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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. This might be the current problem for utilities, where laws demand that solar power can be inserted into the grid (often as a priority or for a guaranteed price) by what would normally be just consumer households.

This article is talking about using your solar power system to actually fulfill your complete power needs, without any grid.

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Could you point to where the article talks about people disconnecting from the grid? I couldn't find it in my read through. For instance, the article says at one point, "What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup?"

I think the risk of people disconnecting from the grid is fairly low, since the necessary lead acid batteries cost thousands of dollars.

-Former utility employee

It's obviously speculative. Both battery tech and methods of local power generation technology is improving. At some point one can imagine a tipping point that it'll become a worthwhile investment for those that aren't super rich. The assumption is the utility companies will act to protect their levels of revenue and raise prices to compensate. This will result in more people investing in solutions. Rince and repeat until your utlility companies are getting bailouts.

There are many different regulatory environments, but the utility I worked at, where I wrote programs to calculate the hourly price of electricity, the utility made zero dollars from usage by residential customers.

Residential customers payed a fixed rate to be connected, and every penny the utility collected for energy was remitted to the market operator.

The utility also made no money on energy by large users, but they were billed based on their own hourly use and the hourly price, and some also would have had demand charges.

so where does the utility make their money?!

Monetary float.

They made money on the regulated connection fee.

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