South Africa could learn so much from this. But won't.
For international readers: In ZA we have this thing backwards, and during an electricity crisis nearing 20 years soon. Everyone who can afford it (middle class and up) is installing backup inverters & batteries, and solar if they can afford that extra cost. However feeding back into the grid is a net-negative for citizens, as the power utility charges a fee to do so and pays less than the cost of solar output to these producers. Even Cape Town's payback scheme which came in last year as a "great solution" is still at best a break-even for some.
One of the consequences is that many renewable energy producing houses don't feed back in and are also not consumers of grid power. Over time this may leave the main revenue stream of the state power utility to be only that of poor & non-paying municipalities.
Our only refuge from the madness is coming to HN and seeing others actually do this thing right, and wishing for things to be better.
As for the comment on renewables leaving Eskom without paying customers: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/521167-people-dumping-... (it's more of an opinion piece, but given how much non-payment there is by many low income municipalities, I see this as a potential reality)
Based on my limited experience and a sample size <5 I can attest to the dramatic quality of life improvement it's made to our household, and it's getting cheaper by the month to buy and install. More and more businesses and new developments are going up with rooftop solar from the start. If you are in the market for a house today, I'm pretty sure that rooftop solar will be one of those things on the "really-nice-to-have" list of things that include a pool, double garage and a built-in braai (bbq). One of these days it's going to move over to the "essential-must-have" list.
10 years from now Eskom is going to excitedly announce "we fixed loadshedding" only for the whole taxpayer base to say "so what"
There is the idea of "renter friendly solar" - either rented solar done in collaboration with the landlord, or varying degrees of portable solution i.e. not connecting to mains to power the entire house but just to a battery that you power a handful of things off of.
My father, with a much bigger system and an old school disk-style power meter is exporting close to 30kWh a day "illegally" once he's done charging his batteries and all that.
And now they want to bring in additional fees and charges for selling to the grid, and they want to buy back at ridiculously discounted rates (1-10% of the buy-cost), which immediately makes it a non-starter for most. So even though 50-60% of all installed systems (my estimate) are ready and capable to export, nobody does, because "reasons".
It's all well and good to save a few cents on electricity, but the real cost is the liability. Fry a lineman and your father may be looking at a multimillion dollar settlement.