alt Hacker News> Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.
No, it's just your typical distorted market. This happens in places that do net metering, where each joule you send to the grid pays for one joule drawn from the grid. This effectively vastly over-pays for local production, because it doesn't account for the costs of maintaining generating capacity or transmission. Those costs then have to be borne by the other customers instead. Utilities wouldn't offer this voluntarily. Where it exists, it's because it's legally mandated as a way of driving adoption of home solar.
The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.