Very cool. You mention powering connected devices - is it feasible to push power back through the outlet to power parts of the home? Euro solar panels are doing this I believe.
Yeah great question. The hardware is capable of bidirectional power, and electrical codes and standards in the U.S. are now catching up with Europe. “Balcony Solar” has taken off there, especially in Germany. Utah just passed H.B. 340 which allows up to 1200W of plug-in solar backfeed. It wasn’t so long ago that grid-tied batteries like Powerwall were working through the same kind of standards updating process to participate on the grid, so I’m encouraged
Interesting. How is this being managed on the device level? do devices ship with this functionality and configure it based on their state code?
Yep! All hardware is capable, and the Grid Code configuration can be set and updated at any time. So as more states follow suit, Pila's ready
Are the grid isolation and backfeed capabilities mutually exclusive? Isolation would have to happen at the panel if you are backfeeding into an outlet, right?
But 'when the grid is up' isn't the time you'd want to feed power from one outlet into the others. It's when the grid is down you'd want to do this, no?
I guess you could flip the trip switch to isolate the circuit?
Yes & no, there are two reasons to push power back:
1- to save money on energy, charge when cheap discharge when expensive. Pila can do this.
2- to backup. Pila can’t do this. It can only backup appliances plugged into it.