> " Since there are so many households, the average will be highly predictable, "

Unfortunately when it's dark in one place, it's also dark elsewhere. When it's cloudy or rainy in one place it's not made up for with extra sun elsewhere. There are also differences across seasons, with less sunlight in the winter, etc. You can average and say a state has, on average, x hours of sunlight in June, but without extremely expensive storage, the sunny days don't end up powering the grid on cloudy days, and solar in the summer doesn't get stored for use in the winter.

Electricity needs to be stable and reliable year round, and every day.

But that's an argument against solar rather than against the notion of retail compensation rather than wholesale for boutique-scale production of solar (which is what the main topic on this subthread seemed to be).

No, it's an argument against solar without storage. Include the storage, include reliability, and you can have solar.

But no one wants to do that because storage is expensive, so they wave their hands and talk about "randomness evening out" or they explain "storage is a solved problem!" and then they draw something on a napkin for you.

Bottom line everyone wants to externalize the cost of storage because it's a difficult and expensive proposition. And so the household with the rooftop solar connected directly to the grid is effectively using the grid as storage, because buying the batteries is -- surprise -- too expensive.

But the electric utilities are saying -- "unreliable power is not very valuable to us, because we need reliable power" -- that is solar plus storage. If you just give us unreliable power, we'll only pay a penny for that, but we'll pay 20 cents for reliable power. And people are getting very angry at this because they think the unreliable and reliable power should have the same price, or that unreliable power is somehow a replacement for reliable power.