Beyond Desk Lamps

Given the price of solar equipment currently, and considering the sheer amount of hardware you'd need to power your house, it's currently cost prohibitive to power your house completely on solar energy. Certainly some people do it, many of them "off-grid". However, why do we need to think of that cost as something that the end user has to necessarily fork out? Did you pay for that pylon on the side of the highway? The 150MW cogen plant down the highway? Are those things cheap?

Well, not exactly; but all you get is a monthly bill for the energy you used. The costs of all those infrastructure items, we assume, are somehow built into the bill. In fact, most of us also don't know about half of the technology needed to deliver it to our homes. But that doesn't bother most consumers: it works. If you can run electrical appliances, if it's affordable, and someone takes care of it when it breaks: great. Applying that approach to electricity generated by distributed solar shouldn't be that different. It's not as much energy perhaps, but the whole "electric bill" system sounds like a good one.