Australia wrote the world’s best rooftop PV rules. We must do the same for plug-in solar – and fast
Glen Morris reports for Renew Economy:
Last Thursday, plug-in solar became legal in Great Britain. The week before that, New Zealand announced it would do the same within 12 months. Germany passed a million installed units years ago and is now well past three million.
In Australia you can buy a plug-in kit today, but you cannot legally plug it in.
I sit on the two Standards Australia committees this technology runs into. EL-005 writes the battery rules. EL-042 writes the inverter and solar installation standards. I have been in those rooms for fifteen years, so I want to be precise about what the obstacle actually is, because it is not what most people assume.
The obstacle is not that plug-in solar is unsafe. The obstacle is that nobody in this country has the authority to say yes.
Here is the tangle.
Standard AS/NZS 4777.1 says a grid-connected inverter is part of the fixed wiring of the installation, on its own circuit, connected by a licensed electrician.
Standard AS/NZS 5033 says the same about the panels.
Standard AS/NZS 3000 treats a socket outlet as a place where you take power out, not a place where you put power in.
The Clean Energy Council approved product list, which is what networks and rebates actually rely on, has no category for a plug-connected inverter, so a compliant product cannot even be listed. Above all that sit eight state and territory electrical safety regulators, each with its own Act, and every distribution network with its own connection rules.
None of those bodies can move first. Standards Australia writes standards, it does not legalise anything. The CEC cannot list a product that no standard describes. A state regulator will not approve something the standards do not permit.
The networks say, reasonably enough, that they will connect anything that complies with AS/NZS 4777 and is CEC listed, which is a door that cannot currently be opened. Everybody is waiting for somebody else.
The solution to this red tape quagmire – our energy ministers need to hand the job to the regulators with a deadline, which is exactly what the UK did.
Solar Citizens is leading a consumer push for Plug-in Solar regulation to be on the agenda for the next Climate and Energy Ministerial Council, when all the state and territory energy ministers meet on September 11.
The technical questions are real but small, and other people have already answered them.
The first is the socket itself. When you unplug a generator, the pins are live for as long as the inverter keeps producing. The fix is a product requirement that the inverter shut down in well under a second on loss of the socket, and the plug design that goes with it. This is testable and it is tested.
The second is the circuit. A final subcircuit is protected at 16 or 20 amps and the breaker only sees current coming from the switchboard end. Inject power halfway along and in theory you could load the cable past its rating without the breaker knowing. Germany and now the UK solved this by capping the output at 800 watts, about 3.5 amps, which is small enough that it cannot happen on any normal circuit. One kit per household, and that is the end of the problem.
The third is anti-islanding, and it is the easiest. Australian inverters have done this for 20 years and we have a well-proven test regime for it.
The fourth is metering, and this one is genuinely ours. Plenty of apartment blocks still run old accumulation meters and embedded networks that will either spin backwards or bill exports as consumption. That is a metering conversation, not a safety one, and it should not hold up the rest.
Then there is strata and tenancy law, which will block plenty of people even after the electrical rules change. Germany fixed that too, by saying landlords and bodies corporate cannot unreasonably refuse.
Read the full story on Renew Economy.
——
Author Glen Morris is director of Smart Energy Lab and represents the Smart Energy Council on Standards Australia committees EL-005 and EL-042.
