Absolutely, my friend got bitten by this in Croatia. He invested quite a lot in solar and then government cut down on what they pay per kWh. Plus with the prices of panels going down all the time you're effectively throwing away money by going into it too early...

I heard that the same thing happened in California and it's led to a lot of people being disillusioned with the solar promise. Is it lobbying by the utility companies that is leading to these reductions or other factors?

I don't know specifically about Caliornia, but in several places that uses to offer "pay back" plans for injecting power into the grid, the problem was that solar power generates power when it is not in the highest demand and varies too much.

I still think there are some adaptations that could be done to mitigate that problem, but the grid seems simply not correctly set up to efficiently use the energy produced by millions of people generating a lot of power during the day and draining a lot at night.

I guess this is where giant Tesla powerwalls or flow batteries come into the picture. A way to efficiently store the energy for when its needed.

Or just charge people the actual price, rather than some hodge-podge of pre-defined rates based on Time of Day.

Yes, it will be complicated, but these providers also think we all care about itemization of generation, transmission, distribution, power factor, grid line loss and debt retirement charges. I don’t, all I care about is fixed cost and variable cost.

Maybe let people overpay through some hedging contract if they prefer to pay an average price.

For me, I want my dryer, A/C, water heater, etc. to throttle up and down based on price to lower my bill overall without reducing quality of life.

One thing that has been happening is that peak rate times are moving in response to solar, which has a pretty negative effect on the economics of grid attached solar.

Grid attached solar is a lot more attractive when your generation is at substantially at peak rates and your morning/evening grid usage is at part-peak or off-peak rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Too much renewables with fixed compensation makes existing fossil fuel plants unprofitable.