For current to flow out of your house the voltage inside the house has to be slightly higher than outside. Not by much, but a little. So the inverter has a higher output voltage than line voltage by design. If everyone does this and some of the power has nowhere to go, then the average voltage goes up measurably.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the grid had been designed to be able to bring power out of residential areas, but my casual understanding is that this doesn’t work very well with existing infrastructure, so with a bunch of extra power that has a hard time getting out the voltage keeps climbing until some inverters hit their safety shutoff.

I was thinking of other countries where the billing system has only variable fees. Which used to work when you didn’t have many people who are dependent on the grid but have a (almost) net zero power bill.

Yes power usage is constantly predicted by utilities. Production must match consumption exactly at every moment. This means weather forecasting is an essential part of managing a power grid, and doubly so with intermittent renewables.

I think the local overloading has something to do with transformers not being able to handle the massive local overproduction. It’s not just power not being consumed, it’s power being injected into the grid.

It’s only fine because the panels do not do much of anything.

When large swaths of the population become even partially self-sufficient, it’s an enormous issue for the electric grid. Again, not an issue over an occasional few hundred watts, but when whole neighborhoods cover their roofs in solar panels the following happens:

• These (comparatively rich) people stop contributing to maintaining the grid. Half of electricity costs are distribution costs, so unless you have no net metering and a separate distribution line in your bill the rich are being subsidized by the poor to install solar capacity at home. Of course changing the billing system fixes that, but it also makes solar much less financially interesting and really pisses off people who already paid for solar and now won’t be having a positive ROI for an additional decade.
• The panels are not remotely operable so their aggregate power generation sometimes causes enormous stress on the rest of the grid, forcing old nuclear/gas/coal PP to spin up and down much more quickly and frequently than they were designed for.
• Locally the voltage fluctuations may be very large. Nominal where I live is 230 V, but it’s not unheard of for rich neighborhoods to be pushing 250 V on very sunny days. Then the inverters shut down automatically, but it’s always whoever happens to have the most sensitive inverter who ends up not being paid on sunny days.

Anyways apartment solar is not really the issue here, it’s the people with 10+ panels. But there are good reasons for solar to be heavily regulated.

Funny how all this Discourse always comes out during peak campaigning times. Right after the election, suddenly ContraPoints falls off the radar and so do these “revolutionaries”.

I think devoting, like, 6 months every four years to making sure literal fascists don’t come to power and immediately round up all your revolutionaries to execute them on the town square would not be too big of an ask. He’ll have plenty of time in December to do whatever he usually does without worrying about electoralism.

It takes a position of enormous privilege to be this disconnected from political pragmatism. If Trump wins, Natalie Wynn won’t get to participate in a revolution. She’d be lucky to survive at all.