You absolutely do not want them sharing the excess with neighbors during a power outage, this is how you get dead linemen.

Solar panel grid tied inverters generally will refuse to function if there's no external power coming in.

The benefit from the distributed generation means that if your local area has large loads added you don't necessarily need to upgrade the HVDC lines from the power plant to accommodate.

This is not as big a problem as it sounds - you cannot provides enough power for you neighbors and so your breakers (fuses) will cut power long before the lineman gets there.

though linemen are trained that they are working on a live line unless they have personally shorted it out. There are many other ways a seemingly dead line can be live so they don't take a chance.

> This is not as big a problem as it sounds - you cannot provides enough power for you neighbors and so your breakers (fuses) will cut power long before the lineman gets there.

The load side (your neighbors) cannot pull more power than is being generated. My 7kW array can generate 7kW and no more. No breakers will trip in a hypothetical scenario where my inverter fails to shut down during an outage, and my neighbors are trying to drawing 10kW.

That's not how that works. Your breakers are sized to support your panel size. If you have 10kW panels that can push 10kW onto the grid when the grid is live, they can push 10kW when the grid is down. The limiting factor is the power your panels produce which in this case is also...10kW.

You're probably right about linemen but there are a lot of other reasons not to feed power onto a dead grid.

Your main breaker isn't the only one. Your inverters have protection of some sort as well.

Yes, all of which is by definition specced high enough to handle the maximum amount of power your panels are able to produce.

Upvoted.

Solar farms don't work during power outages either. When the power isn't out, you get to use the power from your neighbor's solar panel.