[freebeard]

Depends on jurisdiction. From the fine article:

I’ve been working furiously this week on a 48v battery module and controller to work with the Sunny Island 6048 US Inverter. Coming nicely I think. This will be a good combo.

But there is a kind of identity crisis between the Sunny Island and the grid-tied Sunny Boy. In Germany, where they are made, it is actually illegal to use them together. And it’s all about the grid.
....
In 2009 I predicted that we would no sooner free ourselves of the oil companies, than our pals the electric companies who were oh so enthusiastic and encouraging about electric cars would become the new arch enemy. And it has come to pass. Trading one master for another.

In a Pollyanna perfect world, we could of course build a very distributed network on a national scale and power could shunt from area to area as the sun did shine, and local outages could be made up with local rooftop resources and all would be happy. Meanwhile our dear friends at the utility company are doing horrendously cynical backroom deals with “regulators” all too willing to sell out their neighbors for the right amount of cash. Actually any amount will do.

The case in Florida where a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to install solar, which was actually a constitutional amendment assuring utility companies that no one could install solar, was so cynically and deliberately designed that it would do the Democratic National Committee proud. With millions spent by the utility companies to advertise and promote this “rights” movement, it did gain a majority of votes. But that was not enough to pass an amendment and so the deliberately fraudulent ruse was defeated. The author gleefully described it as brilliant political ju-jitsu – that is before it failed and when they thought it would probably pass.

This scenario is currently ramping up across the land and it is now a cottage consultant industry to advise utility companies on specifically how to defeat the desires of their “solar” customers. The self-centered world view of these people is frightening in both its scope and stupidity. But we saw it with the telephone companies over the Internet, the oil companies over the electric cars, and now the utility companies with solar.