OK, they won’t really save the world, but in Europe, you can buy small solar panels that can be hung from a balcony and then plugged into the house current. (gift link)
(not sure why I get a 403 Forbidden error on a gift link)
I’m wondering if these are available in North America. Because of the different voltages, I doubt you can use one of the German ones here.
They’re almost surely illegal in America.
You’re adding a live voltage to the system that would be active potentially when linemen are trying to make repairs.
Each cell (a panel probably has a bunch of cells) produces, say, 0.5 of a volt independent of whether you set it up in Germany or North America. Beyond that you will need further electronics to (safely!) patch it into the mains. Controller, batteries, inverter, etc.
It would be illegal to do that, but why would you? You would not do it with. say, a diesel generator.
PS the article does say that the solar kits come with an inverter and batteries, so the buyers are not left wondering what to do with a raw panel. But the inverter will need to be set up to match the line voltage. Single-phase mains should be 230V, 50 Hz in Germany but in North America it’s 60 Hz and a split-phase system supplying 120V to appliances (I suppose 230 divided by 2 would be close enough, but the frequency would not match, which may or may not matter depending on what you need to power).
Just for the record, there are a large number of small, emergency / camping / off-grid battery storage solutions for sale in the US, many of which will sell you smallish scale solar panels for slow charging.
A brand I’ve used in the past, Jackery, for example, sells this model:
And it’s own branded solar panel (trickle charger, but why not?)
Just as representative options.
I have an older model Jackery that charges off wall current, just for those rare but not unknown 12-36 hour blackouts from massive windstorms, or the occasional blizzard. If it weren’t so pricey, I’d have replaced it by now and added a solar option.
Note, there is a HUGE number of options out there, with larger banks, scalable options, and options with scalable solar as well, this is just meant as a single example.
Germany has the same issue, yet they seem to be legal there. Perhaps because they won’t generate enough current to be hazardous when the power goes out. Just guessing, I don’t know if that’s true or not.
I have not read the article, but I know some details, livng as I do in Germany. The voltage is not a problem, there are transformators for that, and the inverter and the rectifier in the kit will surely take care of that. They were illegal in Germany until recently, because of concerns about the grid, but those have been solved, it seems. You do not even need to connect them to your private grid, that is the one in your house that ends at the meter, which is done plugging them into a househld socket that feeds your home appliances, but you don’t get any benefits from feeding the grid beyond your electricity meter. Nobody pays for that, except perhaps if you have a sophisticated smart meter. That is expensive. You better keep what you harvest from the sun for yourself, and that is not really much. It is difficult to store, batteries are expensive, but you can use the electricity as it is produced for… hmm, yeah, what? You get a couple of hundred Watt at most for some hours a day when the sun shines. I plan to use one similar to the one described by the OP to pump some water in a plot I have to fill a pond from a well.
Problems that arise: most people in Germany, in the cities at least, don’t own the flats they live in. They rent. They may not usually fix solar panels to balconies just like that. Such things are regulated in Germany to byzantine levels. And most balconies are not optimally oriented. Mine is: full south. But living on the first floor of a five stories house in a street with houses on the other side we are in permanent shadow four months a year. Winter is not the best time to harvest sun anyway, particularly not in Northern Europe.
So, long story short: Is it a good idea. Yes, in principle. Is it economical? Not really. Is it DIY? No, you buy the things as a kit and install them as they are. Not much tinkering there. Is it worth it? For feel good factor and a bit of virtue signalling, yes. To save the world? Rather not.
But it may lead to better solutions in the future. I haven’t yet seen any installed, but I have read about them. They were an issue in the press when they were allowed, I believe it was last year. The article in the OP may have better details on everything I have written, but I think I am not far off.
False. There is absolutely no fundamental difference between this and a hard-wired inverter that exports to the grid. Either can sense if the grid goes down, and stop producing power.
Conceivably a manufacturer could omit such sensing, but they’d be unable to receive UL/NRTL listing and would open themselves to massive liability, including from people touching the plug prongs when it wasn’t plugged in.
IMO the likely bigger concern in 120V-land is overloading wiring: if you plugged several into one circuit, it would be possible to have, say, 15A coming from the grid and 15A coming from the solar inverters, so you could have 30A flowing on 14Ga wires (powering two hair dryers or two space heaters) without tripping any circuit breakers.
That’s less likely to be an issue in 230V-land because their standard circuit size is double the wattage (~3600W vs. 1800W) so it would take twice as many panels to potentially get into trouble.
This article concurs:
[These panels] comply with auto-safety shutoff standards, so if they detect a power drop from the grid or your home, they will not allow electricity to flow back into your home circuits or back to the grid.
This is to ensure line-workers who may be troubleshooting problems don’t get zapped while they’re fixing things back up. They also help protect kids who may be messing with the cord end if the panels aren’t attached to the wall.