We currently pay grid tie fees, of less than $20/month, and I am happy with paying for the maintenance of the distribution power, even if it is just eventually "emergency backup connections".
That's one of the possible ways to deal with it, though if it's high enough to actually recover costs, you'll just drive people towards grid defection (going off-grid), which is a dreadful idea and leads to collapsed power grids over the long term as you have fewer people paying into the grid (and, really, lower income/lower use people).
My question is about places like Nevada, which are actively resisting addtional solar installations, citing costs for the grid...? I don't understand what those are, beyond a basic connection fee, and why that would pose a barrier to new solar systems.
The problem is the way solar is currently done - net metered, grid tie, with no backup - paired with typical residential rate schedules (a cost per kWh that includes energy costs and transmission costs, slowly ratcheting up as you use more to handwave at the fact that you need "more grid infrastructure" if you're using a ton of power). These rate schedules have been effective and are in widespread use because they're easy to understand, and lead to consistent bills for consistent net energy use in a month, and, quite honestly, because older meters simply didn't allow for anything more detailed (the old mechanical meters were just a counter - they couldn't track peak use or anything).
Net metering was created back in the day when you were dealing with that one kook at the end of the feeder, out by a stream, with a little micro-hydro setup or a homebuilt windmill, or something like that. It's not a good solution for widespread solar (of the purely grid tied variety), because it more or less allows you to bypass the rate schedule.
So, to use some handwaving numbers:
On a typical sunny day, a house with a grid tied system might:
- Pull 10kWh from the grid overnight and in the morning, for showers, breakfast, hot water, bringing the house up to temperature, etc.
- Push 30kWh from the solar on during the middle of the day while the occupants are at work.
- Pull 10kWh from the grid in the evening for dinner/entertainment/etc.
- Pull the "remaining" 10kWh 6 months later in the dead of winter.
And, here's the kicker: Pay
absolutely nothing for the privilege of using the grid in this manner.
Utilities are throwing all sorts of interesting rate schedules against the wall to see what sticks, but fundamentally, if you're going to be grid tied, and use the grid on demand, you need to be paying for the infrastructure - and net metering with grid tied solar means people aren't.
If you change that, then systems don't "pay off" nearly as quickly - which, IMO, is quite fair, because a grid tied solar system relies, quite heavily, on the grid in order to be useful at all.
To go purely off grid, you'd need to add quite a bit of battery capacity (several days of light use is a good ballpark), plus a backup generator, plus enough inverter to handle peak loads. That adds in the $20k of hardware range, plus installer fees if you don't do it yourself. It makes a system radically more expensive, though it is then legitimately standalone.
I'm going with a hybrid approach for my system - somewhere in the middle, with a day or so of battery, and I'll eventually be adding biomass heating to the house (a modern woodstove of some variety) for additional heat in the winter when solar is a challenge. It gives me grid-down ridethrough capability, as well as allowing me to self consume and generally limit my grid interaction if this becomes useful. I'll be able to feed my evening peak from battery, service overnight loads (at least in the summer) on battery if I want, and will be flexible to optimize my use for whatever rate schedule shows up.
One of the more interesting possibilities, which is a pain in the rear for homeowners to reason about but is pretty fair in terms of grid costs, is a demand schedule - you pay a far lower cost per kWh, but pay a rather substantial cost per peak kW pulled over a given timeframe (look at your local utility for details). But, if I pull 10kW from the grid peak, I'll pay less in demand charges than someone who pulls 30kW peak (because they need larger transformers/etc). With batteries, I'll be able to level my loads out massively - so instead of pulling nearly nothing and then 20kW for an hour, I could configure the inverters to limit the grid pull to, say, 3kW - peak. Anything higher will be serviced out of the batteries and inverters, and if I'm going through a dark week, I can configure the system to charge from the grid at 3kW, again, servicing my loads from batteries when demand is higher.
But all of this means my system is staggeringly expensive compared to a pure grid tied system. I find this sort of thing interesting, but then I'm also having discussions with both my power company and the local public utility commission about system size limits...