Watch it if you have solar power in Hawaii (natural, installation, electric)
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Once you generate more then 15% of your homes electricity by solar Hawaiian Electric can require an expensive study gauging what additional rooftop projects would do to energy reliability.
The studies are an open-ended expense, costing thousands of dollars for a large home, and, on average, $45,000 for a commercial installation.
It applies only to those who are hooking up their own power generating systems while still being plugged into the grid. Many people on hawaii are for this because after years of weird installations, citizens have died when a dead power line was being energized by someones unregulated and improperly installed solar cells. Additionally on some islands, the grid is in a delicate balance between generating and usage. Imagine if you had a generator producing electricity and pushing the excess back onto the grid, suddenly a whole bunch of people power upm their generators with a high excess amount of power being pushed back in to the grid causing a shut down to prevent frying the entire grid. The 15% wouldn;t be a problem if not for the hundredsof ilegal out of code installations that plague the islands. As for Lanai and Molokai, you have what amount to a single grid so it naturally will be more sensative to random unregulated power surges and such because its not like a small neighborhood is out, you can practiculy shut the whole islands electrical grid down.
if you are off grid (with no hookup to the HEI companies), this don't apply. So this is not about "off-grid" its about power generating.
The "unreliability" seems to be caused by non-code hookups and power lines that the utilities themselves left hooked up when they should have been taken down. It's not any kind of a "debunking" of solar, no matter how much the Junk Science blogger would like it to be, it's more an indication of why grid-tie installations need to be up to code.
In most states the code has required (for years, if not several decades) grid-tie connections that automatically shut down when the grid shuts down or behaves erratically.
While lots of people like to point fingers and scream "marxists!", that is the point of having a code in the first place. Not that there aren't some silly and specifically overkill things enshrined in code.
Many states (such as mine) have sort of controlled the problem via rebates - you want that green energy grid-tie rebate, they require a code installation and inspection before you can get signed off for the rebate.
Quote: "Once you generate more then 15% of your homes electricity by solar Hawaiian Electric can require an expensive study gauging what additional rooftop projects would do to energy reliability."
NO, WRONG. IT IS, IF YOUR PV SYSTEM WOULD TAKE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD'S ELECTRIC CIRCUIT TO 15% INTERMITTENT RENEWABLE THAT A STUDY USE TO BE REQUIRED BEFORE YOUR NEW SYSTEM COULD BE INSTALLED. THE HAWAII PUC JUST RECENTLY ENDED THAT REQUIREMENT. YOU GOT NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, ESP. WITH EXISTING PV SYSTEMS.
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