Just a quick comparison vs. my bill.
I'm part of a co-op that has made a gradual change over the past decade. I've talked about it before in several threads, but this falls squarely within the topic being discussed here. The co-op has made several moves over the years to move the meter charge higher to reflect the true fixed costs of attaching to the grid, and reducing or halting increases to the usage cost.
This person pays $7.90 for service availability (my "meter charge"). I currently pay $45/month for that (up from $16 about 6 years ago).
The effect of this change over the past decade was that the consumers with less consumption felt some more pain now. For years, though, the larger consumers have been subsidizing the smaller consumers because fixed costs were integrated into the variable cost pricing. The way that I look at it is that they got one hell of a deal for a long time and new they're getting to the actual real costs (although not a true-up). In some cases, some of the corner cases had to go find new ways to get power and installed their own solar+storage (the lean-to shed in the middle of the farmer's field that has a couple of lights, or the barn with separate service meters from the home). Commercial (non-residential/non-farm) customers pay demand charges for their grid connection size.
This change was easier for us to make. As co-op members, we own the utility and so we have the ability to shape the policy without a lot of government interference. Investor-owned utilities have a tougher time and have to battle a tougher viewpoint from the PUC's concerned that poor little Martha will have her bill go up (despite the fact that she's been getting a bargain-basement price the whole time).
I believe that because of the co-op's approach, distributed solar generation is much easier for my co-op to deal with. They give up to 3 months' credit at retail price for excess generation; they're even talking about changing the policy to make those credits refundable via cash back to the members that generate the power. Their policy is fairly liberal, allowing for systems of up to 40 kW before you are required to become a generator. (EDIT: Note that excess generation gets put into a kWh "bank" and cannot offset meter charges. If you have a meter and therefore a connection to the grid, you pay $45/month minimum even with zero usage.)
I get why these policies are being put in place -- with distributed generation, rate structures that implement fixed cost recovery in the variable usage price will suffer with a huge penetration of solar.
That generally leads to the question of "can I go off-grid"?
As to the argument about sizing systems, I'm finding this to be true in my modeling as well. There are two cases over the past year alone where I have had a prolonged stretch of 5 days with below-average generation from my system. I would require a (roughly) 36-40 kW system to offset all of my power usage for my service here - I currently have half that. From Feb 28 to Mar 4 last year, during the entire 5 day period I generated only 65 kWh with an 18 kW system - let's double that for a system twice the size - 130 kWh.
My demand during that time period averages about 68 kWh a day (~2100 kWh in the early spring months, prior to A/C units). As a result, over those 5 days I would have run a deficit of 210 kWh (EDIT: wrong value - 210 kWh assuming a system twice the size that would be net-zero). There's just no way to size any system for that and be off-grid without having to make pretty major sacrifices. Luckily we drive two Teslas, so we could hold off on charging them - that would save us probably 40-50 kWh over that time frame. However, that still leaves a deficit of over 150 kWh.
The system I would need to install to go completely off-grid while saving for those two events in the past year would be quite substantial. To get my deficit down to something reasonable that could be approachable with storage - say 50 kWh - would require a system about 4x the size of what I have today plus storage costs.
