Industrial installs are encouraged by utilities because they increase dependence on expensive, centralized, infrastructure. And for regulated utilities, this sort of infrastructure expense is easy to rate-base and increase profits.

But independent modelers that have been looking at fine-grained grid modeling, like Christopher Clack, have found huge cost savings by deploying massive amounts of storage and solar at residential and C&I locations first in the coming years, before doing larger industrial scar installations.

Ofc, local storage is an option, but will it be cheaper and safer than what we currently have? 20-30+ year old battery installations left to operate and just hang there don't look too promising to me...

In nearly every market, energy use peaks at mid-day, just as solar is peaking. So distributed solar is a peak-shaving system, whereas centralized utility solar still requires the same big peak.

Distributed storage reduces both troughs and peaks, and makes T&D even more efficient.

PS: it's also a harder system to attack for malicious operators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

How's that?

https://cecgis-caenergy.opendata.arcgis.com/apps/california-...

You'll see that on the scale of substations, industry is right next to residential, and virtually indistinguishable.

Consider 500MW placed on the roofs of homes in San Jose, versus 500MW in a somewhat close green field build. The distant green field build is going to send every single kWh over transmission lines. Where as close to 0 kWh of the residential solar would hit transmission, meaning that all transmission requirements are lessened, as are distribution requirements.

The opposite: the closer you place production and consumption the better. Less energy wasted in transportation, less costs for infrastructure maintenance, less risk of widespread outages.

However, decentralizing access to solar energy goes against the interest of energy companies, the gas industry, the nuclear industry and, consequently, the political class.

Not sure about that. In general it's centralization that reduces maintenance costs. Centralizing in terms of location lets you use bigger, more efficient hardware, and gives you economies of scale. Centralizing ownership reduces administrative costs and allows for savings not possible with distributed ownership.

I do see the various benefits of everyone running their own energy production, but costs and reliability aren't them.

The efficiency of solar panels stays the same with the number of panels deployed next to each other.

The infrastructure to transport electricity (pylons, cabling, transformers) becomes more expensive with increasing capacity. Less centralization requires less transport.