they call them "rentoids" now

Having lived in a rental for many many years the inability to make small mods is SO annoying.

But this does beg the question, who OWNS a balcony. 99% of the home owners I know have single family houses. Granted I live in the south so owning an apartment is not the norm but I assume some people own an apartment in places like New York? But I’d assume people do?

I tried to look it up and from what I could find only about 15-17% of housing units in the US are apartments, and of those only about 15% own. So maybe 2% even have the opportunity. And this is assuming THOSE units have balconies, which I’m assuming only a small percentage of that 2% do. I’d think this is a major factor to balcony solar not taking off.

Yay for Neo-Nazis in government. :(

Any recommendations would be appreciated

Huh, the wiring just supports power spontaneously coming from an exit point rather than an entry? Is that commonplace?

Why wouldn't it? Electrical wiring isn't a one way road, electricity (this is an extreme oversimplification, especially when it comes to AC) will always flow from points of high voltage to points of lower voltage. That's how solar inverters feed into the grid. Raise their voltage a tad bit higher than the grid and match the frequency and phase of the grid until the outflow matches their maximum available power.

Is that commonplace?

That is a hard question, because this isn't a feature, it's how things are. Only thing one needs to take care of is that the solar inverter doesn't deliver so much power that the circuit can consume beyond the circuit breakers capacity, otherwise the breaker would be rendered useless. That's why these small plug inverters are limited to 800W in Germany, that puts the entire possible load on a 16A circuit into the general upper limit that is still within the safety margin fro 16A circuits.

EDIT: Now before someone gets the bright idea to connect their diesel generator to the grid this way: Don't. It will not be in sync or phase and that will make something spectacular happen, but it will not supply the grid. Either have an expensive generator that is able to sync to the grid or have a grid disconnect and switchover in front of your generator plugin socket.

EDITEDIT: Also please never connect an island capable solar inverter to a plug. The ones described above are safe that way, because they wait for grid voltage to be available before they do anything, so there will never be high voltage on the open plug. An island capable solar inverter does by definition not do that. There will be high voltage on the plug and it will kill you and it will hurt like a fucker the entire time you're dying.

My parents recently bought a couple and put them on the shed, you plug it in and magically, it feeds electricity into your home power network. No idea how bit it definitely works!