In my townhouse in Sunnyvale the lights are off, despite that I'm home right now. Sitting in the dark is better than paying PG&E's ridiculous rates. I wish it were easier to install solar here.
It is ridiculous. But when I'm away from solar, I'm extremely frugal with energy because it's so expensive here. It's a matter of feeling ripped off, not whether or not one can afford it. Rates here feel like buying water at an amusement park, except that you live with it all the time.
You'd have to provide some shockingly well sourced data to explain why electricity cost in one location is 100 times that of the rest of California, or how the average resident spends over $150,000 a year on electricity (the average per capita use in Santa Clara county is 6.2MW)
To sit in the dark for 6 hours while paying a whopping $1/kWh would save me 15 cents.