Need to hire a solar consultant with LA/California experience

[rwhite8134]

You can do that as long as you either have a risk tolerance for an unapproved parallel setup (using zero export to hide), or know how to pick equipment that works fine off grid and later transition to on grid. Off hand the easiest way maybe is to use an external AC charger to charge the battery instead of directly connecting to grid. This would be fine from a POCO angle but it will violate UL9540 rules on ESS because there are pretty much zero approved chargers unless you buy a second UL9540 hybrid ($$$$$) and use it exclusively for charging. Again this somewhat boils down to a risk tolerance for doing not what your supposed to do

And a risk tolerance for the equipment being rejected due to you or your designer misunderstanding various technical things.

I feel the amount of extra work it will take you to understand the engineering / design will outweigh the benefit of skipping the first interconnect review.

The garage loads are non-critical. I wouldn't even care about charging the battery via AC/grid. Whatever PV makes I could use and/or store. When we get to the point next year of installing PV on the house and connecting critical house loads to the inverter(s) then doing Interconnection would make sense. But I totally get your point that if I already purchased inverter(s) and POCO says no-no next year then I got to get something else.

Good food for thought. I really appreciate the input guys.

 

[zanydroid]

The garage loads are non-critical. I wouldn't even care about charging the battery via AC/grid. Whatever PV makes I could use and/or store.

Then this is fine. You can buy like a SolArk and set it up without a grid connection and have no risk. If the POCO asks why there are solar panels on the roof without a interconnect agreement you can tell them it’s not interconnected.

I personally would be OK with just buying CEC listed modules after getting sign off from AHJ (including fire setback review).

 

[400bird]

They could reject it because of a typo in the information or code, or because there’s a transformer limit. There’s little way to derisk this — you can’t call up the engineering office and expect them to give much help without an active application.

PGE did this for me in 2018
Not sure if they still do it now, but a phone call doesn't cost much to try and find out.

You've got a great point there. However the Schneider MPPT controllers appear to have a single tracker from what I can tell, I can't see it spelled out exactly, but if optimizers would solve that then I guess the Schneider is back at the top of the list.

Each charge controller is a single MPPT, but you aren't limited to one charge controller. You could add 5 if you need.

 

[Siamac]

Here are a couple aerials:

View attachment 170243


View attachment 170244

How did you get the heat map?