What about the economies of scale? Does/did residential solar create enough demand to ramp up utility scale production?

> did

I think residential solar was a decent bridge to get things going, and the installed capacity we have is helpful.

Now, though-- at midday we have a glut of power. Residential installations are more expensive per kilowatt hour and don't do as well in reaching into the late afternoon when we need power most. There's no need to add more capacity like this. Better for those panels to go somewhere else.

There are still times that non-utility scale solar make sense-- it's usually when you get some kind of non-normal-generation related benefit that tips it over into worthwhile, e.g.

- getting a shade structure for a parking lot as part of the rollout

- if you want power backup for your house, adding a bunch of storage and solar

etc.

Are there benefits to distributing generation? If I can top up my car on a sunny day the grid doesn’t even have to know.

There were some early benefits to grid stability, but not to the extent we've done it, no.

At this point, there are a lot of residential neighborhoods that need more distribution and even transmission capacity (because their peak power movement is now exporting power at mid-day rather than the previous smaller peak loads used). And operating the grid has become a much more complicated task.

Does a battery system solve this mid day export problem?

Yes, it prevents the house with the battery from being a tax on the grid. However, the capacity factor of both the solar and the battery is less than if they were deployed centrally.

Again: residential solar isn't worthless, but in many places we've reached the point of diminishing returns where any additional capacity is much less useful-- unless there's an ancillary benefit that justifies it (like backup power for your house when deploying storage).