[adolph]

The short version: most consumer and business solar panels are centrally managed by a handful of companies, mostly from countries outside of Europe. In the Netherlands alone, these solar panels generate an output equivalent to at least 25 medium sized nuclear power plants. There are almost no rules or laws in Europe governing these central administrators. . . . The same thing goes for heat pumps, home batteries, and EV charging points.

Seems to me that this is very similar to the situation with IoT only with higher stakes. I appreciate this article's presentation of inverter and grid trust.

Beyond trusting customer inverters to do the right thing, I wonder if there is a method for safing a grid at the hardware level. Naive question: could there be a grid provider device that prevents overcurrent or incorrectly clocked cycles?

[kwhitefoot]

The utility company fuse between the property and the 240 V distribution system should prevent overcurrent. If the frequency or phase of the inverter is wrong the inverter might die first unless the network is already down.

There isn't really any practical way to prevent overvoltage though. So a rogue controller in charge of all the solar systems in a street might be able to do quite a lot of damage to consumer devices.

A problem from the utility point of view is that they can no longer guarantee that the 240 V side of the distribution system is safe to work on just by tripping a breaker on either side of the distribution transformer. So all work on the 240 V distribution system has to be done with the assumption that the system is live.

Eventually regulations will be updated, if necessary, to deal with large numbers of solar installations on domestic buildings.

[cesarb]

> The utility company fuse between the property and the 240 V distribution system should prevent overcurrent. If the frequency or phase of the inverter is wrong the inverter might die first unless the network is already down.

To put it more simply: if the phase is wrong, the effect is the same as a short circuit, which fuses and circuit breakers protect against. If the frequency is wrong, the phase will become wrong after a number of cycles.

> There isn't really any practical way to prevent overvoltage though. So a rogue controller in charge of all the solar systems in a street might be able to do quite a lot of damage to consumer devices.

There is, it's called a surge protector or surge protective device (SPD). It converts any overvoltage above a certain level into a short to ground, which then trips the fuse or circuit breaker. It's often used as a protection against lightning-induced currents.

> A problem from the utility point of view is that they can no longer guarantee that the 240 V side of the distribution system is safe to work on just by tripping a breaker on either side of the distribution transformer. So all work on the 240 V distribution system has to be done with the assumption that the system is live.

From what I've seen, the utility workers usually ground the wiring when working on it (they have a special-purpose device for that). Once it's safely connected to ground, it's no longer live.

[kwhitefoot]

A surge protector dimensioned for protection against lightning induced overvoltages will probably not trip at the level of overvoltage that could be produced by an ordinary inverter.