> solar is increasingly threatening the electric utility business model

The writing is on the wall that the electric utility business model is a dying business like the career of bus or truck driver. Some countries will take a while to realize due to head in the sand , tariffs and corruption.

Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.

if the same solar also had enough battery capacity, sure. But they do not, they still need to buy at out of solar peak and that just causes problems for both sides.

I think grid should start moving into selling storage as a service. Just put a bunch of bulk storage at every transformer station and buy solar from consumers at solar peak, sell them back say 80% of it (or whatever margin is required to pay for it) off peak.

That way utility no longer have to haul megawatts all the way from the power plant all the time, any peak can be hauled from the batteries and let the other types of power plant more time to spool up, and the grid is more resilient to outages (assuming you were lucky and battery bank local to you still had some charge

In most places in the developed world utility-scale solar is much cheaper to build than rooftop solar. And there's value in having a stable grid to fall back on. I think the demand destruction story is overrated.

Commercial and industrial use already makes up a large portion of demand. While the model will change to cater less to residential needs, overall demand for stable, high voltage generation is not going to go down.

I think in most countrys, you already pay one bill for the grid and one for the used electric power.

Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades

What will people do at night?

There’s a business model where distributed solar production and storage is the norm and central grid based generation and delivery is the minority.

Such a model is extremely resistant and there’s less system infrastructure necessary. It’s quite feasible to redesign the system around a “distributed first” model.