Just completed a 16 hour grid outage simulation. I'm very pleased.

[JES2]

I believe @JES2 meant that when the grid came back online the excess solar power being produced by the panels was being stored ("diverted") by the Powerwall and not out to the grid. The grid does not do any "diversion" - either it's on or off.

With the smart meters in Texas, which they put in about a decade ago, then upgraded a few years back, each customer is now an independent entity. Before, you had everybody in a pool, and there was no differentiating between who got power. Now, Oncor has the capability of deciding who gets power or not, especially if there is not enough power to go around. (In this case, it wasn't a lack of power, but a lack of working transformers to provide the energy.) We have businesses and government agencies that did have power, but homes that did not. Oncor was able to send me an email basically stating when I should have power restored based on their priority. In a sense, the grid was online to me, but they were not sending me any power (based on my smart meter grouping.) My question was whether I would have been able to send electricity out (solar) in this state.


From my experience during grid outage simulation tests is that the Powerwall triggers the solar inverters to turn off when the battery is sufficiently full (>95%) by increasing the frequency of the power. What I saw with my microinverter set up is that this behavior can actually turn some, but not all, of the inverters off. While not perfect it does seem to keep the solar production close to in line with the house consumption when the grid is unavailable to sell power through, keeping the battery use minimal while the sun is shining. I have some details in my write up here My grid outage frequency issue is resolved!.

That makes sense. I know that the solar was still loading up the PW2s at 98% with the grid being down.

 

[gpez]

Well the timing here couldn't be better, just had my first real outage and the Powerwall behaved like a champ!

At 8:10pm as my wife and I were watching TV we heard a "zap" noise outside and the lights flickered for a brief moment but otherwise everything was still on. The UPS I have on the Xbox and TV turned on its front LCD but never beeped. First thing I did was check the oven - the clock was off meaning it had no power. Since the oven is not on the critical loads panel I knew then that there was an outage! We peeked outside and I could see that the entire block was without power. Sure enough the recloser nearest to our home on the street was clearly in the open position. The Tesla app notified me that the grid was out and the Powerwall was supplying the house right as our neighbors texted us asking if we lost power. I told them yes...but no! We went back to our show and with a sunny day predicted tomorrow I wasn't worried about how much of the Powerwall was being used in the slightest. Our local utility said that 2260 homes were without power but we were humming right along! My dad even joked that they should have changed that to be 2259. An hour and 10% charge later I noticed our neighbors lights were on and just a few moments after that the Powerwall switched us back to utility. Rumor is on the street that a branch fell on some lines down the block - an easy fix but who knows what could happen next time.

I warned my wife that I was going to be giddy the first real outage we had and I didn't disappoint! Had a big grin on my face the whole time. Awesome to see everything working

 

[JES2]

Well the timing here couldn't be better, just had my first real outage and the Powerwall behaved like a champ!

At 8:10pm as my wife and I were watching TV we heard a "zap" noise outside and the lights flickered for a brief moment but otherwise everything was still on. The UPS I have on the Xbox and TV turned on its front LCD but never beeped. First thing I did was check the oven - the clock was off meaning it had no power. Since the oven is not on the critical loads panel I knew then that there was an outage! We peeked outside and I could see that the entire block was without power. Sure enough the recloser nearest to our home on the street was clearly in the open position. The Tesla app notified me that the grid was out and the Powerwall was supplying the house right as our neighbors texted us asking if we lost power. I told them yes...but no! We went back to our show and with a sunny day predicted tomorrow I wasn't worried about how much of the Powerwall was being used in the slightest. Our local utility said that 2260 homes were without power but we were humming right along! My dad even joked that they should have changed that to be 2259. An hour and 10% charge later I noticed our neighbors lights were on and just a few moments after that the Powerwall switched us back to utility. Rumor is on the street that a branch fell on some lines down the block - an easy fix but who knows what could happen next time.

I warned my wife that I was going to be giddy the first real outage we had and I didn't disappoint! Had a big grin on my face the whole time. Awesome to see everything working

Nice. I know that giddy feeling. Like prepping for a test and realizing that you studied all of the correct information. A one hour outage won't get a lot of people to consider a solution, but it is amazing what a 24 hour outage will do, based on some of my neighbors' comments.