Solar Already Won?

I forget from where, but I read this article on the Guardian yesterday.  I kept thinking about it, so decided that it would probably be worth posting about.  The article is patently absurd.  Solar has not won yet.  Not at all.  Nor have regulators and customers come fully to grips with the impacts that significant solar deployment on residences and businesses are.

The biggest unaddressed area is that of consistent power delivery.  It's what is known as "reliability" in the industry.  Your house has whatever power it needs (barring storms or some other extraordinary event), whenever you want it.  Solar doesn't work that way.  Despite the positive economics the author cites for per kWh costs, the roof-top solar customers are taking advantage of the fact that whenever the sun isn't shining (or bright enough) to cover the electricity needs, they just draw from the grid.  Reliability is not cheap, but is bundled with your power.

In my opinion, the biggest problem is the way we pay for power (at least in most of the US, I can't speak knowledgeably about Australia).  We should be paying high fixed costs to be customers of the electricity network.  The cost of the wires (distribution and transmission) and transformers and substations is substantial and doesn't vary in the short-run.  Then, we should pay a relatively low variable costs that matches what the cost to produce and deliver the power is (here, delivery would only factor in line losses).  Why don't we pay for electricity this way?

I think that the major reason we don't do it this way is that the current approach tends to incent lower consumption on the part of customers.  That is to say that if people knew they had to pay $100 per month to be connected to the network and then only 4¢/kWh, then they would be less sensitive to leaving the lights on or lowering the AC temperature.  So given that most of us pay a very small fixed component ($10?) and something on the order of 10¢+/kWh, we use less.  Conservation rules! (I guess)