Here’s a hypothetical situation. You decide to build your own steam generator plant and connect it to the electric grid. No matter where you live, you’d probably have to meet a ton of requirements from whoever controls your electric power, almost surely backed by your government. Yet, according to a recent post by [Bert], a version of this is going on in Europe and, probably, in many more places: unregulated solar power inverters driving the grid.
If you have just a few solar panels hanging around, that probably isn’t a problem. But there are a sizeable number of panels feeding power — and that number seems to grow daily — having control of the inverters could potentially allow you to limit the grid’s capacity or — if the inverters allowed it — possibly take the grid down by feeding power incorrectly back into the grid.
According to [Burt], a small number of companies control most of the inverters in his country — the Netherlands — and there is virtually no regulation about how they operate. While we don’t think he’s suggesting they would act maliciously, you don’t have to search the news very much to find cases where companies have been hacked or made a mistake that caused major impacts to important systems.
Apparently, inverters in the Netherlands do have to meet certain technical standards, but the post since that’s widely unenforced. But the real point is that the companies managing the switches are not regulated or managed. [Bert] thinks that EU-wide legislation is needed to forestall some future disaster.
You might think this isn’t a realistic scenario, but you just have to think about Crowdstrike to realize it could happen. Or other major network outages. We aren’t usually fans of more regulation, but [Burt] makes some interesting points. What do you think?
Thanks for the heads-up.
I’ve put some PV on my roof, with an inverter. Of course, I’ve yet refused to install any app. It seems to be quietly doing its job without any connectivity (unless it has hacked some neighbour’s wifi’s password). Now the quest begins to find out whether it can be reverse-engineered.
I think regulators should force those companies to agree on standardized, open protocols. Otherwise, the temptation to sell the data to some broker is just… too high.
All my stuff is second hand older non-connected.
I can put one inverter onto wifi and monitor it but it’s firewalled off the internet as a whole.
Incidentally a local pub just lost the ability to forward food orders from the bar to the kitchen because of an internet outage. Why are people designing kit that needs a central server for this???
@abjq said: “Incidentally a local pub just lost the ability to forward food orders from the bar to the kitchen because of an internet outage.”
If the edge router is configured to allow traffic between hosts on the local LAN, why would that fail if the WAN connection to the Internet fails? Maybe for security purposes, the router is configured to block all traffic between hosts on the local LAN? My edge router has the ability to turn traffic between LAN hosts on or off. Another option is to simply set up a static route between the bar and the kitchen hosts through the router, and turn off all other traffic between hosts on the LAN. Yet another option is to put the bar and the kitchen on their own VLAN? What you describe sounds like a configuration problem. If both the bar and kitchen hosts are connected to the LAN switch on the edge router, and they are allowed to connect (both their MAC addresses are in the ARP/RARP table), the failure of the Internet connection on the router’s WAN port should have no affect on traffic between the bar and kitchen LAN hosts. The safest configuration will only allow certain hosts to communicate between each other on the LAN, and block all other traffick between any other hosts on the LAN, like mobile phones carried in to the bar by random patrons. Traffick between random visiting bar patrons will have to go over the WAN port to/from the Internet as usual.
Whoops; traffick > traffic. Is there no spell-checker on the Hackaday comment system?
There’s none even for the articles.
The problem is ‘convenience’. As soon as any control from the outside is active your system is vulnerable. That’s why my home is ‘unsmart’ (this needs a better word).
There is monitoring and alerts in place but one has to walk up to the physical appliance to make changes to it’s behaviour.
I call that “resilient”.
I agree, but there are different levels of vulnerability. If I run my own little smart home “cloud” in my basement and open it up carefully so I can access it from my smartphone through proper authentication, yes someone might get around the authentication somehow, but it is not very likely and he has to do some effort for each individual he wants to hack. If I instead use the cloud of some big manufacturer, someone just have to hack that cloud to gain control over everything connected to it. Hopefully the manufacturer invests more effort in securing the cloud than I can do it at home, but I strongly believe that this does not outweigh the increased thread in most cases.
So this presents us already a solution to this problem: We must not use manufacturer cloud systems to access our devices. Check before buying any connected device whether it can be run without the cloud, and look for alternatives if you cannot or if the restrictions are too big.
This!
“I bought company X’s whole solution and it all works through their cloud. It’s so convenient and I didn’t have to know anything!”
