By using less oil and less gas we reduce CO2 emmissions, save money and are less dependent on other regions far away.

you have a house, taking power from the grid. Then you want to become more self-sufficient and add solar, but don't want to sell to the grid, just for yourself. If the solar installation and its circuit is not _fully_ separate from the one connected to the grid you have to get a permit even if it's a "Nulleinspeiseanlage".

Yes, technically you could make everything completely separate, then it would be fine. But I haven't seen that in the wild a single time so far.

The Germans manage their electric grid very well, the last major electric blackout in Germany was in 2006. (More than 15 million clients of the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) did not have access to electricity for about two hours on this date.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

On the other hand electric grids in Philippines are quite unreliable and economic losses caused by blackouts are quite high:

" That is a brutal reminder that every blackout doesn’t just kill the lights; it sets the nation’s money, productivity, and economic progress on fire. " https://mb.com.ph/2026/10/26/blackouts-heavy-price-tag-is-ga...

In many areas solar panels get turned of by grid operators remotely for many hours on sunny days. In an area in the south I worked in around 50-70% of the produced power of larger installations (>30kwp) is essentially thrown away because the grid simply doesn't have enough capacity.

And Germany is #4 regarding grid stability (measured in SAIDI) in Europe. There are only some tiny and small countries better than the german grid, and no large industrial country. And, btw, Europe has a WAY higher grid stability than the Americas.

Why is that important? Years ago, I had weekly telcos with a customer in Tucson, Arizona. And more often than not we didn't had one: they had no power over there. So the shabby quality of the public grid influenced in a bad way their economy. Businesses simply couldn't talk and plan during that period. Probably also not produce.

Having a top-notch grid is IMHO a basis for a successful economy.

(And fun thing: the german grid is so good ALSO because of our neighbors. We're all interconnected. In Germany, we don't really have the landscape for massive water pump storage power plants. But when we have excess electricity, the ones in Austria and Switzerland are using "our" power. And we need the power, we get "their" power back. Or France ... in the summer, they now routinely have to power down their nuclear plants due to cooling issues. But in France ... no one notices. We all help each other. In year 53% of the french atomic power was "out" due to climate change and regular maintenance. And it all worked nethertheless. As it should be!)

I expect what you're talking about is anti-islanding and so it's not interested in what you're consuming locally.

The anti-islanding works by detecting whether it can make a noticeable change to the constant 50Hz (or 60Hz depending on country) AC waveform, if it can that's an artificial waveform made by itself or similar devices in the neighbourhood and so the anti-islanding protection stops delivering power. But if when you try to change the waveform it won't budge, that's because there's say 10GW of much beefier power sources out there keeping it the same shape it always was, so it's OK to generate electricity.

Just kidding, I know what you mean. I actually started with true balcony solar and evolved into the battery+inverter setup and couldn't be happier

To have a battery that truly powers a whole house circuit breaker and not just one flakey ambiguous amperage draw rating collection of power strips you're looking at significantly more. And it's not just for cloudy days. You'd have to size your array for the winter solstice to not be constantly running a deficit out of summer.

Please correct me where I'm wrong with your actual lived experience, but ive yet to encounter much of that, mostly just "I googled this thing and found something claiming to be a thing I think might work"

Energy input is just one portion of a businesses expenses.. even if this business was fully dark (all robots, since you're not going to get all your HQP to move to Africa), you still would like to have that business somewhat interconnected to the supply chain.

Many businesses won't exist long enough to hit the ROI needed to uproot to move to someplace extra sunny and to pay for the full install of the power required to be fully off grid.

Basically, the grid was built with the assumption that plants produce power, and that households only consume it. That means opening a breaker between the transport grid and the distribution lines should allow to safely work on the consumer-bound side.

That assumption no longer works if consumers energize the network, and while I assume workers have safety guidelines to check the line before starting work, there is still a risk.

Fixing this issue would require new remotely-operated breakers to be installed, which is costly, and it's hard to justify installing them proactively just in case.

I have been wondering if there is a smart way to make use of "island" solar at home, but not thought of one other than heating assist (pipe tape heater).

Governments have conflicting goals. You think "raise taxes" is the most important goal. But, believe it or not, some governments -- even conservative ones -- also have goals like "protect the envirnment".

In Germany for example, you are nominally required to register your balcony solar. Online, no fee. So it's easy. But .. there are no fines attached if you don't do it. And they don't ask for any taxes.

They are HAPPY that you do your local electricity power after Putin turned off gas export and it turned out that LPG import is way more costly (due to cooling and pressure, a lot of the stored energy is used for that during the transport/processing on that).

In Germany, there was even a process where the politics told the electrical engineers to not be so anal about electric security to make plug in of these devices into normal sockets a possibility. The VDE only wanted special sockets to be used. The politics said "Nope, too expensive for the normal people".

The idea that legislative and executive is only working AGAINST the people is invalid.

While most developed countries have aerial imaging campaigns on some recurrent schedule (NAIP in the US is on a rolling 3-year cycle), this is usually not the case in developing countries.

Quite a few never had any large scale aerial imaging campaigns and most do not have them on regular schedules.