[CuriousCosmic]

The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies.

If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power.

Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to.

There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period.

There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs.

With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.