They also must be certified by an outside safety organization like Underwriters Laboratories and have a feature that would prevent electricity from feeding back into the grid if there's a power outage.

Yea, I'm sure Amazon will enforce that law.

Remember, when you look into the void in the form of social media on your phone while you shit, the void looks also into you

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".

I wonder if the GOP has just forgotten what decade it is with a lot of their voter suppression stuff. Yes, they're absolutely working to suppress the vote... but it really looks like most of the people they're going to stop from voting are their voters.

For a long time, the low-income and minority vote was overwhelmingly Democrat, and those same categories were also "low-propensity voters". Make voting a little bit harder and you'd reduce Democrat vote totals, while Republican voters were rich white people who were well equipped to jump whatever hoops you put up.

But there's been a realignment in politics. A lot of the low-propensity voters are now voting Republican, while the wealthy, dedicated and (especially) educated voters are now leaning strongly Democrat. Make voting harder today and you're likely to block as many Republican votes as Democrat votes... maybe more! I don't think they're going to get the return on their voter suppression that they expect.

What would democracy without capitalism look like? Democratic socialism always ends up quickly abandoning either democracy or socialism. Social democracy (e.g. the Nordic model) works pretty well, but that's still fundamentally capitalist.

Gotta stop you there: No, these panels and any similar plug-into-the-wall battery systems that might come with them will never be able to serve as a backup if there's a power failure. When the grid power goes out they will shut off. Even if you have both sun and full batteries, when the grid goes down, you'll lose power.

The reason was mentioned in the summary:

They also must be certified by an outside safety organization like Underwriters Laboratories and have a feature that would prevent electricity from feeding back into the grid if there's a power outage.

If they could energize your home circuitry during an outage, and your home is connected to the grid, they're also going to energize the grid. This has two consequences. One, you would actually be trying to power your whole neighborhood, not just your house, and two (and more importantly), you would be energizing the grid that power company personnel are trying to repair, which could seriously injure or kill them.

If you want to have backup during a power outage, you need another piece of equipment, a backup interface, and it needs to be inserted between your house and the grid, and to collaborate with your inverter(s). Also you inverters that with both grid-following and grid-forming modes.

During normal (grid up) operation, your inverters will synchronize to the sine wave provided by the power grid, putting power into your home (and, if you're not using it all) into the grid, in phase with the grid. When the grid goes down and your inverters see the grid wave go away they must stop putting out power, both because as a practical matter the signal they're syncing their output to has disappeared and because they must not energize a grid that is down.

When the inverters see the grid go down and stop inverting, they also send a message to the backup interface, which is just a big switch. It physically disconnects your house from the grid and then sends a message back to the inverters, telling them it's safe to form a new grid. One of them (they have to be communicating and collaborate on this) creates a new sine wave, the rest sync to it and they all start putting power into your circuits. You're in backup mode.

Note that this doesn't all happen instantaneously. It's common to have a 1-2 second outage while it all happens. I have 40 kWh of batteries on my house, but I also have small 0.15 kWh[*] UPSes on my networking equipment, desktop computer, etc., specifically to cover that small interval. Both times! Because there's a brief outage when the grid comes, back, too.

When the grid comes back, the backup interface sees it, waits a few seconds to make sure it's stable, then sends a message to the inverters: "Grid is back!". The inverters stop inverting and tell the backup interface that it's safe to reconnect to the grid. The backup interface reconnects, and the house is back on the grid. Note, though, that it's only on the grid. The inverters do not start inverting right away, even if you have plenty of sun and/or battery. Instead, they watch the grid for a minute or two to make sure it's stable, then they sync to it and begin inverting, starting by putting a small amount of power out, then ramping up until they're doing whatever they're configured to do (on my system, because I have DC-coupled batteries, they try to produce enough power to zero the grid draw/feed, allowing any excess solar to flow into the batteries until the batteries are full, then they produce enough power to zero the battery draw/feed, which pushes any excess into the grid).

[*] 150 Wh is actually way more storage than I need my UPSes to have. The problem is that AFAICT no one sells UPSes designed for situations where the UPS never has to cover more than 2-3 s of outage. When I buy a UPS I have to buy it sized by the maximum continuous wattage it can provide/relay, and it will typically come with a battery sized to provide that output for ~15 minutes, even though I only conservatively need 10 seconds.

inkjet printing holes into material is going to be neat

If your home is connected to the grid, what happens in your home reaches outside of your home. In this case it's particularly obvious: If the grid is down and a lineman is working on the grid wiring near your house, he doesn't expect that wiring to be energized. If your house is backfeeding power into the grid, you could injure or kill him, even if he's a mile from your property.

So, there are regulations that limit what you can do in a grid-connected home. If you disconnect from the grid, you can do what you like (though your insurance company may still want assurances that you're following code).

a doozie to debug

There are mini clip-on current sensors. For measuring potential you still need to either also know resistance, or probe the points between which you want to measure it. You could measure differential current, and then if you used that measurement to break a circuit, you'd have a GF[C]I.

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

Am in the UK. Am being paid for exporting solar-generated electricity from my house.

Yes they match phase obviously.

For safety they output nothing unless they see a power signal.

Utilities in California really only make money on new generation projects, which is why PGE killed residential grid tied solar here by making it unprofitable.

I think google should pull their virtual head out of their corporate ass and realize that sucking up to Trump isn't good for a future in which they get to continue to exist.