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Honest question: do you think residential / small scale commercial solar is the future? As an outsider it seems like utility companies are best placed to deploy

Honest question: do you think residential / small scale commercial solar is the future? As an outsider it seems like utility companies are best placed to deploy solar at large scale in the right locations, bypassing customer acquisition costs. Here in California, PG&E offers the "solar choice" program where I pay extra to have 100% of my electricity generated from solar. This cost $6.50 of my $82 electric bill last month. (Yes I know electricity is fungible.)

brownbat 8y ago
That's a tough question. Distributed production offers some huge advantages, but in the nrel study above you'll find that utility scale is strictly more efficient. I think Hawaii is a good case study. Customers are generally frustrated with the power company's poor reliability and high rates. Rooftop solar offers a substitute for what has traditionally been a protected monopoly, and there's abundant sun, so solar adoption there is crazy strong. HECO has generally fought to slow it down. If utilities realize this threat, they'll become competitive on price and customer service. Reliability in some places. If they do not understand this threat, then they will just try to lobby for more and more extensive penalties for those with rooftop solar who are still connecting to the grid. Like cable companies raising rates in response to the rise of Netflix. The most extreme version of that would be the emergence of microgrids - cord cutting from utilities by entire subdivisions. Microgrids are potentially really cool technology, but would require some pretty intense dysfunction to take off. So while I hope utilities figure this out, regions will vary, and rooftops put a new sort of check on how bad utilities can get, even if they don't become ubiquitous. Rooftops will inevitably be the answer in some places, not all. Oh and if you look country by country, to places where it has been harder to get a well financed responsible utility... Parts of Latin America or Africa could really be jump-started economically by rooftop solar.

brownbat 8y ago

That's a tough question. Distributed production offers some huge advantages, but in the nrel study above you'll find that utility scale is strictly more efficient. I think Hawaii is a good case study. Customers are generally frustrated with the power company's poor reliability and high rates. Rooftop solar offers a substitute for what has traditionally been a protected monopoly, and there's abundant sun, so solar adoption there is crazy strong. HECO has generally fought to slow it down. If utilities realize this threat, they'll become competitive on price and customer service. Reliability in some places. If they do not understand this threat, then they will just try to lobby for more and more extensive penalties for those with rooftop solar who are still connecting to the grid. Like cable companies raising rates in response to the rise of Netflix. The most extreme version of that would be the emergence of microgrids - cord cutting from utilities by entire subdivisions. Microgrids are potentially really cool technology, but would require some pretty intense dysfunction to take off. So while I hope utilities figure this out, regions will vary, and rooftops put a new sort of check on how bad utilities can get, even if they don't become ubiquitous. Rooftops will inevitably be the answer in some places, not all. Oh and if you look country by country, to places where it has been harder to get a well financed responsible utility... Parts of Latin America or Africa could really be jump-started economically by rooftop solar.