There's no citation or research about the laws in question in this article, or the Miami New Times article it cites as a source, or the WFTV article that it sources.
From what I gathered in reading the three articles there's a state code that mandates that homes must be hooked up to the electrical grid. With out seeing the law or it's history (e.g. when it was mandated), it's difficult to say if it's malice on the part of utilities or just a poorly worded law from 50 years ago.
Electricity is regulated, like water, because it's something people have a hard time living without in modern society. It's perfectly reasonable for the state to mandate that properties have power as a protection for tenants.
It certainly sounds like the power company is doing nothing to accommodate those who would like power by having policies in place for reporting solar hookups to protect linemen or offering bi-directional meters to avoid billing irregularities, but there's no evidence presented to support the assertion that they lobbied to prevent solar.
With that said, this article is fucking bonkers. It makes almost no sense and as you noted, the sources don't even line up with what they suggest they do. IFLS is bullshit.
Unless I'm missing something, the law doesn't require renewable energy generators to be hooked up to the grid. It just establishes some rules requiring you to safely connect to the grid if you are going to offset your power supply from the utility company with a renewable energy source. That's absolutely reasonable. Beyond that, anyone who has bought a house would also want some guidelines and code inspections to be done on something as complicated as a solar install, which this rule also requires if you are going to get your install certified to be interconnected with the power grid and receive excess generation credits.
Florida has/had historically issues with power, especially as populations rose; the utilities were only willing to build generators if they could be guaranteed recovery. All this wasn't just about homes, but the power needs of the entire commercial, public, and safety infrastructure too.
That has nothing to do with powering you own home from you own solar panels.
When the grid-tie inverter senses the grid is down (it could even be scheduled outage for maintenance) - it stops feeding the grid and only powers the house. When it senses the grid is back it ties to the grid again.
If you need to work on the house, there can be a master switch where the panels come into the inverter (law in Australia) so you can manually turn them off, thus ensuring none of the house has power.
The spark for the article, so I understand, is that regulation advocated by FPL made it illegal for homeowners to access that switch. So, in the wake of the hurricane, it was explicitly forbidden for folks with solar systems to power their own homes.
You are describing a rational, reasonable regulatory system. :) Sadly, not the one in force.
You can't run loads from cells directly, you need a battery and inverters. Or every cloud will fluctuate the voltage and watts massively and your electronics will fry. In the olden days, flickering incandescent would be fine.
Yes, it's required for generators too. You have to install some sort of switch (I forgot what it's called) so the house power doesn't feed back into the grid and kill a lineman.
The title is very misleading as well. Just goes to show that Fox News and their ilk aren't the only ones who do fake news, it's journalism in general.
Also, the title is an outright lie: "Thanks to Lobbying, It's Illegal to Power Your Home with Solar Panels in Florida"
IFLScience is not "journalism in general." The acronym stands for "I F*%ing Love Science" and it got started as a Facebook page made popular for posting science-joke memes. The site and FB page, both run by Elise Andrew, are both fairly disliked in the Science Online community for misrepresenting studies, disseminating false information, and chronic copyright violations as she blatantly steals photos and art from others and fails to give credit.
This wikipedia article covers just a little of what Elise Andrew is guilty of:
Does anyone actually still believe this? The idea that [journalism I agree with] is fair and [journalism I disagree with] is fake news was dead by last year. I can't think of a single general audience publication that hasn't transitioned to clickbaity, half truth nonsense. I have largely stopped reading the NYT and the WSJ for this reason. I still like the economist, but even they feel like they are slipping at times.
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
If they can delay the process long enough, it effectively becomes illegal.
A qualified electrician installs a "transfer" switch. It's two breakers tied mechanically so that one position feeds the house with line power, flipping it, the other is the generator.
I have one to keep my refrigerator, well and furnace running.
Read the law. It is illegal to have a home not connected to the grid at all. so there is no danger about a backfeed since the 2 systems never meet.
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
Some local power companies had that inserted into city code.
I think you need to read the law. Nothing in the law requires you to be connected to the grid. Local laws and rules may require you to be connected to the grid to obtain a certificate of occupancy, but I have found no Florida state law requiring you to be hooked up to a power grid.
