This process makes the typical consumer a temporary producer while the flow of electrical power remains reversed.
Electrical utilities often take steps to decrease their overall parasitic load to minimize this type of backfeeding and improve efficiency.
[3] For manufacturing cost and operational simplicity reasons, most circuit (overcurrent) protection and power quality control (voltage regulation) devices used by electric utility companies are designed with the assumption that power always flows in one direction.
Such costs may be minimized by limiting distributed generation capacity to less than that which is consumed locally, and guaranteeing this condition by installing a reverse-power cutoff relay that opens if backfeeding occurs.
[4] Because it involves transfer of significant amounts of energy, backfeeding must be carefully controlled and monitored.