Not impressed but if any of those devices are hackable come see me when you are throwing them out in a couple years because the company discontinues support.
“I don’t connect anything to any network because security and curmudgery!”
OK Boomer, not impressed. Are you preparing for the arrival of the Cylons?
“I know how to forward a port in my router and securely configure ssh and/or a decent VPN server”
Now that’s what I’m talking about!
Cylons are not necessary, when you have the Singularity coming!
Don’t insult the Cylons!
You don’t want them to target your location first!
Once you’ve connected it to the internet there is no such thing as authentication to a bad actor manufacturer. There are any number of ways that authentication could be backdoored by the original company. Yes its probably safe from your neighbors kid, but that wasn’t the point of the article.
‘SensibleHome’ is beautiful. Especially with the multiple denotions of sensible.
‘Resilience’ is a great word to put into the tagline of a project.
Thanks for the input. =)
That’s great for small users but once you’re into the grid scale automation is a must. You need some sort of networked control or your solar farm quickly runs into trouble.
Ideally your SCADA network is correctly isolated but we now that’s jot always the case & you’re one malicious thumb drive away from a bad time.
*know, not.
Thanks autocorrect
Before the internet this would have been accomplished with on-premise computers and a dialup line.
Yah, I know, that sounds way out of date. But how much bandwidth do you really need to tell an inverter to turn on or off?
Ok, you could probably accomplish the same with a good securely encrypted connection over the internet. But large energy companies have been notorious about corner/cost-cutting almost guaranteeing that someone will @#$% that up. Why hasn’t your ssl suite been updates since 1998? Well.. we laid off the last guy who even knew what that was a long time ago because we couldn’t measure any profit that he generated…
No one is war-dialing anymore are they?
(Engineer Scott picking up computer mouse)…”Computer!…Computer ? Hello computer ?…..a keyboard….how quaint “
A neighbor had his new house wired for smart control of appliances, lights, etc. When one of his 2-way hallway light switches (remote DC control of a very cheap triac) went bad he asked me to fix it, but the custom switch housing was cramped, very cheaply made, and the manufacturer had already gone out of business. I ended up repairing it with conventional switches for him. Not long afterward a local contractor offered to set me up in business doing “smart homes”. I gave him all the reasons why I thought they were a bad idea (greater opportunity for component failure, flaky vendors, custom controllers and software, vulnerability to lightning strikes and line surges, redundant wiring, etc) and turned him down even though I probably could have made good money at it … at least before the lawsuits put me out of business.
Smarter.
The best thing politicians do is doing nothing.
Laws and regulations are not for the better, and usually the only real result from it is more cost.
That said, the solution lies in the motivation to more companies fill that market, augmenting the options and making it hard to do big hits, but the government tend to create big solid blocks with it’s partners, creating the problem to later on try to solve with laws.
Counter-example: phone chargers.
Do you remember when every company has its own adapter, which leads to multiples junk piles of unused bricks and cable ?
If not the EU, who would have decided on one fits all solution ?
Regulations and laws are costy ? Compare when a monopoly licences its products for others to have access to its ecosystem.
Ah yes the EUs regulation permanently locking technology at a set level completely destroying the incentive to advance technology. What brilliant heros the EU are for that decision. USB-C the perfect standard known for it’s clear easy implementation. I’m not even an apple fan boy but the cable they were providing was objectively the better cable.
The only reason we don’t have near free nuclear energy in every home is the government making regulation so expensive that all the other objectively worse forms of energy become cheaper. They are not cheaper they are just artificially propped up as such by the government. The government has forced us to use a less environmentally friendly and more expensive system for decades now, truly they are our saviors.
Yeah, a 10 gigabit charge port cable has really hurt our prosperity.
“The best thing politicians do is doing nothing.
Laws and regulations are not for the better, and usually the only real result from it is more cost.”
My city of 266 million people is one of many cities getting it’s water from a lake that is fed by a river which has caught fire multiple times thus leading to the original creation of the EPA.
I don’t think it should be considered impolite to tell anti-regulation people such as yourself to e4t sh1t & d13 since you basically want to make us drink it.
A city with a population of 266 million people?
Which city is that?
Wow! Yah, not quite. I meant 255 thousand. Time for more coffee.