The law that is consistently referenced in these mostly conspiracy blogs is just a set of rules regarding offsetting your power consumption from a utility company with a renewable energy generator. It requires you to have a switch that they can access. The articles like this one https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/rep-ray-rodrigues.html from Cory Doctorow, a Canadian, fundamentally misunderstand the law. They extrapolate from this sentence "Customer-owned renewable generation shall include a utility-interactive inverter, or other device certified pursuant to paragraph (4)(b) that performs the function of automatically isolating the customer-owned generation equipment from the electric grid in the event the electric grid loses power." that you have to shut off your power if the grid loses power. That's fucking nonsense and a complete misreading of that rule. All it requires if that you have a switch that the power company can use to disconnect your power generating house from the grid so that their linemen don't die when they are doing maintenance on a line.
I invite you to find anywhere in this law or any other Florida state law that says you must be connected to the power grid.
>What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians.
No, what the state has done is required that if you're going to hook up to the grid to supplement your solar installation, you should do it safely. Of course FPL and the other utility companies have lobbied to benefit their bottom line, but spreading misinformation is not beneficial in the fight against them. It muddies the waters so that no one even knows what to fight against.
The same state rules require a breaker-switch on the solar panel feed, disconnecting it from the grid [1]. However, customers are not allowed to use that switch - it's for FPL use only.
So add another switch before this switch, inside the house maybe, so you can switch it on or off. I read (some) of the FPL rules about this and nowhere did it say you cannot do this, it simply says so that the electrical workers can shut it off to the grid from outside, if necessary.
How come solar panels are ubiquitous elsewhere? Is it that e.g. Germany is risking the lives of line workers? Is Florida doing the right thing, or the wrong thing?
You need a similar permit in Germany as well, but the government has pushed hard to make getting a permit as quick and easy as possible. Germany has also invested massive amounts of money to upgrade their grid infrastructure to handle all those solar panels feeding electricity back into the grid. Florida's grid looks completely different and simply isn't built to handle the same number of solar cells.
> How come solar panels are ubiquitous elsewhere? Is it that e.g. Germany is risking the lives of line workers? Is Florida doing the right thing, or the wrong thing?
1. Florida does not provide any subsidies for solar installs (only the Federal 30% tax credit)
2. Florida utilities continue to lobby directly against solar, while sinking money into non-renewable generation technologies (this is changing, as some Florida utilities have thrown in the towel and have begun to plan to install utility scale solar and battery storage)
3. Unlike other states, utility power in Florida is already very inexpensive (~6 cents/kwh) generated from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, so there's less incentive than in other states to move to rooftop solar.
The same regulations exist in Germany also there is no way around them, in the UK if you want to either backfeed or connect a solar (or any other power source ) installation directly to your house mains you have to tick a ton of boxes including giving the power company control over the feed (basically when they shut down the power they also shut you down).
If you have a completely segregated solar installation no one cares.
All directly grid-connected inverters have backfeed protection built-in.
Bigger installations can have automatic switching from the grid to the inverter, much like an uninterruptible power supply. (This is technically possible with smaller installations as well, just uncommon, since it doesn't make a lot of sense)
Not just that, but it also can make the whole grid unstable under certain conditions. Electricity is an EM wave and if everybody could leak the out of the phase energy into the grid it would create interferences and oscillations all over it.
All solar inverters that would meet any kind of standard synchronise to the frequency of the grid. They also cut out when they detect the grid is down.
For battery systems, they can keep going (like a UPS), but require an 'anti-islanding' switch which automatically isolates the system from the grid when it goes into that mode.
At least, this is all the case in in Australia (and Europe I believe), where we have some of the most households feeding the grid from solar in the world (as a percentage of homes).
Exactly, my point too. If you back feed, you usually get like 3.5c for each kwh you produce. The only problem is you generally pay 3x that to purchase when you are required to use electricity (et al. cloudy day). The shut-off thing is just common sense "don't kill they neighbor" doctrine.
I work in the solar industry and can confirm that this is standard safety practice in my state as well. When grid power goes down the inverter is required to shutdown and remain off until a few minutes after normal grid conditions are restored. This is to ensure that the grid equipment is actually de-energized so it can be worked on safely. It's such a ubiquitous policy that all inverters need to be UL Certified to prove that they do this.
Utility companies pull a lot of bullshit, but this policy is actually pretty sound.
If you want to use your PV as backup power, you need to treat is as you would a conventional backup generator and install a manual transfer switch that that isolates disconnects the electrical service as the backup power is engaged. This can nearly double the cost of the solar project, so most people don't do it.
This reddit comment thread [1] explains the issue well.
In short: most households get grid-tied solar power setups with no batteries. If the main grid is off, it creates islands of power where the units can't safely backfeed to the grid. However, you can legally get a battery setup which costs more money and use that when the grid is down.
This seems to be straight from a dystopian movie or book I'm not sure it isn't a joke. Is the "get off my lawn" a thing of the past in US? What business have US gov, or anybody else for that matter, to do with what I do on my property?
