This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to solar + battery + ( EV, heat pump water heater, induction stove) and disconnect from grid. Grid disconnects will cause costs to rise even more, a virtuous cycle.
And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.
> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.
Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.
Building a large solar installation may scale a bit sub-linearly, if you can e.g. order things in bulk at better prices, and have some electric assemblies done at a factory, more efficiently.
Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).
Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.
I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.
Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.
The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
I did get induction to replace a propane cooktop recently but that's only because I had to get a new range after a fire and induction probably made more sense than it did a few years back.
That doesn't sound like "great news" to me unless you're a serious classist.