of the grid, so people are installing batteries, heat storage and controllers that switch heavy consumers like their heat pump according to other loads in their house.