The original (very generic) title):
Government to go “further and faster” in becoming energy secure
The Energy Secretary outlines measures to protect consumers and make Britain energy secure.
They are speaking of panels in the 800W range which you can just buy , mount in front of your balcony or on top of your carport, and plug into a wall socket.
These things are wildly popular in Germany. The do not generate a lot of power, but armotize in about three years and save real money. (Depending on how old the metering technology is, they can also make the power meter spin backwards, which I think is only fair considering how much households pay for kWh, compared to energy-hungry companies, which get most of the the massive cost savings from renewables but don’t pay for the necessary upgrade of the grid).
That’s a persistent myth, and it drives me nuts every time I read it. If power line workers are working on something that is supposed to be dead, they treat it as live and work it with hot sticks until they have bonded all the phases together and to ground. This is done both at the point of disconnect and where the work is actually being done.
Even if they didn’t do this, your little inverter is trying to backfeed the entire grid. The load it sees is indistinguishable from a dead short. Your inverter would overload and trip offline, even if it wasn’t watching the grid voltage and frequency.
There just isn’t a special risk to power line workers.
Hmmm, I’m not an electrical engineer, and really not a line worker, but I do workplace safety for a living. I was sure you’re wrong, but it is indeed not listed anywhere in the sector’s risk inventory here. I stand very corrected.
There is a generic “Make the site safe from both ends” risk mitigation though, and it makes sense that you take the same measures no matter what the source of the potential risk. Doesn’t matter if the cause is “all the solar panels” or “Some absolutely moron did things wrong several decades ago” or just plain “shit broke yo”.
There is, indeed. One of the “sides” they have to consider is the possibility of a live line coming into contact with the disconnected line that they are currently working on. Lines crisscross frequently, and in the aftermath of a storm, a downed wire on one line could bring it into contact with and inadvertently energize another line.
The steps they take to mitigate the risk of an entire neighborhood worth of power being dumped onto the line they are working is more than adequate to mitigate the risk of backfed solar: They deliberately bond all phases together on the dead line, so any fault is shunted through the short and away from the workers.
I’m saying that the “risks” of backfed solar are far less than the risks that they already mitigate, and certainly do not justify keeping plugin solar off the grid.
(I am not saying that backfeed inverters don’t need to mitigate the risk as well; I am saying that mitigation at the device level is one of several redundant safety measures.)