By John Tozzi
Some of the roughly 6 million power customers in the Northeast without electricity in Hurricane Sandy’s wake may be glancing around at a handful of homes with solar panels on their rooftops, thinking their clean-powered neighbors might have juice. Most of the time, that’s not the case.
Most residential solar panels are connected to the power grid, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, and when the grid goes down, so do they. “They don’t stay on even when the sun shines but the power grid is out,” says Danny Kennedy, co-founder of Oakland (Calif.)-based Sungevity, which has a few hundred homeowners as customers in states hit by Sandy. “That’s a good reminder to all of us that we need to modernize the grid.”
One reason the grid-connected solar systems shut down automatically in outages is that when the power goes off, if home solar installations send electricity onto the lines, it could electrocute workers repairing them.
Also: In Crisis, Public Officials Embrace Social Media/The New York Times
