“Easy-to-install solar panels that plug into a regular outlet are getting attention just as Americans are worried about rising energy costs. That’s because these plug-in or balcony solar panels start shaving off part of a homeowner’s or renter’s utility bill right away.
“”A year ago, nobody was talking about this,” says Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a California nonprofit group that advocates for plug-in solar. The panels are already popular in Germany, where more than 1.2 million of the small plug-in systems are registered with the German government.”
In the US, not necessarily. Connecting power generators to the grid without a permit from an electriction is technically illegal. Most utilities will charge you or even get you in trouble if it’s reported to them, or you send power back through the meter, hence the standard approach is to dump the power into batteries and just run devices off that.
And even in places like Utah (which just legalized this), the battery-less panels are still expensive.
I don’t know why. Maybe scaling+competition hasn’t kicked in to bring prices down? It could also be that 120V inverters are less common and more expensive?