Things I didn't know.

Last night my town had a pretty good power outage. Someone took out a transformer. Which means I got to learn something new about Solar!

Apparently - if you own solar, you are not protected against blackouts unless you have a "very unusual off the grid type installation". The National Electricity Code states that you can't have a solar system that feeds electricity back to the grid as not to electrocute some poor lineman who thinks the grid is dark when some systems are feeding electricity back to the grid.

The grid connected power systems have to include a feature that guarantees they will shut down as soon as the grid drops power and must stay shut until the grid has been stable for 5 minutes. Which eliminated any reason I would buy a solar system. And, I bet a lot of people don't know about this because power is fairly stable until it isn't.

This is also interesting because California has two nuke plants down at the moment.

So, here is to hoping we won't have an above average summer for heat. Because you know - California is famous for it's rolling blackouts.