Why 'no backup power' surprises every first-time buyer

The conversation we keep having

Somebody buys a panel, or is about to, and asks: so during a public safety power shutoff, I'll still have the fridge?

No. And the reason it's such a consistent surprise is that "I have solar panels" and "I have power when the grid doesn't" feel like they should be the same sentence. They aren't, and they aren't for rooftop solar either — a rooftop system without a battery also shuts down in an outage, which surprises those owners too.

Why the rule exists

Picture a street where the grid is down and a crew is repairing a transformer. They've isolated the section, confirmed it's dead, and started work.

Now picture a dozen homes on that street with solar quietly pushing electricity onto the same wires. The section they've isolated isn't dead. It's being energised from the customer side, and nothing at the substation would tell them.

That's called islanding, and preventing it is why every grid-connected inverter sold in the developed world watches the grid continuously and stops within a fraction of a second when it disappears. SB 868 requires it explicitly.

It's a good rule. It's also absolute — there's no override, no switch, no clever workaround, and anyone selling you one is selling you a hazard.

What actually happens in an outage

The grid goes down. Within a fraction of a second, your microinverter stops. The panel is still in full sun and still producing DC, but nothing is being converted or delivered. Your home is as dark as your neighbour's.

When the grid comes back, the inverter waits a short interval — typically a few minutes — to confirm it's stable, then resumes. You don't do anything.

What to buy if you want backup

A portable power station. A battery in a box with its own AC outlets. It charges from the wall, or from a solar panel, or from your car. During an outage you plug things into it directly. Jackery, EcoFlow, Bluetti and others make them from around $250 for something that runs a router and some lights, up to several thousand for something that runs a fridge for a day.

This is a completely separate purchase from a grid-tied plug-in system and it's the right answer if backup is what you want.

A hybrid product with a backup output. Some battery systems have an emergency power socket that works when the grid is down. Read the specification for the words "backup," "EPS," or "off-grid output." If those words aren't there, it doesn't do it.

Not: a plug-in solar system with a battery. The battery in an EcoFlow STREAM Ultra makes you money by shifting midday production to the evening peak. It does not keep your lights on in a blackout unless the product specifically says it does — and we would check that claim against the manufacturer's own specification sheet before relying on it, for any product, including that one.

The honest framing

Plug-in solar is a bill-reduction appliance. It's not resilience equipment, it's not emergency preparedness, and it's not insurance against a public safety power shutoff.

If you want both, you buy both, and they're separate lines on the budget. What you shouldn't do is buy one expecting the other, which is what happens when a product page shows a family lighting their home during a storm.

How it works, including the anti-islanding bit →