266k
I won’t say the EPA hasn’t done some good things, but it put the camel’s nose under the tent and they can regulate virtually everything. Now we have to use almost unusable spouts on gasoline cans that cause way more spillage than whatever they are supposed to prevent. And that’s just the start of their BS.
There is a right amount of regulation.
Let them pass new ones, just as fast as they repeal old ones.
Perhaps 2 repeals for each new, until things get to a balance.
Interesting proposal. Curbing over-regulation through regulation regulation. It would be a good case study for complexity theory.
The EPA didn’t specify how portable gas cans manufacturers implement the rules; some thought it’d be better to have an engineer monkey design the spout than put real effort into it. Others did an amazing job. It’s a free market; buy the ones that work well.
Similar to the automotive safety rules; some car manufacturers decided to get cute with the 3 pt seat belts and added a stupid motor. The simple manual 3 pt belts available in (nearly?) all modern cars meet the regs and work just fine.
The difference is that solar PV is expected to misbehave in a massive way anyways. Hundreds and thousands of Megawatts can fade in or out in a matter of minutes, repeatedly, with clouds and sunset/sunrise. The grid-tie inverters have no “inertia”, so they don’t contribute to the frequency stability of the grid at all, and they can switch off in milliseconds en-mass for any disturbance. The regulators just subsidized everyone to put solar PV on the grid, with priority access over everything else by law, and told the power utilities to deal with it.
The end result was power quality issues, the “duck curve”, high ramping costs and indeed a growing risk of cascade failure type of situations – but that’s just the new normal. With this sort of setup, any malicious actor can only do as much harm as it’s already doing to the grids.
That’s not necessarily true. Newer (micro) inverters exist that are “grid-forming”. These can in fact act as “inertia” in the grid. Older, simpler, inverters could not do that. They would just shut off, potentially all at once, when the grid frequency would go out of spec.
Wonderful example of misconceptions. The “grid” isn’t a person. The power utilities aren’t either. Your inverter is doing a basic thing and only one: produce current with the same phase as the “grid” (respectively: stop producing current when there’s no grid).
The “utilities” as you mention are doing the exact same thing. If any producer misbehave, they have the obligation to disrupt/disconnect it from the grid (although, the higher the current, the higher the disruption, the higher the speed of reaction). Inverter are simply this, automated, reacting in a millisecond time frame while it takes seconds for the larger producer. They can stop your inverter in a 1/10s by stopping delivery you with current. They can “speed” up the grid by reducing the phase or inversely. Honestly, if all elements in the grid were so easy to control, it would be so much stable.
“The “grid” isn’t a person. The power utilities aren’t either.”
Ah! but in the USA if the power utility is a corporation, it is a person!
And nobody said so.
Define “misbehave”. Utilities have to tolerate worse behavior from VREs because of right-of-way laws put in place by politics. Before these laws, utilities outright refused to connect you for backfeeding the grid, or offered you such poor terms and conditions that few would.
That’s not how it works. Your PV inverter is at all times trying to advance the grid phase as much as it can, because that’s how it puts out power. If it did exactly the same phase, there would be no net flow of power towards the grid and you wouldn’t be getting paid your net metering and/or subsidies.
The only purpose of the inverter is to push as much power out as it can, regardless of what the grid is doing, except when the grid goes down entirely. They could be doing all sorts of clever stuff, like emulating a spinning generator, but they won’t because that doesn’t maximize the payoff. The utilities have little to no control over that, because they don’t own your PV system.
For example, on a cloudy day, your inverter could be limiting its ramping rate to play nice with the grid, so it would only increase power at X Watts per second and not cause big transients when the clouds roll overhead.
However, that would cut your production by a significant margin, some tens of percents, so the owner of the system is unlikely to use that feature unless forced to – and nobody does.
And I always thought that it put power out, by having a slightly higher voltage, but staying in phase.
How misguided I was.
Actually, that’s the same thing: on the screw terminals there is only one voltage, and the inverter pushes current against that voltage. You could say it tries to raise the voltage faster than the grid, which is “trying to increase the voltage” in time domain and “pushing the phase” in frequency domain, differences in waveform in time domain are harmonics in frequency domain.
(The decreasing part of the waveform is not to be seen as lowering the voltage by the inverter, but a less hard push to keep it up. It helps to think about what any change in time/frequency domain would look like in frequency/time domain.)
