The utilities model is based on the notion that you can recover your capital costs (and more) over the lifetime of the plant. The rapid rise of solar in particular is putting that at risk, and utilities are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can fight by keeping power costs low, and lose, or they can fight by raising their power costs--however they want to do the accounting--and also lose.
Utilities are infrastructure, it is possible to seperate the big plants from the network, it's already done in many places. The question is how much of the network should the customer pay for and how much should the generator pay for. Solar is putting that to a test.
55% of my electric costs is network related, for some houses it's 90% of the cost..