[vidarh]

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).

[lsaferite]

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.