Utilities fighting against rooftop solar are only hastening their own doom

Instead of innovating in either service or product, many utility companies are trying to get cities and counties to make home solar panels illegal.

If utilities alter rate structures to reflect time of day and location (as they should!), batteries allow solar customers to arbitrage, storing power when it is cheap, selling it back to the grid when it’s worth more.
If utilities reduce the amount they pay for rooftop solar-generated power, batteries allow customers to increase their “self-consumption” — that is, to consume more of the solar power they generate, by storing it and spreading it out across the day. McKinsey calls this “partial grid defection, in which customers choose to stay connected to the grid in order to have access to 24/7 reliability, but generate 80 to 90 percent of their own energy and use storage to optimize their solar for their own consumption.”
That’s a nightmare for utilities: customers who use their grid but pay them nothing for it, forcing them to charge other customers more.
Utilities can charge fixed grid-connection fees to all customers, but if those get too high, they start to push customers toward full grid defection — ditching the utility entirely.
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What McKinsey does make clear is that for power utilities, unlike for so many other decrepit American institutions, simply clinging to the status quo is not an option. Rooftop solar can be staved off temporarily with fees and rate tweaks, but as batteries get cheaper, those strategies will stop working. More and customers are going to generate, store, and manage more and more of their own power.
Utilities have got to find other ways to make money, other services to provide, other roles to play in the power system of the future. They have no other choice.