Rate-design wars are the sound of utilities taking residential PV seriously

Suppose you were a homeowner with solar panels installed. Right now, you're not paying very little because of net metering. Two years from now, the utility decides you'll need to pay monthly for grid connection.

It might then make sense to just cut the grid connection. Adding panels and batteries is the obvious choice, along with upgrading appliances with more energy efficient ones. Batteries are expensive, though they could be in your electric car.

One step further, if neighbourhoods or condo associations organize in micro-grids, big utilities are again stranded with useless assets.

For those who have suggested going off the grid, keep in mind that even in sunny California, we do have a rainy season. I've reviewed my friends' electric bills with them, and even those with quite large PV installations are still net consumers through most of the winter. To make it through, you'd likely need a generator (dirty, loud, expensive).

I think the bigger issue here is that people have made long-term commitments (20 year lease agreements) to finance solar installations, counting on net metering and a continual increase in power rates. If the utilities change the game, you're going to screw over a lot of fairly well-off consumers (vs. the mean), which doesn't usually go over well.

Infrastructure investments must now be done by HECO to allow for increased solar adoption - something that may not be in the best interest for the utility.

I'm fairly confident this section about Germany is wrong - Germany has feed in tariffs which operate in addition to net metering, not as an alternative. That is certainly the case in the UK, whose system was modelled on Germany's.

Still, the basic point of this post is correct, net metering is an indirect subsidy, but there is an obvious technical solution: using the article's metaphor, to encourage people to eat their own zucchinis, or to use the solar energy on-site rather than automatically exporting it to the grid.

At present, PV systems export generated electricity directly to the grid, separately from the grid-connection used to bring in electricity which is consumed on-site, all of which is imported. Solar could fulfil normal electricity demand, and also be used to charge up storage heaters, or storage a.c. To the utilities, the house would look like any other, except with lower electricity demand.

"they want to further reduce the incremental energy price by implementing a fixed monthly charge on each customer, aimed at covering some of the costs of retail distribution, metering and billing."

That's straight out of the 1975 hippie classic "Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston" - and is one of the Casus belli California cited when seceding from the union in that book.

Whether I shave off my higher-tiered consumption by changing my thermostat, changing my lighting or by putting in solar, that lost high-profit consumption isn't the company's property, it's mine to do something else with.

But I would be adverse to having to pay via a "connection charge" for what looks to me like a failed uprating of a nuclear plant, if I were I a Southern California Edison customer.