Make zero (or low) interest loans available to pay for it; the power companies could originate the loans and pay them back through the existing monthly payment system.
Everybody wins: people get cheaper/sustainable power, the grid load is eased, and the utilities can make money handling the money.
Another thing we saw with some utilities is that they had to raise rates during the drought to cover their costs. People were so good at reducing their water consumption that the utilities were having trouble covering their large fixed costs. It'll be interesting to see how things go once California implements the income-based fixed electric billing in the next few years.
After Tesla was able to supply a battery pack to the city in Australia after a Twitter bet, I'm really surprised that more storage has not been installed everywhere. Maybe I stopped paying attention to the story too soon, but did this battery buffer not fix the problem?
The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners.
[1]: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
[2]: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...
Isn't that trivial to at least mitigate via time-of-use rates?
If millions of people stop paying monthly utility bills, electric utilities start to run in the red, or have to further raise rates while the grid further destabilizes. This is unfolding in real time in California and a few studies have come out showing that subsidized rooftop solar is doing more harm than good without utility-grade energy storage.
I realize that in your scenario we're talking about millions of people no longer paying utility bills, but surely that could not and would not happen overnight, and I cannot imagine that these companies could not find some wiggle room in their billion dollar profit margins to adapt to a change that might for once lower monthly bills.
But that would make actual use effectively free and disincentivize conservation. So it's a hard problem to solve.
You could perhaps raise the effective price of solar by writing in high per-month fees for any houses with solar, but also waive those fees for homes which prove they have a substantial-enough battery solution to help ease demand on the grid during the relatively high-use hours of 5PM to 10PM.
[1] It's different for big industrial users, like factories operating 24/7; their per-unit costs are dominated by consumption rather than infrastructure. They also get lower prices partially reflecting these lower costs.
There is often a difference between "industrial" vs. "commercial" but both seem to pay lower rates than residential.
Phew. I am so relieved. Not a single day goes by when I do not think about how those poor riches manage.
I've long held that, at least in developed countries, we should be ending unemployment insurance and moving to guaranteed employment and utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs.
Yes, of course not for disabled or high skilled folks who just need to transition. But for many many cases there's little reason to give someone hundreds per week for no work.
While I agree with that, it seems the implementation of a program like that would be quite difficult...especially considering how difficult it is to get pretty much anything done.
Are these new workers doing things that other union workers could be doing? Would they have to join the union? Those two simple things would derail any plan like that for one side of the isle in the US, at least.
Perhaps a wide retraining program offering. Something like "Hey you've been unemployed for 2 years, you're losing benefits starting (sometime). To help you along you can take a free solar installer course paid by the tax payer."
And when suddenly there is not enough of them work for food people? This is how GULAG came to be.
I'm thinking national projects like hoover dam and interstate highway systems.
As i understand it having even a little work/contribution can help with holding off depression . It doesnt have to be 40hrs a week, but even a single day of work can help keep normalcy.
"hoover dam"
Book Recommendation: The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25814021-the-profiteers?...