[johngalt]

You are underestimating how much of your electricity bill is going to capital costs. It's possible that the cost of electricity consumption will drop, but only if it replaced with other costs to subsidize the cost of the various electrical infrastructure.

Installing a small amount of solar to offset personal usage at the hottest part of the day is much different than ensuring that varied demands can be met across an entire city 24/7. This is also true on a personal scale. It is much more costly to go fully off grid, and the payoff times are much longer (if ever).

The only reason that rooftop residential solar makes economic sense is because of the way we price electricity based on consumption. Utilities are building most of the infrastructure regardless of if a handful of people using 40% less electricity on sunny days.

[solotronics]

So if municipalities tracked the cost to install and maintain the utilities accurately they could split out the infrastructure rate from the kilowatt rate. Once you pay off the cost of your portion of infrastructure then you would only pay for maintenance. This would result in more efficient pricing for watts used of electricity.

[zizee]

If they charged the true cost of the grid and dropped kw pricing to the true cost, people would have little incentive to conserve the limited resource that is electricity generated.

It is more like the supply/demand has set a price for KWs and the margin the electricity companies make on it is used to subsidize the cost of the network.

[bluGill]

Rooftop solar makes sense because cost of land is a sunk cost, and thus doesn't have to factor into the total cost of the install. This assumes that solar makes sense for the area though, some houses are shaded too much.

[zizee]

I think you'd be surprised how cheap land can get outside of cities.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

But then you get increased losses when transporting the energy into the city, plus the costs for the distribution infrastructure. Rooftop solar tied to the grid can be used by your neighbours when you aren't using it, which means almost no transport loss, not even crossing a transformer.

[zizee]

Sure. I was responding to a comment saying the reason rooftop solar makes sense is the sunk cost in the land overwhich the roof lives. Rooftop Solar make a lot of sense, but probably the main reason is the electricity generated does not come with the cost of having to maintain a hugely expensive grid.