Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies: Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.

This article is from the New York Times, a prominent US newspaper which writes primarily for a US audience. It's relevant for them to bring it up.

As a person from Default Country, I love this statement and I want it on a shirt.

I hate this stupid country as much as the next guy, but I still want to know if there's anything I'm allowed to do that might be good for the planet. Now I know I'm not allowed to do this because my stupid fucking country doesn't allow it, which is usable information.

FTA:

The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

I've got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I'd need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I've got all that, but it's not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.

Individuals owning their own means of energy production is obviously unamerican.

They are VERY DANGEROUS to conservatives and the flawed ideological rafts they're still clinging to.

Are they Chinese solar panels or good ol' American products?

No, because you can kill a lineman working on the downed line, who mistakenly thinks the line is dead and has no idea that you're feeding power into it from your solar panel.

They're not supposed to be grid-forming and should turn off if there's no grid voltage. And if you turn off a breaker you should always check that there's no voltage, you might've turned off the wrong breaker.

Yeah that would worry me, plugging a power source into a wall socket.

I would much rather build an independent little cart with panels and a battery and a charge controller and an inverter and use it the way you would a generator. I would rather pay the power company full price to run my refrigerator and nothing at all to recharge my lawnmower than 98.3% for both.

It can power across the circuits its all technically the same electrical connection within a house. These systems are relatively small due to the constraints of a typical standard plug and the amps it can support so they tend to be limited to less than half of the total power on a loop.

Yeah, looks like the bot needs a little attention from the devs