Thank you for the response, yes I am not implying the zero export devices hide the solars presence, but rather address the economic argument a utility would have against not having interconnect agreement, since the safety argument is already addressed by UL 1741 / Rule21. And if there are no external impacts and no law against it, I believe the risk of this is quite low.
I don't think there's a fundamental reason against it. But it will require someone to agitate for it. It took a pretty long time to get utilities on-board with grid tie solar and to build the consensus for rate payers subsidizing net metered residential systems (often installed by wealthy people, and arguably also by predatory PPA / loans). Quirks of the US compared to elsewhere - more safety risk aversion, much fewer export limits for residential except in Hawaii; export limits / infrastructure upgrades are as necessary here for utility scale as elsewhere.
I'm sure the utility will complain about leg imbalance but they can certainly math out some limits or whatever.
There's also I think a question about the ROI of this agitation. If you agitate for balcony zero export as opposed to Europe which is I believe balcony with net metering bank (but I haven't looked at it closely), the installer of those systems might only be offsetting utilization on a single circuit or a single leg. Single circuit happens if you put the zero export CT clamps at the most convenient place for plugging in, namely the plug. Then you can only zero out stuff, EG, plugged into a receptacle on the inverter or the plug (imagine a plug that has goes: Plug -> CT -> Bus of Solar output and Receptacle. Then the Zero export can cancel usage on that receptacle, but it will not know about utilization elsewhere. This might work well for an AC).
It would be better to put the CT in as upstream of a main panel or subpanel as possible. However, this substantially increases the amount of electrical work needed. Albeit mostly low voltage, and potentially you can use a wireless transmitter (but this will affect the zero export quality, so it comes with its own eng tradeoff)
If you export into a utility side bank, then none of this is necessary. But then you pull in concerns from the utility about loading the system.
I guess another reason this will be hard to do in the US, is that a lot of the grid tie stuff has been spearheaded by solar installer industry. They likely do not have a way to exploit small scale systems, so someone else will have to lobby and agitate. Not sure how to put together the coalition etc. It definitely won't be DIY solar hobbiests -- the intersection of people with expertise that are really passionate about microsolar, is not going to be that big probably. Hobbiests with expertise tend to have built their own macho, huge off-grid systems. The Sierra Club / NRDC probably aren't going to put their lobbiests on this vs other issues
Unless the utility just is concerned about revenue avoidance and then goes to the permitting authorities (somehow) and tries to enforce. But that's akin to the sewer company going around with a thermal camera trying to look for warm spots in the ground for unpermitted septic that leads to loss of revenue. They don't really got time for that, and even if they did, the backlash would be huge.
It depends on the ROI for the investigation and social dynamics. For solar, you can detect it with camera drones, those are super-super cheap to fly and then plug the pixels into some image recognition model. And social dynamics can be manipulated.
I don't think it's yet affordable to go around looking for unpermitted septics with LIDAR and IR sensing. LOL.
As I mentioned, off grid is not allowed in many jurisdictions (including much of CA), so we shouldn't talk about it, right?
Can you provide a reference for this? 1741 covers off-grid.
sungoldpower.com
