Thoughts on Solar

The Washington Post is out today with a disturbing article titled, Where heat waves may cause blackouts, and no surprise, Southern California is one of those places!  The rationale for the headline is straightforward enough: climate change is bringing more consecutive days of heat wave weather, and those extended days of heat cause stress on the electrical grid, including on those transformers you see on power poles in your neighborhood, maybe even in your own backyard.  When overloaded, by both heat and increased demand (from air conditioning, pool pumps, and increasingly EV charging), those transformers can fail, sometimes spectacularly!

SCE is well aware of this issue.  From the article:

The power company Southern California Edison recently warned that climate change will make it so “existing infrastructure will become less efficient, especially inland, resulting in reduced capacity on lines and higher losses in transformers.”

Even if the transformers do not fail, SCE might be required to cut off power during heat wave events, compounding the impact on consumers who now find themselves without AC - or even a fan - during a high heat crisis!

It doesn’t have to be that way!

Adding solar and sufficient storage is a way to thrive during those heat waves knowing that whatever the grid does, your life will pretty much continue as normal.  We are certified installers of Enphase equipment, including their more powerful 5P battery systems.  Get ahead of the curve and give us a call today.  One of these summer days you will be glad that you did!

We recently received PTO for a new project in Altadena, and part of what made this interesting was that we decided to modify the project mid-stream so that we would be positioned to add an Enphase Ensemble Storage System down the road.  We wanted to configure the layout so that when the storage was added, we could just “plug-and-play” - so here’s how that turned out…

Oh County, Why do you make EVERYTHING so Hard?

Our approved plans from LA County showed the solar disconnect adjacent to the service panel, but that really wouldn’t work out if we were going to add storage.   Instead, we were going to install a backup subpanel near the main panel and the Enphase Enpower switch next to that.  Then we would run conduit to a gutter box on the wall, above which the storage device(s) would eventually be installed, and then we would have our combiner box and PV disconnect.  So I redrew the site plan showing the location of the revised equipment, and a new single line drawing to show how everything would be interconnected, crossed my fingers and hit “Submit".

Nope.

County would not allow us to revise our existing solar permit to incorporate the Enpower switch.  Instead, we had to revise our solar site plan to just show the new location for the disconnect, and leave off the Enpower switch.  Then, we needed to pull a second permit - a complex electrical permit - that included a site plan with all of the equipment (all solar components designated as Existing!), and the full single line drawing.  And, yeah, pay for it.  Seriously?

Patience Carries the Day!

Ultimately we were able to overcome all of County’s complaints and get the project approved.  Happily, SCE issued PTO almost immediately, so we came back to go live with the system.  Our client, Sean, decided to memorialize the process, so here is an edited version of that footage that let’s you see how we designed for the future, and the process of bringing the system online.  Check it out!