[Matthias]
What if the inverter sensed bad harmonics on the grid, caused by switching power supplies, and only pushed power during each phase to compensate for the non-sinusodal portions?
I meant “during the portion of each phase”!
Pretty risky, with only a little bit of delay you end up amplifying them. And you have to be fast, so you can stop compensating when the source of the harmonics is switched off. Then you have to comply with the distortion limits of the grid, since technically you emit harmonics as well as the dirty power supply you try to compensate (and how do you differenciate between inbound and outbound harmonics? What about reflections of the compensating harmonics?).
In the end it is probably easier to look for the worst harmonics and put a notch filter on these frequencies. Perhaps you can regain some energy from the damping part of that filter?
[Matthias]
I like your response!
Thanks!
Since when is amplitude changing either phase and/or frequency?
That makes no sense.
Pushing the amplitude means reaching the “right” value earlier, thus pushing the phase. Constantly pushing the phase is the local variant of pushing the frequency on a longer timescale. It is more obvious for a synchronous motor/generator, but the (electrical part of the) math is the same for an inverter.
The inverter matches the grid voltage, so when the phase difference to the grid is zero then no current flows. No difference in voltage, no current. When the inverter starts to push the phase forwards, the waveforms are no longer overlapping exactly and a voltage difference appears, which drives current towards the grid.
This mimics what a conventional spinning generator does. The voltage is kept constant while the speed of the generator is adjusted up to push power out towards the grid. All the generators try to speed up the grid by pushing the phase forwards, while the loads all drag the phase backwards, so when the system is in balance the frequency stays constant.
The inverter could push power by matching the phase and increasing the voltage amplitude at the peak, but then multiple inverters would one-up each other by forcing the voltage higher and higher and that would push the local grid voltage off-specs and break something.
This is complete rubbish, Mr Dude. Sorry, but I have to call this out.
The inverter only makes a difference when it’s pushing out more voltage.
This has to happen in phase (otherwise on the part of the sine wave that’s falling, it’s below the mains voltage, and sucking in current).
That’s a myth. Inverter are the best device you could put in a grid. They follow the grid’s phase (not amplitude) and in case the current consumed is too low, they’ll just stop immediately (it’s analog, not numeric, there isn’t any algorithm here that could be hacked). That because, for the inverter to generate an AC waveform, it has to switch inductors that are charged to let them release their current in the grid. If the grid isn’t able to drain the current (more supply than demand), physically, the voltage difference on the inductor when switched on will be too low for the current to drain into the (grid) sink. So the transistors won’t switch them and miss that period. The same is done period by period until the (grid) sink can drain the current.
It’s purely physical behavior, not an algorithm that can be hacked or controlled from outside. The only limitation is to detect if the voltage difference on the output line is in range to avoid sinking current in a utility worker. That’s a main safety switch that’ll disable the output if the voltage difference on the output doesn’t oscillate around the expected voltage. That’s a pure analog comparator too.
This behavior is required to get certification, and it’s so common that it’s not written on the manual anymore (all inverters do that, no one would sell one that doesn’t, since that couldn’t be plugged on the grid).
From the power utility point of view, inverter are the best device to manage, unlike a power supply that requires powering and sync’ing in tens of seconds, because, you don’t have to do anything ACTIVE to manage them. It’s all done magically.
For the point of producing and selling PV power, no they don’t. They push the phase ahead to push as much power as they possibly can, because that’s what they’re paid and made to do. If there’s ever a time when the inverters are the majority power source – perhaps because of a cut transmission line – they can easily run off and trip the local grid.
Inverters could be used to do all sorts of neat stuff, but that’s just theory. In reality they’re used in a really dumb way, because it maximizes the amount of subsidies coming your way.
It’s not entirely correct to say that the solar inverters are unregulated – they’re positively regulated. There’s rules in place that power utilities have to accept the connection and the power.
Otherwise they would have placed their own regulations and set their own prices to limit the installation of solar PV to a more manageable level.
Investing in solar energy requires money and often households choose equipment, normally it must meet the prescribed standards of foreign countries, but they are also guided by the financial aspect of the investment.
It is interesting that equipment manufactured in China is the most common choice when building a solar power plant, at least in my country. The mobile application is not available through official App stores, but is distributed as a downloadable app package without insight into the application code.
