Approval free alternate energy tie ins ?? 2

[2dye4]

Why can't you go to your home improvement store and buy an alt energy system and use it to offset your homes power usage.

The utilities don't like it that's why.
The main reason cited is line worker safety from back feeding the grid. If that is the only drawback I have the solution.

Why cannot the utility place a Power line carrier signal on their lines that travel through the grid and find their way to the utility intertie inverter that refuses to supply power without seeing it.

Presto. If a grid source breaks the alt sources go down automatically as a result of loss of the carrier signal.

This should not be a serious technological problem and it would allow off the shelf purchases of Alt energy systems to be purchased and tied into the grid for lowering utility bills.

When the consumer can see it and touch it and take it home and use it there would be much higher uptake of alt energy systems and the savings would mount silently.

Any reason this wouldn't work.

 

[davidbeach]

2dye4, The issue has nothing what so ever to do with whether or not you can generate your own power. Nobody cares. It is when you want a connection such that your source is running in parallel with the utility and could back feed into the utility that the utility becomes concerned. Install your what ever, use it to charge a set of batteries. Provide a charger connected to the utility that will charge to a lower voltage than your alternate source. Power your load via an inverter connected to the batteries. No problem. Just don't have a means of supplying power back to the utility. If you do have a means of supplying power back to the utility you will have to play by their rules.

 

[2dye4]

Davidbeach

Ok that i can live with. I have been told that utilities would not let me install an augmentation system without their approval and i simply think they have no right to prevent me from doing so as long as it is incapable of backfeeding.

As far as grid tie systems i believe that it is technically feasible to create a standard for tie in inverter operation that would negate the need for utility approval, allowing more people to go green. I don't understand many of the arguments against this relating to power quality for other customers as there is no problem with a nearly infinite variety of loads that can produce severe harmonics and high current draws and the grid is mostly a linear system so that pulling or pushing disturbances have identical effects on other customers ( aside from sign difference ).
My initial post was to query methods for doing this but it quickly rattled too many cages for this thread to be productive.

Thanks all

 

[itsmoked]

Hmmm Are we reading the same thread?

I think your question was answered both technically and, as a free bonus, politically quite well...

1) Certainly you can do whatever you want within the NEC codes and the more nefarious air quality dictatorships to power your own property. As long as you don't backfeed the utilities. (at this time)

2) Sending a communications signal down every power line in the US to signal an occasional backfeeder's equipment is unnecessary for the results you seek.

3) Yes, a standard national-political and technical inverter front-end for safe backfeeding would go a long way in making smaller solar backfeeders more accessible.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com