Protection

I work as a protection engineer at SMUD -- one of those black hole jobs that no one knows anything about -- but it is far and away the best job I have ever had. Ever.

Lack of protection on the power system was responsible for the Florida blackout last week. A fault occured, and with nothing to break the fault current (SMUDs fault duty approaches 25,000 Amps)...well, the grid likely went unstable due to the sustained fault. And shit melted.

Fault detection and isolation is built into the Sunny Boy inverter on my solar system. It is, in my opinion, another black hole. I am only fairly certain I've built the system correctly...not a glowing recommendation to be sure, but, it passed inspection, I've yet to get shocked, and it has run flawlessly for almost a year. On three counts it couldn't possibly be wrong...