Many States in the US allow this and it’s old hat in Europe. Imagine hanging solar panels off your balcony plugged into the outside plug reducing your power bills. Maybe preventing Ontario needing to buy power from the States.
and PLEASE Sign this ACTIVE petition: https://www.pluginsolarpower.ca/
Signing the petition needs your email and takes less than a minute to complete.
UPDATE: It turns up there are 2 petitions to sign. Ontario Provincial Petition and FEDERAL Petition
As a resident in this place, it won’t happen. Not because it’s a bad idea, and not because it’s dangerous… Grid tie solar like this is only really interesting (aka, something you want to do) to offset your electrical costs, so it’s only really interesting for lower or middle classed people…
All the people with lobbying power, who would never benefit from this… You know, the ones who long since bought and paid for the various branches of the government, and have the MPs on speed dial… They don’t want this because it will “look ugly”. They’ll use all their power and clout to stop this before it becomes a thing, just so they don’t have to look at it when they look down on us.
Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about solar backfeeding into the grid. There’s a lot of safety regulations to get right, and I wonder how it works in a mains power outage? Are all the lines partially electrified with everyone’s solar?
What people can do right now, is install solar with a battery, and instead of making the extra energy the power company’s problem, you just draw less power from the wall instead.
With a battery alone you can also take advantage of time-of-use billing if you charge it up at night when there’s excess grid capacity.
Grid tie inverters won’t deliver power unless they can detect and sync to the grid. If the grid stops working (power outage) and there’s no grid AC to sync with, then no power is delivered. It shuts off for safety.
When you feed into the grid, your power has to match the frequency and phase of what on the grid.
If the grid is down, your solar system has nothing to match to and will not send power into the grid.
@MisterD I’m all for plugin solar, but I can’t sign 3rd party petitions that harvest personal details. I would sign the federal one if/when it reaches the parliamentary petitions site.
Great idea. I’ve been watching these devices. Though still pretty expensive, they could add a lot to the power grid if a lot of people purchased them. And they’re so easy, I bet a lot of people would go for it.
Once you can get them at Costco, it should get affordable.
What are the consequences if people just do it without a permit?
To start, your insurance won’t cover any damages.
This takes me to sending an email to my MP, but this is a provincial issue, so should be going to MPPs in Ontario.
I added links to the PetitionS. (Provincial and Federal)
Doh! I’m an idiot. Thanks!!
You’re not at all. For some reason the federal petition takes you to e-mailing you MP and (in my case) goes on to message about changing Ontario legislation.
not my state in the us. although I like you are hoping we get it. Keeps being bandied about but does not get any further.
FYI: In the US, there is a federal push for this, too.
While I appreciate people up-voting, the total signatures at posting time was 480 for Ontario and it has only gone up by one signature.
Make that +2
