At what point is a 1 in X event need to be likely to occur for it to be worth spending thousands on, if not 10,000's?

My point is that with this basic setup (I run 2 kWp) is that you still lose power when the grid goes down, so your relationship to the grid is not totally changed. The only thing you notice are smaller power bills.

The disadvantage is compared to a insular/black start capable setup which is more expensive/complicated (and needs a licensed electrician to be legal) but lets you run on battery when the grid goes down.

Do you have a pointer to such DIY home solar? I was planning to build my next system from Victron components, but this could be an interesting alternative.

Do you have any directions where to go for this, traveler?

Yeah, you can run a few systems on a circuit that way, but most of the ups-like storage inverters are not integrated into your solar PV system, so don't try to minimize feed-in into the grid and maximize locally generated power consumption.

Renewable power generation is not dispatchable, so large fraction of it in generation make grid stabilization interventions more frequent.

Unless your country has a sane generation strategy you should plan for more rather than less power outage events in future. Fortunately commercial home solutions for that exist and are getting cheaper.

It's possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.

You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That's really simple and cheap, but isn't safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.

You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn't work when the grid isn't connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can't do things on its own.

If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you'll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it's not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid's AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.

It's not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of "what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?" For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.

The grid-tied inverters need to have a grid voltage and frequency to be in a certain defined range orelse they switch off (this behaviour can be changed via firmware for some inverters). In theory you could use a pure sinus UPS for that, but in practice it is not designed to receive power on the outlet side and will overload/burn out.

There are specific battery/diesel backed solar grid-tied inverter solutions which can smoothly separate and reconnect from the grid during outages while providing power to the consumers. These are far more expensive than simple grid-tied solar inverters.

Yes, you can use that as an emergency solution, if you have a battery-buffered solar system with an UPS functionality. Most existing balcony solar systems don't have that.

You're forgetting that those batteries are super useful in case of power outages

1. The last power outage I had was over 10 years ago.
2. Batteries only work in that case if the inverter isn't "grid-following". Most inverters are, and so when the grid goes down, so do your batteries.

I know about off peak rates but that makes it even longer to pay for its self as you are only saving some of the energy cost rather than all of it. Does eliminate solar panel needs but still looking at a decade or more and panels are comparably cheap.

Power cuts are so rare here that it might be dead before the next powercut, and never had one last for more than minutes.