It may slightly help with capacity, but it causes bigger problems financially. Even if a home uses next to no power, it still must be connected to the grid. The total number of such homes ends up meaning a lot of power lines, transformer stations, monitoring equipment, and people to do all the work.

If you have all of that expense, and suddenly people have solar panels so pay $0 for an energy bill - do you see the problem? The actual cost of fuel/generation is very small compared to the fixed costs.

The more people use solar, the more in the red the utility becomes. You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top, but that destroys the incentive for solar panels - they'd never break even for the average buyer.

Solar is great, fantastic even. But it should be done centrally, or people will have to get used to the idea that they will never pay themselves off and are just doing it for the environment.

Where I from, every utility bill has two parts: fixed cost and metered cost. You pay for installed capacity and by the meter for actually consumed kWh, GJ, m3.

The term you're circling is "grid defection".

> must be connected to the grid.

That's a legislative problem. If a home can prove it can produce enough electricity for itself, it should not be forced to be connected.

> You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top

A lot of places already do this.

That is an interesting theory, but it doesn’t work like that in reality.

Australia is giving free power to everyone during the day because they have so much.

More solar is a great thing.