On grid tie if the power goes out do you still have power ??

I get asked this quite a lot . If theirs a hurricane and the panels survive . Will they be able to come get under the ac . Short but sad answer is ......No..... For now . Grid tie relies on the grid as a nearly 100% efficient means of transferring the energy the panels produce for quickest payoff. This means you have to have energy showing that inverter that there is no power outage.

Why Not ?

The short and sweet answer is linemen safety. Imagine you just have a bad storm, no power for about a week. Next two days come and no clouds pure sunlight . In those days if your panels were producing . That would present these linemen working to restore power a serious problem . You now have 5000 watts of power coming from basically a mini power station that isn't shut down while there trying to work. This is why the rules for grid ties so they cant feed power to the grid during no power.

Anti Islanding

This is basically where if your dc to ac inverter doesn't read line voltage it will not produce and send any power down the line for a lineman to grab and receive a rude wake up call. Where im at UL 1741 is the code . My inverter is solar edge so i already knew they would be compliant . But never hurts to double and triple check . I read something a while back saying that Florida couldn't have panels and as i got into the thread it was obvious that the person who wrote it had no idea why they couldn't use the panels in a storm . It had nothing really to do with the power from solar it was the fact they like anyone else didn't want to get fried from a line that was supposed to be a non live line . I haven't done any research over there but i would almost be pretty sure they could easily turn off the line to the meter and run a generator or off grid panels as long as they didn't send any surprises down the line .

This is a quick update of solar. If your thinking of going solar and grid tie . Make sure that your inverter will comply with these rules or you basically bought your self a brick.