They would be forced to pay even higher energy costs if they had to also compete with all these homes which now relies less on the grid.

> And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?

Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.

> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).

All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.

Solar generation has little economies of scale: PV arrays scale linearly, unlike turbines and electromechanical generators. Batteries also scale basically linearly; maybe you can have a better deal if you buy a truly massive amount of batteries, but I'm not certain it's so dramatic.

Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.

Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.

Upgrading transmission infrastructure costs a lot of money (and bureaucracy). Especially in Oregon and northern California where the lines probably should be buried to stop risking wildfires. I’m not sure which path is actually more cost effective for solar+battery.

Centralized generation is the riskiest for any economy. The targets to bomb (or local drones) are very well known and super easy to disrupt the entire economy. Solar on every roof is the most resilient and cheapest form of energy.

Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).

Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.

It's not just the generation; it's also the maintenance. If you own your own rooftop panels and a few go out, it's relatively expensive to bring someone out to replace them...if a mechanically and electrically equivalent replacement exists in 5 years. At utility scale, you're always replacing panels, so you have dedicated staff doing it.

Others have replied saying why this may not be the case, but even if it is — you also need to balance efficiency with other values, such as independence and resiliency.

I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.

Capital upgrades don't require capital, only monthly installments. US has the most advance financial packaging infrastructure that can package anything into a monthly payment. It will be a straight up comparison between (electricity bill from grid + gas for 2 ICE cars + natural gas bill) vs (solar + 2 EVs + heat pump water heater + induction stove).

Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.

The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.