> It only offsets their use This is exactly the problem. During the day when solar energy is plentiful, the homes don’t use energy – great! But at night, they

> It only offsets their use This is exactly the problem. During the day when solar energy is plentiful, the homes don’t use energy – great! But at night, they do, and it costs the power company a lot more money to serve this power at night than they are saving during the day. > I would also point out that with solar this free excess is directly helpful to utilities because it happens in the middle of the day when summer energy use peaks It is not. Peak load happens in California in the summer, yes, but the moment the Sun goes down. Not during the day. If the houses have batteries for load shifting, then yes, distributed generation is helpful for peak load. But not without. Feed-in tariffs in Germany were a huge “gift to the world” [1] and instrumental to the solar industry. But not sustainable :P 1 - https://gregnemet.net/book/ch5 https://gregnemet.net/book/ch5