Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies: Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.

[European utilities] have failsafes implemented to prevent back feeding electricity in the grid

Yeah but imagine if you could save money by not doing that? What are the odds that there's going to be cheap(er) personal mass power generation in the next few decades.

While it seems like they’d have to, the article makes no mention of such a fail safe. What does it do and how could it work?

From what it sounds like, the safety is in the device not the grid. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a far lesser sense of personal responsibility to those around you in the US than Europe and I don’t know that I’d trust that nobody over here would fudge some bypass to power their house in an outage

These systems are approved in Europe by utilities because they have failsafes implemented to prevent back feeding electricity in the grid.

Sounds like Big Government Regulation of my God Damned Rights to do something on my house as I see fit! Europe's full o' damn communists and their stupid sun grabbin' electro-gibbits. That's why they'll never be the Greatest Bestest Country on da face a dis here Earf.

They have enough energy, but they automatically turn off once the grid goes down because they need the grid to synchronize. Balcony solar panels are not able to work in "island mode", so no lineman is at risk.

You really don't need a lot of power to kill someone, especially with AC you really don't need much to induce ventricular fibrillation.

A 120W panel at full sunlight easily has enough power to kill someone. That's 1A at 120V, minus some conversion losses. 120W is pretty low end these days.