It’s a sad fact, but to have the capacity to handle real distributed generation, all the electrical utilities would need to invest a considerable chunk into their infrastructure – we, as consumers, should have demanded they do this long before now simply as part of the cost of doing business, but we’ve not done this, and without some specific incentive, they either won’t, or will insist they have to “pass that cost along” regardless of record profits in their sector for almost a decade.

I have a friend who’s a high-level solar infrastructure engineer, and he assessed the who greater bay area for this very question, and found that the needed infrastructure upgrades were in the tens of millions of dollars to low hundreds range, depending on how far out the improvements were pushed.

I think that we, as Californian ratepayers, should DEMAND that any electrical utility should commence such upgrades immediately. Who’s on board?