Well, I was speaking theoretically. My cells would produce much more in an open field than being half shaded by trees half a mile away because the sun stays so low. And if the utilities were well run and kept the lines in good condition I would have no reason to install my own generation. I grew up in a small, relatively poor, European country and we maybe there was one outage that lasted about twelve hours. And here I am many decades later in a major metro area with multiple outages every year mostly due to luck of maintenance of the local lines.
The grift in the USA is that the utilities make a guaranteed profit to offset all their expenses and depreciation. This means the utilities are incentivized to grab at the largest possible budget, since they make a guaranteed return when they spend that budget.
The utilities will always have a positive ROI; it is in their monopoly charter. The more they waste, the more money they make. The more people they kill, the more they get protected by the politicians they've paid. The more stupid their energy contracts, the more they can pass on to ratepayers.
Like take your solar panel analogy in an open field. The Power Company isn't building your solar. They are creating contracts to create liquidity for someone else to build/operate the facilities. And when these grifters do it, they'll pay numerous outsource vendors to wacky things. Like do you inspect pollen accumulation, perform an abundance of system checks, measure bird deaths caused by your solar, trench a turtle causeway, check for bears, assess soil runoff for drainage around the panels, etc etc etc? You probably don't but the utilities all budget stupid stuff in.
They'll want to pay the highest possible cost for all the raw materials and labor. When they overrun their budget, they can simply ask the oversight committes to approve more funds. What's the committee going to do? Tell the Utility to save money? hahahaha.
Interest groups all pay politicians (in every state; not just California) so they can all chow down at the sweet sweet allocation of money, They are the opposite of efficient. They are corrupt.
