By the time the utility-scale solution comes on line your average home owner will no longer be interested in being a customer as there will be really no reason not to generate your own power, unless of course if things like force shields and personal home hadron colliders become popular.

As it is for less than $3000 I have enough solar power to cover everything but the largest power hogs. (AC, heat, refrigerator.) All my personal devices, tv, lighting, and water heating do just fine off of solar. There is no reason why most of the rest will not be converted in that 20-30 year window.

I give not a single flying fuck about how stupid the Chinese and Europeans are behaving when it comes to their subsidies. If they want to subsidize my giant American capitalist swimming pool filled of course with the tears from baby seals killed with clubs made of nearly extinct hardware from the devistated South African jungles that's their problem.

As far as the "whole passel" of laws I don't have to pull permits that are not required. The entire solar water system is run off of 12vDC, no permits required. The panel installation and the solar pool pump is 1 permit and electrical inspection, instead of the 3 or 4 I needed before. I am also getting to skip the wire run and trenching and the extra electrical box work. That all adds up quickly to the price.

Sarcasm on the fritz and they still give me a shitload of mod points to dole out. Funny huh?

Couple reasons.

1. When the grid goes down, so does your little micro grid. If you have sensitive needs, say for example a server farm, climate control needs, or medical life support equipment you never want it to go down.
2. The utilities charge you to have connections to the grid even if you do nothing but generate electricity. They charge ALOT to businesses. (Pissess off the crony capitalists aka Republicans and Democrats.)
3. Also if you have utilities coming onto your property you start getting into property right of way nonsense that gives the gov't or the utilities a way to butt into your business. (Pisses off Statist Progressives)
4. If you are not connected to the grid your power generation can't be taxed because they have no way of monitoring it, and you won't be forced to pay subsidies to pay for electricity social programs. (Pissess off the Democrats)

So why just hold out for angering republicans? I say piss them all off.

Then why do I have solar panels running my outdoor lighting, pool heater (water), and pool filter (electrical), without said gov't subsidies? Oh that's right it was cheaper when you start factoring in all the things I didn't have to payout to the county gov't in the way of permits, electricians, trenching equipment, copper wiring and the conduit to run it from the house out into the yard, etc, etc.

For a utility yes solar generated electricity makes little sense, but for the home or business owner it makes a great deal of sense. The farther from the grid you go the more sense it makes. With equipment prices these days anything more than 30ft from the house solar is on parity with grid electricity if you are willing to do the work yourself.

Then maybe, just maybe I can stop typing exclusively in sarcasm.

I was getting worried (my sarcasm detector has been offline since 1987). I thought there for a minute you might be the one of 9 people in the US that has managed to miss every single article about Tesla/SpaceX and did not know who Musk was.

how does anyone not account for that when they price out some grand new adaptation?

Kind of like say building disaster proof micro grids that are not under control by government sanctioned utility monopolies? I never understood the whole low IQ concept of "we have to save it for something more important, so we shouldn't use it logic because it might get expensive".

No we should use the shit out of it to drive the price up to the stratosphere so that the market comes up with either a cheaper way to produce it or more effective technology to replace it and meet the demand.

should involve these guys.

Yes, if I were in college I'd certainly only lug one book around -- my notebook computer. I'd keep all the schoolbooks on the computer.

As to elderly eyesight, when I was a kid, all the geezers wore glasses, but few young people. Now all the youngsters have glasses and few geezers do. Why? The young are ruining their eyesight with computers, tablets, and phones much like I ruined mine with books.

But when I was a kid, cataract surgery was still rare. The patent on the CrystaLens should expire around 2023, so most oldsters won't need any glasses, since it not only cures cataracts but nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. It won't be long before I have to get the other eye done.

We now have a "right to work" billionaire as governor of Illinois. He's calling for "right to work" zones, fortunately the legislature isn't going to let him.

If I weren't retired and lived in a "right to work" state, I would demand that the state's government supply me with employment. After all, if it's my RIGHT to work...

"Right to work" is a flat out bald faced lie, and any working person who supports it is a moron.

The difference is that a middle class or poor person who votes Republican is voting against their own interests.

No, what I'm saying is that socialists try to buy things for a dollar and sell them for a penny and can't every seem to understand why they go bankrupt within 6 months.

ENRON was a bunch of thieves taking advantage of a bunch of socialists. There wasn't even the tiniest bit of free market involvement in that entire debacle.

You are conveniently leaving a few details:
1. PG&E was required by the State of California to provide power no matter what.
2. PG&E was not allowed by the State of California to change retail prices without the State's approval. This resulted in them being forced to buy and sell electricity at a loss until they went bankrupt.
3. ENRON's little scheme was a two part scheme. ENRON was nothing but paper. The entire company was essentially fake. Anyone holding their stock got ripped off. The other part was to take advantage of CA idiotic price fixing scheme to bleed both PG&E and the taxpayers of CA dry which they did for years. Everyone at ENRON was a criminal set on taking advantage of a situation created by the State of California not the market.
4. CA put itself in the situation where they had to buy power from outside the State since they killed off all but the cleanest natural gas power plants with heavy handed environmental regulation.
5. What little solar and wind power was available PG&E was forced to buy at an enormous loss. To add insult to injury, the Federal Gov't was heavily subsidizing wind farms through grants and purchase requirements, causing areas such as Tehachapi to sprout wind turbines like weeds forcing PG&E to buy even more power from them far above the rates charged to customers.
6. With the retail prices set artificially low PG&E customers gorged themselves on electricity priced bellow the market price. This accelerated the collapse of PG&E and resulting in the summer rolling blackouts which continued even after the State stepped in to bail out the now bankrupt PG&E.

So yes I called ENRON a side show, because California set itself up for failure, all ENRON did was take advantage of the very system that California had created.

ENRON could not have pulled off their theft without the utility monopoly created by California, the price fixing set by California, and the severe lack of in state power production, again created by California.

I don't see a lot of this, or any of it really, having the slightest impact on actual politics. Then again I'm in America, and the only thing that impacts our politics since "Citizen United" is corporate money, so this might be a bigger issue in Europe.