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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

The argument is that customers of the power company are funding payments to owners of solar panels.

If there are less/no customers of the power company, there aren't as much/any funds for those payments.

Also, you can't have these solar panels without the power companies. The solar panels only produce electricity while the sun is up so the people with solar panels are essentially using the utilities as free batteries - produce power during the height of the day when less power is needed and use more power ~5pm when the grid is at its max.

Also, you can't have these solar panels without the power companies.

Not true any more, not that it ever really was, is just a lot cheaper to do now - http://www.aquionenergy.com/

Power is almost always more expensive in the middle of the day. You can see this if you look at the energy component of the hourly electricity price (day ahead or real time) for any of the organized electricity markets (though you aren't totally wrong, the winter load profile does have a local minimum 14-17). Residential use lags in the midday but commercial + residential almost always peaks midday. In other words, solar generation occurs closer to peak pricing (i.e. solar electricity is more valuable electricity).

If there are less customers of the power company, then the electricity per person is more expensive and solar is then even more competitive. This prediction for the collapse of conventional electricity suppliers is being referred to as the solar-death-spiral and it came from wall street, not the green lobby.

True enough, but the initial comment from chrisBob was about the immediate situation.

Batteries have huge economies of scale, and solar needs them.

The utilities will change, but I doubt they'll disappear.

But those same customers have for decades funded the capital expenditure of the power companies without getting to own anything at all. If they take their money elsewhere you can hardly blame them. It is like getting a mortgage instead of renting.

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