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Comment by oloboWd | Hacker News Reader

There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.

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All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money.

But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.

And THAT is a primary reason utility companies are fighting grid-connected consumer solar right now. If you are grid attached you are part of the cost of maintaining the grid that is normally offset by your revenue to the utility. If you are just using it as a glorified battery backup by feeding in excess during the day and pulling during the night and you are a net zero to then company then your per-customer revenue is much much lower. If only a small percentage of customers do this then you can level it out. If that percentage starts to grow then something has to give. Either you lower your maintenance budget, lower your operating costs, or lower your net profits. No one directly involved wants any of those to actually happen. This is obviously greatly simplified (e.g. The extra cost of handling customer generated power), but you get the idea.

Or you negotiate with whomever licenses you to be allowed to change your charges so that the maintenance is covered by a connection/subscription fee and usage is billed separately.

This is increasingly how utilities are structured in Europe: You have connection charges, and usage charges, and they may be due to different companies (though are often billed together via the provider you pay usage charges to).

This has come as part of breaking up utility monopolies so that people can e.g. pick "their" electricity provider (of course in practice this just means the providers settle overall relative supply between each other).

My utility here in the US has a per-custom base fee, but I think the issue is the base fee is regulated and not high enough to cover the costs of solar customers.

The "grid" doesn't yet exist in certain plots of land. One may want to build a house in the woods, but not pay the costs to get electric/water/sewage run to the property from whatever main road is closest.

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