> it gets popular enough to affect the grid,

The plug in solar systems are small and usually mounted in ways that don’t capture as much energy as the same panels mounted on a roof. These systems aren’t going to get popular enough to make a big difference in anything.

I think it’s nice that they’re available for people to do some small scale offsets, but I think they’re more of a gateway to better solar installations. They also send people down the path of investigating battery storage add-ons, which might actually be a better long term solution for everyone.

If we can get to a point where we can buy plug-in batteries that are subsidized by requiring coordination with the grid, the power companies could get distributed, controlled battery storage to work with their demand curves. This can already happen with the bigger permanent install batteries.