Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Probably not. What you gain from economy of scale in purchasing, you lose with transmission and land costs. You have to put the panels somewhere. For home use, you use your roof, which is waste space - and nobody is going to sue over a flat-footed turkey lizard habitat...
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Centralized facilities can get a lot of savings in the *storage* side of the system because they can afford more sophisticated *shared* storage mechanisms that don't scale well down to single family installations.
Alternative energy systems are also *intermitent* generation systems and are only viable today to the extent that the centralized utilities serve as a storage and backup system.
In my region, the local utility is compelled by law to buy any excess solar and windpower from residential installations at *retail* prices. It makes solar more attractive than if the homeowner had to install a bank of batteries to hold unused daylight power for nighttime use. This poses no problem to the utilities because the adoption of home energy systems is miniscule, but will be unsustainable once adoption rates become significant.
Rest assured there will be changes as adoption increases and the changes will not necessarily favor increased adoption of distributed energy systems.