I'm guessing: fewer people buying from the power companies/grid => the fixed costs of these companies are pushed onto the poorer customers, who already couldn't afford much.

The following isn't a grid problem (more of a demand issue), but maybe they're referring to this:

> But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it. [1]

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-pakistan-s-solar-en...

Previously, pretty much everyone (not just 'rich people', although, well, 'rich' is relative here, of course...) had diesel generators, which were not connected to the grid, since that would be seriously expensive, plus syncing would be pretty much impossible anyway.

With solar, you can feed back into the grid much more easily, to the point that this is the default. This sort-of doubles the load on the grid (not exactly, but you get the idea), since both 'consumption' and 'production' need to cross the same wires.

This is a problem even in, like, Germany, where the grid operator can send a "kill signal" to local solar inverters to shut down. In Pakistan, I can't even imagine...

Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).

Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.

Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.

But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.

Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.

Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.

AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622584

South Africa - load shedding is a curse word here :).

Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720

The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.

Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.

The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.

So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.

LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.

"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504630 - July 2025 (4 comments)

IEA: The battery industry has entered a new phase - https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-en... - March 5th, 2025

Naxtra Battery Breakthrough & Dual-Power Architecture: CATL Pioneers the Multi-Power Era - https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html - April 21st, 2025

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024

Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.

My payback is 6-7 years in Canada with $0 invested.

“Responsible for my own power generation” = I do literally nothing. Nada.

I get $1000 a year for free.

Please show me someone who does not want $1000 per year for absolutely nothing.

A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.

Most people don’t have the capital to be responsible for their own electricity generation, except the rich.

I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.

overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.

Shift usage to daytime and rely on battery storage.

Where do the massive upgrades to the distribution system required for this kind of setup come from?

We simultaneously hate utilities and want them to redesign and pay for a distribution system that was not intended for bidirectional load flow.

Our municipal distribution systems are barely adequate. Net metering produces essentially no revenue but imposes a huge load on that infra.

It seems to have worked, too.[1]

Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.

Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...

[2] https://www.ercot.com/mktrules/keypriorities/bes/ktc8

And it's messing with our utilities in BC because we were buying the daytime oversupply in California and selling the hydro generated power back at night. They've had to adjust plans as battery storage comes online.