This is already happening in South Africa. The grid pretty much can't provide and is now turned off for people for up to 40% of the day.

So over the last decade, a huge amount of solar installations have made people a few small steps away from going off grid. But separate to that, they're paying less and less (0 in some cases), so "the grid" is stuck keeping: subsidized customers, customers who use almost 0 and customers that use lots illegally and don't pay.

The power utility's answer: tax users that don't use any electricity. And not just a connection type flat fee. They want to punish people that use very little, ironically after begging people to "please stop using so much electricity".

From what I've heard (friends who worked there for a month), electricity in South Africa is demential. For example there's a timetable to know when you will have, probably, four hours of electricity tomorrow and for the next week. You cannot make extrapolations from that.

You are 100% correct. They have planned "blackouts" according to a schedule so that it's fair and everyone gets a turn. However the schedule is based on how heavily the strain on the network is, which they regularly fiddle with. There are even apps now that notify people of blackouts planned for their area and help them make some sense of the chaos.

Luckily (or not) they have huge strain on the network atm so they pretty much said "nope, perpetually stage 6" so at least people know what to expect for the coming days. It still catches so many people off guard and they're forced to make plans for dinner as an example.

And yet they're refuse to allow solar users to push back to the grid easily. It's madness and the government is making itself obsolete, which will medium term affect the poor the most.

> And yet they're refuse to allow solar users to push back to the grid easily.

Grid solar (and even more wind) is harder to handle than a plant that can be modulated. If they can't handle their plants or invest to fix their issues, I can understand that they don't have the means to handle solar.

For most people in urban and suburban areas, a grid connection is going to be sufficiently financially attractive that the rational thing to do is keep it.

For one thing, maintaining sufficient storage at home to fully recharge a car overnight would be prohibitively expensive, but maintaining a grid connection to allow you to do so is cheap.

The process of ripping up the grid is more likely to occur (and in fact is already starting to happen) in remote areas. Traditionally urban consumers have cross-subsidised some remote electricity connections but in many cases it’s cheaper to buy those consumers off-grid systems or independent microgrids than maintain grid infrastructure connecting those locations.

This was kind of the rural electrification challenge the US faced. Opting to wire almost everyone up was a costly endeavor at the time. But one we take for granted now.

Given where the world is now, given how much easier decentralized solar & renewable are than the massified power generation of yore, I'm more conflicted today than I am comfortable with. The idea of sprawling microgrids, communities giving local access maybe cheap may grow up, but likely undrr diverse & inconsistent & biased policies... Likely as an Uberified enshittifying take on what a public utility ought be.

It's just evolution. At this point the price of solar on your roof with some batteries is getting low enough that it earns itself back even without subsidies. As this stuff gets cheaper, more people get access to this stuff and the market grows. As it does, prices drop further.

It's not happening overnight so people and grid suppliers have a chance to adapt. But yes, bad things generally happen to people and companies that can't adapt to changes. Ironically, people that are in developing countries tend to be more adaptable. If something works, they'll be all over it.

The monopolist's response to this is indeed to push for things to be illegal and expensive. Which ironically just speeds up their demise. Places where this happens simply become less competitive.

People move to where the jobs and economics are better. Also politically. Politicians blocking sane policies on this front are going to have a hard time. People are going to call out their bullshit and point to neighbors where the grass is greener and ask hard questions. Inevitably a few less enlightened politicians are going to insist on finding this out the hard way and then get voted out of office. The rest will learn from their examples; that's already happening. Republicans like cheap power just as much as Democrats. This is not a left-right topic anymore. People still bicker over climate change. But cheap power is something everybody can agree is a nice thing to have.

I find it more likely that the poor will want to disconnect from the grid, because the grid is fundamentally about reliability. When your own systems fail, you still want power while you are waiting for repairs. At least if you can afford it.

I hope to get a battery system to offset some of my costs, but I can't forsee not being connected to the grid as backup and to sell some excess energy back anyway.

I don't have an electric car either, so while my current solar system (6.6kW) could power my current household energy use basically year-round (if I had sufficient battery capacity), I would only be able to slow charge solely off that, so I expect I will still be buying energy from the grid once I get an EV for times I want to fast charge (probably 11kW three phase), even with the solar and a hypothetical battery.

The key use for grids that can't be replaced is industrial use. Some companies need very-high quality power, in terms of frequency stability or downtime. Other companies require high volumes.

For these users, it's much easier to buy service than to start a dedicated service within the company responsible for, essentially, setting up their own grid.

Once you have that, connecting nearby homes cheaply is easy, and it's really a rich person's pastime to build an off-grid alternative with equivalent quality if you can get connected.