What happens if the power goes out?

What happens if the power goes out?

Most solar arrays are “grid-tied.” This means they’re connected to the local power grid. This allows solar homeowners to use their solar electricity when the sun is shining, and to switch seamlessly to utility-provided electricity on cloudy days or at night. For grid-tied solar arrays, your system will stop producing electricity when the grid goes down unless it is connected to a battery storage system.

This is a required safety feature. In the event of a power outage, inverters are designed not to feed electricity into the grid and potentially injure the utility workers who are servicing the wires. As a result, when the grid is down your inverter(s) stops converting the electricity for your home from your solar modules’. Your home will not have power (even if the sun is shining). When grid power returns, you don’t need to do anything at all. Your inverter will sense that grid power has returned, wait for a few minutes to make sure everything is okay, and then start producing power again when the sun is shining.