It already is... Here's the thing, it's unlikely anything would be 180 degrees out of phase (and especially not of equal magnitude), so you won't get this:SuburbanFarmer wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:43 pmI fail to understand why this capability wouldn’t be built into every solar/wind installation.
But any out of phase can be problematic...
Ok, even 45 degrees is fairly extreme, but say it's 2 degrees, 5 degrees, 3 degrees... And not a mix of only two sources but of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions, all injecting their "ac signal" into effectively the same wire (the grid). It wouldn't be a very "clean sine wave" anymore.
With 50 well maintained power stations it's fairly easy to control, you've only got 50, or maybe even a couple hundred potential failure points... but what happens to those odds when it increases exponentially to 100,000 or millions? Sure, you design safety systems in, but even those can fail in some circumstances...
Modern grid-tie inverters actually do, for instance, monitor the grid for Power on the outside grid, and will cut themselves off the grid if the grid power cuts out (mandated for grid-tie BTW) - so if say a storm take a out wires it's not still feeding power in that could potentially electrocute a line worker trying to fix things. (The same reason if you have a generator you have to cut off the mains connection while running it). Now ask yourself - if your neighbor is also grid-tied into your same wires, do you see the mains (utility) grid power go out? Or does your setup still see the neighbors power feeding in, and they yours, and both keep feeding power to the grid - potentially causing loss of life? Just one of the many potential problems with a vast diverse generation system.
People who don't understand the electrical engineering side if things like to think "oh it's so easy, like hooking a couple car batteries together"... it's not.