Yeah having you control your home installation through a connection to the manufacturer rather than restricting the whole thing to LAN access by default is definitely a disaster waiting to happen. Frustrating, because this seems like exactly the sort of problem that regulators are terrible at understanding, let alone fixing.
You don’t have to have your solar system connected to the manufacturer’s site.
Mine system isn’t. I can check its status or change its settings on a local webpage that is only accessible inside my home network.
Most solar systems (mine included) have an option to connect them to the manufacturer’s servers. You don’t have to use it. Deactivate it. It does you no good.
Blacklist the inverter at the router.
Better yet, Wireshark. Reboot that solar system.
Don’t take their word for it.
Log traffic from MAC address/wireless node.
If you suspect them of being sneaky bastards, you have to treat them like sneaky bastards.
[Bert] Hubert becomes [Burt] in the article, can you please fix that?
As a Chinese battery company, Tenpower also use the solar energy
Grid coupled solar is a disaster. A home should either be self sufficient or dependent on the grid (with optional auxiliary backup power). Delivering back to the grid at some time and taking at other times puts unnecessary strain on the grid and requires communication. Communication with the grid has safety and privacy implications. Hackers can see who is home by monitoring power consumption and sell that data to thieves who break into homes when the owners are away. Hackers could potentially cause power outages or even fires if they exploit bugs in inverter firmware. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
Chinese inverters enjoy a lion’s share of the domestic 3KW to 10KW home inverter market. Their mobile apps are also easy to use and straightforward. Needless to say, their servers are also, without a doubt located in China.
You would be kidding yourself if you think there is no remote kill switch.
You would also be kidding yourself if you think China would use it without a very good reason. Commerce has made that country and they respect it (i believe)
Absolutely my thoughts. Most govs prevented Huawei equipment from being installed on telecoms but no problem with their inverters being used on millions, potentially billions of houses and businesses!
The governments that suspected China had unfindable root hidden in Huawei chips knew it was possible because they have unfindable root in Qualcomm chips.
They have to be beaten over the head, even when their own spooks are telling them things.
inverters programmed to crash the grid?
Not unpossible, but not as easy as it might sound.
Breaker, Pole transformer hysteresis, same at substation, ratios.
10kw of solar is about 30 meters^2/b/b/b/b/b/b/b/bsquare yards.
An inverter built for that is going to have that much power for a few minutes, every sunny day.
Minus the safety factor and dirt factor, of course.
Main thing I’d expect…a shitload of inverter fires.
A few solar heavy substations ‘WTF…nope’ing out.
No doubt there’s at least a back door, if not a ready made kill switch in these internet enabled smart inverters.
It also begs the question about what the grid companies would do if they become too reliant on the energy harvested from the general public, in the event of say, some country trying to block out the sun. Not to mention what happens when people produce too much.
I assume there’s only so hard your home solar can try to drag the grid around before it pops a main breaker – whether that is good enough protection I am not sure, in a large scale attack probably not.
Exactly the reason I do not have mine connected to the internet.
Nearly all solar inverters can be read out/controlled locally using a RS485 interface.
Can anyone explain any possible advantage for controlling a home solar installation (at all), locally or remotely? What exactly is there to do? Turn off individual inverters – why?
My parents have a 15ish year old installation, the most cloud connectivity it had was broadcasting generation stats to somebody else’s computer who ultimately stopped paying their hosting bills after a couple of years. Fortunately the inverter gateway protocol has been sufficiently reverse engineered so you can capture your own stats.
As for safety in this ‘uncontrolled’ system, if the grid goes down the inverters are forced off. They only run when there’s a stable source to sync to. Then there’s the big manual red switch should you wish to use it.
“Turn off individual inverters – why?”
To prevent overloading of the grid. If there is an imbalance in supply and demand there is a problem. While inverters do check the mains voltage and stop delivering if the voltage gets too high this may not be sufficient. Shutting down or reducing power output of inverters at peak supply of solar is needed to maintain a stable grid.
Alternatively you can pay people to consume power. This really does happen. This shows the insanity of it all. There is no economical grid-level energy storage and you can only control loads and supply to a degree.
Not all grid-storage is battery, and even that is progressing.
