Hi Tim,
I had long talks with the president of our electric coop. The biggest hurdle for them is demand. Everyone comes home after work and turns on the air conditioning, TV's, takes showers, etc.
What this means is that the power company has to have a reserve for this spike in power and that costs us more. If they didn't have the surge the grid would be able to run much less overhead and costs to consumers would be less.
What NY Power Authority did was really neat, they have a reservoir that PV power pumps water into all day. When the power surge comes the water runs down tubes and powers generators to absorb the extra power.
The thing is that people have no idea how fragile the grid is, worse they don't care and they care less about conservation of power. I constantly get people asking me if they can heat their 5k house with a couple of PV modules. We know who won the Super Bowl but we have no idea of our own needs! That will only change when the grid comes falling down. A single relay took down most of the US East coast several years ago, that's how fragile the grid is.
Rob
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