ChrisOlson what he wants to do is put up a grid tie without the utilities permission. That isn't allowed. I checked and found that if he wants a transfer switch he may be charged a monthly fee for being allowed to have it.
No, you need a Net Metering Agreement with your utility to hook your system to their grid. And federal law requires that they allow you do it. Although some utilities make the process so prohibitively expensive, and charge extra monthly service fees, so as to make it not practical.
Nobody needs a dual distribution ATS for a grid-tie solar energy system. All that is required is a lockable disconnect on the customer side of the meter. It is the homeowner's responsibility to provide the lockable disconnect that totally disconnects the residence from the utility grid, and it must be accessible by utility personnel 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year. When you put in a solar or wind energy system that is connected to the grid, it is like any power plant owned by the utility. It must be able to be positively shut down or disconnected in the event the lines need service. That is the purpose of it.
The Wisconsin Act also requires a $300k liablility policy in force for the smallest class of users.
Again, this is only for grid-tied systems, and most homeowner's policies already provide in excess of $300K liability. It is not a special policy - it is just a minimum level of liability and homeowner's property insurance coverage required to grid-tie a renewable energy system.
I don't think most people realize how expensive it actually is to go off grid. It isn't cheaper than the grid. WindpowerOrBust can't be doing this for the money.
Well, that needs some explanation. We have a rather large off-grid system here and we used 20 kWh in our house today (so far) - 12 kWh of it coming from solar on a day when it was sunny to start with this morning, then clouded over solid overcast this afternoon. The rest is coming from wind power and our batteries are still at 96% SOC at 9:30 at night:
Our average consumption is around 16 kWh/day. We have about $70,000 in our off-grid power system for our house and my small shop that is capable of producing that, day in and day out, 365 days a year.
IF you amortize your cost of equipment over the typical payback time of 10 years that most grid-tie solar installations like to use, and add in the cost of standby/peaking generator fuel for off-grid, yes it is more expensive. The advantage to being off-grid is that you own the equipment and have control of it, and your costs are fixed once you are set up. So the biggest problem, really, is the upfront cost of an off-grid system. The maintenance, long term, is actually very, very low meaning we have virtually zero out-of-pocket monthly expense for a 16 kWh off-grid residential system. The other thing is reliability. Our off-grid system is dead reliable. Being hooked to utility power isn't.
So there are pros and cons. But I wanted to clarify the fact that there is no restriction in Wisconsin to putting in solar and wind energy systems as this thread alleges that there is. And, in fact, Wisconsin has laws in place to promote installation of these systems. This 100 kW solar array was installed in town at the electric co-op just this past summer:
It is a "community solar project". The electric utility put it in and a subscriber can purchase a portion of the array (like 2 kW or whatever). Then the person who purchases part of the array gets a credit on their electric bill for what their portion of the array produces every month, along with all the state incentives, and federal tax incentives. So the consumer gets the advantage of having solar, but it is maintained and kept at the electric utility so the homeowner doesn't even have to go out and brush the snow off the panels after a snow storm. It was wildly popular beyond what anybody thought. They sold the entire array to subscribers within 3 days of it going operational.