In places like Germany it's supposedly becoming more common to have a solar panel on the balcony and use a similar plugin device. I think the legal situation in the US is more tricky unfortunately
Not only in Germany, as per Commission Regulation EU 2016/631 systems under 800W are not regulated as power generating facilities - you just need a two-way meter installed on request by your power company and you're good to go.
Does the two-way meter have a way to prevent back feeding the grid in the event of a power outage? Having an unregulated device even under 800W seems like it could be dangerous to anybody working on the power lines.
> prevent back feeding the grid in the event of a power outage?
Yes - such devices need a constant grid output to sync to. When the grid drops, their output drops. Furthermore, at 800W, it wouldn't be able to put any voltage onto the grid even if it tried to as it would get overloaded (it'll be trying to power up the entire neighborhood).
I think the idea was maintenance, so the connection to the neighbors would've been interrupted, thus the only connection would be through the person doing the maintenance.