Inverted don’t check voltage amplitude, they check phase. If there’s too many inverters on a system (too much supply), the current will phase out and the inverter will stop until the next period. That’s because to ‘”invert” a DC source to an AC sink, you have to release the current stored in your inductors in the sink, creating a phase shift in the current. If the phase shift is too high, the inverted can’t do that anymore, they just prevent the transistor to switch, preventing the inductor to charge more and, in turns, prevent the solar source to fill them more. No current will come from the solar panels, and that’s it, no one is harmed. As soon as the sink drains the current, the transistors can switch again and they’ll restart the cycle.
There is no such thing as amplitude monitoring (except for explaining to a non engineer), that would be impossible since the grid amplitude is different everywhere depending on the line length, the load, and so on. The only thing is the current, if it can flow in one direction or another. Inverter just make sure it flows, amplitude will adapt analogically to let it flow.
Therein lies the problem with mass solar rollouts (where they reach the capacity when operating fully of a ‘regular’ power plant). They can be all on and too much power is generated, spot prices go negative. The regular plants can wind back so much but can’t completely disconnect as they are (attempting to) provide the stable 50/60 Hz.
It’s the same problem with wind, when the wind blows, spot price plummets and the wind farm operators get little to nothing for their power (unless they’re on a fishy government minimum-price contract).
Until mass grid storage somehow becomes a usable reality, these pseudo-random renewables are only causing instabilites.
Still doesn’t explain why a home user would want somebody turning off their panels remotely. For large solar farms it could reasonably be done although they won’t be happy about missing out on their income whilst disconnected.
“Can anyone explain any possible advantage for controlling a home solar installation (at all), locally or remotely? ”
“To prevent overloading of the grid.”
A HOME installation?
So.. how’s that work? Is the power company calling you up and saying “We have too much supply right now, can you turn down yours a bit” Then you bring up your app and do so?
Sure, makes sense for a large solar farm. That’s not going to happen with the millions of individual homes. Collectively might those millions of homes provide enough to cause a problem?
Probably.
That’s a good reason to be investing in grid storage solutions YESTERDAY and trying to actually be prepared as more and more home solar installations come online. It is not an excuse to stubbornly hold on to polluting 20th century tech forever.
If you are in the US… FFS vote Blue!
Vote Vermin Supreme.
Vote Pony party.
Everybody gets a pony.
A personal identification pony (have it with you at all times).
They will take all American’s guns, and give us better guns!
Vermin Supreme!
Mods: He ^ started it…Advocating for a loony party.
Down here in Brazil you cannot connect anything to the grid that is not run thru the state-owned energy controllers. Inverters, panels and meters have to be pre-approved. Works like a charm.
Firstly, critical systems should not be connected to the internet. Secondly, a distributed system like this should have been remotely controlled using something like broadcasting encrypted commands of slow pulses through the grid itself that would go otherwise unnoticed by other equipment. This would keep the power system isolated from the internet and it would be trivial to detect unauthorized signals. Any data that needed to be returned could have been a small encrypted radio that is only sent upon request.
It is possible to secure an internet connected system but it’s a lot of work which is expensive and the chosen solution here was optimized for cost first and security second.
Oh, Yay! More pulses on the unshielded power lines AKA RF interference.
I don’t care if a shielded copper wire or fiber optic cable has to be ran along with every power line thus increasing the price a bit. It’s not like those things cost much in comparison to the power line itself. Data over power lines is awful.
Sandworm by Andy Greenberg goes into detail about the vulnerabilities remote controlled PLC on an internet facing network pose. It is an interesting and slightly scary read.
My biggest takeaway from it on my first read through was that there need to be protocols in place for when an attack on major infrastructure happens. Simple things like having “dumb” analog controllers as backups. The kind that a person needs to have physical access to in order to “hack”. Yes they’re less efficient and are a bit slow on the load balancing side of the house, but a team of state sponsored jerks in a foreign country won’t knock out your power during the Super Bowl or on the coldest night of the winter season.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41436213-sandworm
If i ever get the chance to host my own energy production, be it trough solar or some mini wind turbine, it will be an off-grid solution with a bunch of batteries in the basement. This system will only grab grid power when the battery level drops below, say, 20%. Otherwise i will enjoy my own power. Maybe if i overproduce i will pass some down to the grid, but i know that i will have power even when the grid fails.
The rules in this area (Xcel energy – Colorado USA) Require ALL solar generated power be fed to the grid by an independent meter. They credit your account to offset the amount your home’s meter draws.
