[jwitchel]

There is near zero actual risk. These systems have been around for a long time and are widely deployed in Europe.

Circuit breakers have been around for a century and work great. You plug something in that pushes or pulls too much current and pop - disconnect.

So while they are absolutely safe, there's huge FUD coming from the utilities who lose revenue AND PROFIT they were getting from you with each system.

Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, Florida Power & Light (FPL), Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), Consolidated Edison (ConEd) are all for profit monopolies.

Asking them if it's safe is like asking Microsoft if you should switch away from Word. It does not matter the reasoning, the answer was always going to be the same.

[rkangel]

I believe that they're safe, but I don't understand how.

My circuit breaker is specced to be a bit lower than the capability of the downstream wiring. For the sake of argument let's say that the breaker is 16A and the circuit wiring is good for 20A.

Now the panel injects 8A into the circuit and suddenly I can pull 24A (16 from the circuit plus 8 from the panel), but that's through wiring that's only rated for 20A.

Does it rely on the fact that the actual amount of current from the panel is small (but continuous) and so we're likely to not push anything over the line?

[mixdup]

How do these plug in panels prevent backfeeding in the case of a complete outage? IE: if lines are down and linemen go to work on lines with trees on them etc how can they be assured they're not energized?

[Deathmax]

The inverters are meant to come with anti-islanding to detect when it's been disconnected from the grid, which applies to both regular PV installs and a plug-in panel.