There only appears to be a single state (Colorado) where collecting rainwater is strictly regulated,[0] and in most states (31) it is not illegal/no regulation/even encouraged. A further 9 states regulate and encourage rainwater collection, and then Texas provides incentives to do so. The remaining 5 states simply have regulations around rainwater collection.
I think his point was that it's not a legitimate role of government to interfere in the details of your private life inside your own home, especially when they affect no one else.
The main reference is a page giving guidelines for what sort of equipment is required for connecting a solar system to the grid for net metering.
Of course there will be some requirements for that, and most systems that use the grid for "storage" aren't setup to power the house when the grid is down. Thus the system that isn't capable of powering the house without the grid is off when the grid is off.
The question of whether one can operate a house with solar+battery when the grid is down is not really answered by the article.
The stuff about the bi-directional meter is warblegarble.
What the requirement is talking about is operating a grid tie system before FPL upgrades the meter to one that measures in both directions in a way that meets their requirements. This is a sensible requirement, not a ginned up excuse.
You have to design the system correctly so it does not backfeed grid. https://goo.gl/iw8f8w Look at the marketecture from solar edge. You can add in a generator with a automatic transfer switch. They also highlight a scenario with existing PV and a separate grid tie inverter.
Isn't it necessary to have the grid as a backup consumer?
What happens if you over produce solar energy, but don't have the necessary means to dissipate it?
Solar panels get less efficient as voltage increases, hitting zero at a reasonable point. This is very convenient, since all you need is a buck converter in the battery charger and any unused power can be ignored.
The power still exists, of course. It just ends up heating the panels, which are fine with that.
It looks like FPL has a Net Metering program, which a lot of power companies offer. In short, you get credits on your bill for the power that goes back into the grid. It used to be that some power companies actually write you a check.
It's not necessary. If you produce more than you use consistently then a good sized battery bank may be all that you need. A lot of new home appliances are so energy efficient they are starting to see use on sailboats.
Solar cells can produce at load. It's not like panels that aren't connected are melting down, like nuclear.
Readit News
It is dangerous to backfeed the grid -- you may kill the line worker coming to fix a blown transformer or downed line.
In some places a grid connection is considered necessary by the building code. If so, you must use proper equipment.
From what I gathered in reading the three articles there's a state code that mandates that homes must be hooked up to the electrical grid. With out seeing the law or it's history (e.g. when it was mandated), it's difficult to say if it's malice on the part of utilities or just a poorly worded law from 50 years ago.
Electricity is regulated, like water, because it's something people have a hard time living without in modern society. It's perfectly reasonable for the state to mandate that properties have power as a protection for tenants.
It certainly sounds like the power company is doing nothing to accommodate those who would like power by having policies in place for reporting solar hookups to protect linemen or offering bi-directional meters to avoid billing irregularities, but there's no evidence presented to support the assertion that they lobbied to prevent solar.
Oh FPL 100% did that. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election...
With that said, this article is fucking bonkers. It makes almost no sense and as you noted, the sources don't even line up with what they suggest they do. IFLS is bullshit.
Unless I'm missing something, the law doesn't require renewable energy generators to be hooked up to the grid. It just establishes some rules requiring you to safely connect to the grid if you are going to offset your power supply from the utility company with a renewable energy source. That's absolutely reasonable. Beyond that, anyone who has bought a house would also want some guidelines and code inspections to be done on something as complicated as a solar install, which this rule also requires if you are going to get your install certified to be interconnected with the power grid and receive excess generation credits.
https://www.flrules.org/gateway/RuleNo.asp?ID=25-6.065
That has nothing to do with powering you own home from you own solar panels.
When the grid-tie inverter senses the grid is down (it could even be scheduled outage for maintenance) - it stops feeding the grid and only powers the house. When it senses the grid is back it ties to the grid again.
If you need to work on the house, there can be a master switch where the panels come into the inverter (law in Australia) so you can manually turn them off, thus ensuring none of the house has power.
Simple.
You are describing a rational, reasonable regulatory system. :) Sadly, not the one in force.
The title is very misleading as well. Just goes to show that Fox News and their ilk aren't the only ones who do fake news, it's journalism in general.
Also, the title is an outright lie: "Thanks to Lobbying, It's Illegal to Power Your Home with Solar Panels in Florida"
This wikipedia article covers just a little of what Elise Andrew is guilty of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elise_Andrew#Criticism_and_acc...
Links to this site have no business on HN.
