Dragoncar, I'm talking about you, a neighbor down the street, a guy a block over, a business a mile down the road, etc. having panels. The current bottleneck is one or more central plants generating power at a high enough voltage to get to your neighborhood. A complex network of transformers and overcurrent devices to eventually get that down to usable levels miles and miles away. Any individual node drawing more power than others creates problems, so there's a continuous balancing act of load management. However, you add these small solar setups of 5-10kw here and there and you effectively smooth out that imbalance by providing power within the node that also coincides with those peak demands.
To question 2, I was thinking along the lines of the midwest and northern states. Lots of mid-day A/C use in the summer and lots of electrical heat generating in the winter. Even those on LP and nat gas like their space heaters, bath heat, heat pump elements and baseboards. Perhaps the load isn't as great as A/C, but our available daylight hours are less that time of year, too, so it matches pretty well.
