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.
