A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations

A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations. Not necessarily. For household solar, economies of scale kick in at the manufacturing level -- if you’re producing lots of standardized units, each household’s installation costs can go down. You’re right that there will be some distribution inefficiency, as some households will over-produce and some under. But it may not be that bad if most households size their installations sensibly. The centralized utility can balance distribution across many households, but there are some extra costs too -- installation and maintenance of power lines, power leakage, downtime due to faults. Edit to add: I suspect we could agree that district solar (small local utility companies) is an excellent compromise that gets most of the benefits of both types.