Deleted Comment
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
If they can delay the process long enough, it effectively becomes illegal.
A qualified electrician installs a "transfer" switch. It's two breakers tied mechanically so that one position feeds the house with line power, flipping it, the other is the generator.
I have one to keep my refrigerator, well and furnace running.
What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians. And they delay, delay and delay that certification process. Meanwhile, you are paying for the cells and installation and it sits unused indefinitely.
Some local power companies had that inserted into city code.
The law that is consistently referenced in these mostly conspiracy blogs is just a set of rules regarding offsetting your power consumption from a utility company with a renewable energy generator. It requires you to have a switch that they can access. The articles like this one https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/rep-ray-rodrigues.html from Cory Doctorow, a Canadian, fundamentally misunderstand the law. They extrapolate from this sentence "Customer-owned renewable generation shall include a utility-interactive inverter, or other device certified pursuant to paragraph (4)(b) that performs the function of automatically isolating the customer-owned generation equipment from the electric grid in the event the electric grid loses power." that you have to shut off your power if the grid loses power. That's fucking nonsense and a complete misreading of that rule. All it requires if that you have a switch that the power company can use to disconnect your power generating house from the grid so that their linemen don't die when they are doing maintenance on a line.
I invite you to find anywhere in this law or any other Florida state law that says you must be connected to the power grid.
https://www.flrules.org/gateway/RuleNo.asp?ID=25-6.065
>What FPL has done is require that solar installations get signed off by their electricians.
No, what the state has done is required that if you're going to hook up to the grid to supplement your solar installation, you should do it safely. Of course FPL and the other utility companies have lobbied to benefit their bottom line, but spreading misinformation is not beneficial in the fight against them. It muddies the waters so that no one even knows what to fight against.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-18/florida-you-cant-us...
1. Florida does not provide any subsidies for solar installs (only the Federal 30% tax credit)
2. Florida utilities continue to lobby directly against solar, while sinking money into non-renewable generation technologies (this is changing, as some Florida utilities have thrown in the towel and have begun to plan to install utility scale solar and battery storage)
3. Unlike other states, utility power in Florida is already very inexpensive (~6 cents/kwh) generated from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, so there's less incentive than in other states to move to rooftop solar.
Source: Florida resident
(a) If the grid goes down, your solar also is deactivated
(b) If the grid goes down, your house is powered separately by solar, but disconnected from the grid.
In Germany the second is more common, while in parts of Florida, the first is required.
If you have a completely segregated solar installation no one cares.
Bigger installations can have automatic switching from the grid to the inverter, much like an uninterruptible power supply. (This is technically possible with smaller installations as well, just uncommon, since it doesn't make a lot of sense)
For battery systems, they can keep going (like a UPS), but require an 'anti-islanding' switch which automatically isolates the system from the grid when it goes into that mode.
At least, this is all the case in in Australia (and Europe I believe), where we have some of the most households feeding the grid from solar in the world (as a percentage of homes).
Deleted Comment
Also you can run the system in autonomous mode, no risk at all for worker, even it's a lie.
Dead Comment
Utility companies pull a lot of bullshit, but this policy is actually pretty sound.
If you want to use your PV as backup power, you need to treat is as you would a conventional backup generator and install a manual transfer switch that that isolates disconnects the electrical service as the backup power is engaged. This can nearly double the cost of the solar project, so most people don't do it.
In short: most households get grid-tied solar power setups with no batteries. If the main grid is off, it creates islands of power where the units can't safely backfeed to the grid. However, you can legally get a battery setup which costs more money and use that when the grid is down.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/70oz3k/due_to_e...
[0]https://energy.gov/eere/femp/rainwater-harvesting-regulation...
Deleted Comment
Of course there will be some requirements for that, and most systems that use the grid for "storage" aren't setup to power the house when the grid is down. Thus the system that isn't capable of powering the house without the grid is off when the grid is off.
The question of whether one can operate a house with solar+battery when the grid is down is not really answered by the article.
What the requirement is talking about is operating a grid tie system before FPL upgrades the meter to one that measures in both directions in a way that meets their requirements. This is a sensible requirement, not a ginned up excuse.
(all the quotes are coming from a linked grid interconnection guideline https://www.fpl.com/clean-energy/net-metering/guidelines.htm... )
I wonder if there is actually any legal requirement to have a grid interconnection. The article isn't real convincing.
The power still exists, of course. It just ends up heating the panels, which are fine with that.
https://www.fpl.com/clean-energy/net-metering.html
Solar cells can produce at load. It's not like panels that aren't connected are melting down, like nuclear.