That is part of the equation; 'Value added' that value is obviously going to evolve over time. The value of energy you export when you're the only guy in the neighborhood exporting is significantly higher than when EVERYONE is exporting. Indeed, energy exported at noon on a sunny day may soon have a NEGATIVE value. So the only way for a PV owner to get paid for power in the future would be to store it during the day and export it at night.
If Solar PV penetrates far enough perhaps there will even come a time that someone WITHOUT solar panels (due to trees or an urban environment) can use the grid for 'free' by installing a 40kWh pack and assisting in shifting power from day to night.... all kinds of ways to add value.
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The main objective PUCs MUST work to avoid is allowing price structures to make it economically advantageous to go off-grid. For various reasons not everyone is going to install solar so those than can install more should be encouraged to install more.
I completely agree. Injections and withdrawals of power should simply be priced at the wholesale market price, possibly allowing the utility a margin (i.e. pay you less for injections or charge you more for withdrawals) to cover scheduling costs, etc. Then there should be a charge based on your interconnection to cover the other costs (distribution, transmission, etc.). As you note, the wholesale price can go negative, so you would have to pay to push power out to the system at such times (or get paid to consume more). In such circumstances having storage would be very valuable, as well as grid-aware devices. Super-chilling your chest freezer when power is cheap/free is a very simple wave of 'storing' electricity, commonly used by commercial fish-freezing operations here in New England; when power gets costly, you can then let the temperature coast back up. Your frozen turkey is way cheaper at energy storage than LiIon batteries!
I'm not sure if you saw, but Southern California Edison recently accepted an offer of 85 MW of distributed storage. So it's already becoming a reality that a utility will pay you to have storage in your cellar, whether or not you have solar panels.
Utilities need to accept the fact that generation is going to be a smaller and smaller part of their business. That doesn't mean they can't be profitable. Just gotta buy low, sell high and charge a toll for every kWh that uses their lines.... and create a pricing environment to encourage conservation when energy is scarce and storage/consumption when it's abundant.
The electric utilities serving most of the U.S. population are already out of the generation business. I'm guessing from your handle that you live in OR or WA, which never restructured their utility business (thanks in large part to the gorilla-in-the-room Bonneville Power Administration, which blocked every attempt to set up a northwest power pool with independent operational control; such an operator is really a prerequisite to proper restructuring). However in California, Texas, and the east coast from New England to DC, nearly all of the states required that investor-owned utilities sell their generation or move it out of the regulated utility. So, for example, Southern California Edison makes no profit on the power they wheel to their customers (aside from some relatively minor sales from its 1,200 MW of hydro). Its profit is entirely from providing the distribution service.
I think the utilities are putting the brakes on solar adoption not out of greed but fear. Thomas Edison created a power system with central-station generation, feeding thick transmission wires connecting to thin distribution wires, to 'dumb' customers. It's like the old IBM mainframe systems, with terminals everywhere. Fundamentally Edison's network was still in place without meaningful change until this past decade. The utilities are having a really hard time figuring out what to do with the newly developing equivalent of distributed computing.