I don’t have the system, and my neighbor doesn’t want me checking out how badly he is being screwed by the power company, so I’m not sure if he gets generated cost for his solar, Time of Day pricing, or fees credited. (My fees are slightly more than the power I use).
With power outages between a few seconds and a few hours several times a year, I think a whole house UPS that is solar charged is what I want. Let it take over during peak pricing on a normal day and have a generator backup if the batteries get low in a power out situation.
I wouldn’t mind dumping a little extra power, when the sun is shining, the batteries are full, and the home needs are all met. Having a central control for a grid tie inverter seems fine by me. It would even be small, and hopefully cheap.
Many areas ( like here and WA DC ) have renewable power mandates. The power company really wants to count your solar generation towards there mandated generation capability. In Washington DC they heavily subsidize Home solar installation, under the contractual agreement that you will keep it in service for 6 (?) years.
Don’t get me started on the financing people get that massively drives up the cost of solar.
-G.
Sounds like Burt is already willing and accepting of the inevitability of our robot overlords.
This is no more a problem than it is as a feature of distributed systems.
Almost all the arguments can be equally applied the other way. Governments and NGO agencies are just as susceptible and fill the news as much as commercial entities. And if you think state actors aren’t malicious to someone you haven’t been paying attention to world events for the last century.
OK. In California, the buyer of residential PV energy is the grid operator, CAISO. They don’t buy from the individual homeowner but from an entity known as an “energy aggregator”. This entity is a companion business to the company that performed the installation. That installation is required to be fully permitted. The permitting process for the installation isn’t just county/municipal construction permits, but energy engineering vetted by CAISO and the local utility. “Random” installations are NOT allowed to interconnect to the grid. The question becomes is there any followup to assure the installation actually performs per the vetting engineering.
This whole procedure is called net metering. The aggregator, when selling to the grid/utility sells at a rate the utility doesn’t like… AND they sell to the home/PV equipment owner (you paid for the gear, the install and own the roof it’s on) at a lower rate.
This makes no sense you cry!
You’re right but it’s how net metering works and why the claim that unregulated PV provisioning is occurring. It’s heavily regulated and happening in ways that are designed to obscure what’s really going on.
Do they work out your bill with a Caiso Calculator? (sorry)
The follow up happens when there is a power outage and they find you feeding power out.
At the end of the day everything else is just bean counting, you’re feeding power to your neighbor during sunny day. And running your own AC (through both meters).
Bootleg solar to offset is like a lot of things. You can get away with it, until you don’t.
Main reason not to do it, possibility of energizing local power grid during outage. Killing someone. Have to be a 2 big stupid inverters on same circuit, both see other and say ‘everything is fine’ (in Mandarin).
Rule also applies:
Never break more than one law at a time.
Cop’s 6th sense goes all tingly when you’re breaking 4 or 5 laws at once…They’re coming by air.
One law broken at all times is bad. No wiggle room on road.
I was so dissatisfied with my inverter’s logging and cloud capabilities that i wrote my own backend for it, which also allows me to control devices using code that i completely understand and can modify as needed:
https://github.com/judasgutenberg/Esp8266_RemoteControl
Seriously? Not a single mention of https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/home-energy-system-gives-researcher-control-of-virtual-power-plant/
GivEnergy screwed up and used a weak RSA-512 key that can be factored for $70
It is [Bert]. Please correct the spelling. Give the researcher the respect he deserves.
I corrected the spell checker on the first change at the top, but missed it on the bottom one. Fixed now, though.
naw shiet. The issue is that you cannot legally put solar on your home without having it grid connected in most areas. They are literally forcing you to participate and not be independent. IMO if you want some solar, the system should be separate from the grid entirely. It’s not an “all or nothing” approach either. The easiest offset would be to run small a/c units directly from solar during the hottest (sunniest) parts of the day. Thus eliminating a lot of power usage from your bill, not grid connecting, saving tons of cost, and no need for risk. Energy is energy no matter how you store it. Cold air is our single largest expense when it comes to grid power. ie: running your entire house is too expensive, connecting to grid is troublesome at best, pick one appliance to offset, the setup then becomes affordable to piecemeal. nearly 200 bucks a month is what running a/c alone off solar could save people in my area with small homes, just needs to be enough to keep the animals alive and the place dry during the work day.