The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire.
Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].
Wow. Did you read the next three paragraphs to the end of the article:
| Policymakers are now attempting to come up with solutions. “You can make solar play nice with the grids,” ...
| Yet the best solution would be for energy firms to respond to the competition and sort themselves out.
The article is talking about:
* how solar is disrupting the traditional utility model
* in countries where the utilities provide a poor service wealthy people are doing there own thing producing their own power with PV
* how this leads to less customers for the utility leading to more expensive power for people who cannot afford to generate their own power
* that solutions like grid-tied home PV instead of independent systems provides a better outcome for everyone in the area.
I don't think it it to much of a stretch to say that the article is advocating for, as you say, "a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage."
You forget that governments built the grid. Then they sold them, usually for far less than they're worth to "friendly" companies to get some money to spend. These companies, in a complete baffling coincidence then provided a suspicious number of those politicians with board seats after they retire from government, or "government liason director" positions and the like. Now the government is forever paying interest ... well, not so much the government, of course, the customers are. You and me. The government got the money, spent it, it's gone.
BUT, a while ago rich people started to get off the grid. And this has advantages, such as much greater flexibility in where to live, so they did.
Middle class people could get off the grid, which ironically the government paid them for. So they did.
Companies largely got off the grid (it's more complicated, they built solar plants, then sold the electricity for electricity at night or somehow traded with grids, and locked in these contracts for decades). So they're effectively off the grid.
So who's paying this eternal interest that keeps increasing?
Who isn't off the grid? The governments themselves, and poor people. Governments have, of course, decided they don't pay for the grid themselves (not even for maintenance). It's in your electricity bill ... which due to government financial responsibility (such as the previous German government entrusting all this ... to Putin. Yes, really, that Putin) ... is climbing fast. One might add that one story is that the head of the government that entrusted German energy to Putin was threatened during an official visit to Putin ... by Putin setting dogs on her (he had read she was terrified of dogs) ... she STILL went through with entrusting the energy infrastructure to Putin. Then Ukraine blew up a major part of the infrastructure Putin built. You can't make this up. Personally, I'm the sort of person that if someone sets dogs on me ... anything after that is going to be a tough sell.
So now poor people effectively have an extra tax in high electricity prices that are climbing fast (the increases are now down to 5x the rate of inflation. Yes, DOWN, that's correct). Oh and to make matters worse, as the article points out, it's become ever easier to get off the grid. Which means the people served by the grid ... still dropping. Not just houses in suburbs are disconnecting, but city houses as well. And there may be other reasons. It's green. Or my favorite: the Israeli reason (these people are brilliant and insane). Convincing people to buy solar power because ... it does not disconnect in case of war. Apparently it's popular in Arab countries too.
Since this allowed past governments to spend more money, they now have no problem spending a less, or paying that money back, of course. Yes, that last sentence was a joke. No, in reality they're coming up with ever crueler and more forceful methods to make sure poor people pay the extra tax, such as making it non-dischargeable. Making it a crime to disconnect from the grid. To take it out of unemployment benefits before the person sees the money. To threaten everything a person has in case of non-payment (e.g. school subsidies for their children). Etc.
It isn't working.
Oh and that this debacle, which is entirely the decision of the currently in power party, even if the head of the government was swapped, is driving people in droves to other parties (ie. AfD), is the fault of Zelensky, Putin, Musk, Netanyahu ... and frankly everyone ... except of course the party that actually did it.
I used to build microgrids and work closely with utilities - generation, transmission, and distribution. This was probably 15 years ago, but they talked about the 'solar death spiral' even back then.
In my opinion, a lot had to do with how they set retail rates. The retail electric companies set different rate categories and tiers. Most residential customers don't realize that they're often subsidizing commercial and industrial customers. So, of course there's going to be a death spiral when those residential customers decide to generate themselves.
Industrial power consumers are billed differently - so it could be more or could be less. The bills are more complicated - industrial customers will generally pay for things like power factor, capacity, demand, time-of-use rates, tiered rates, etc. On a per kWh basis it would depend from customer to customer. If you had a factory that operated overnight for whatever reason, their electricity would be very cheap.
Weird, I didn't read it like that at all. The article really just comes off as an explanation of the effects of decentralized solar on existing utility companies. It doesn't ever say that solar installers are bad.
In fact, it even somewhat welcomes it by pointing out that the competition utility companies now face will force them to offer better service.
> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage
I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff.
So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax.
Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.
I don't think there is a viable answer to that. The thing is a lot of what we pay for with the grid is reliability. Until rates are set up in a fashion to properly express that we will have problems.
Wind and solar reduce fuel use, but they make for very little reduction in required infrastructure. Thus the value to the utility company is approximately the value of the fuel that's offset minus the costs of handling the situation.
Combine these and you see that the true value of wind and solar is pretty low other than from an environmental standpoint of reducing carbon emissions. (Now, if you have a use case of something that's power intensive but can freely be turned on and off then there could be some appreciable value.)
It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.
This is almost what is happening. Rate payers are paying less and less in order to compensate for production cost, and increasingly more in order to be connected to the grid and that the grid is stable. For the moment that cost is mostly attached to how much energy is consumed as a matter of billing, but that can change.
Rooftop solar with storage and a grid disconnect is fine. The problem comes about when people expect the grid to be there during the 5% event but otherwise be free (or even worse, that the utility be required to pay them for low-value power that overloads puny distribution systems during undesirable generation hours. It's a matter of economics - centralized generation, transmission, and distribution is expensive. Someone's got to pay for it if we want it to exist. A lot of people crow about their great solar setup and don't talk much about the power that they pull from the boring old grid.
If we're ok with everyone being an island or building a system capable of massively distributed generation, great. It will be massively more complex, less efficient, and more expensive to maintain. Let's just be honest about the nature of the problem.
Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...