Yeah a customer charge vs revenue to cover expenses through the rate case are separate here. If everyone suddenly had solar installed, the utility wouldn’t have enough revenue from customers to maintain the current grid without upping that base charge, so now that base charge would be substantial. Since now you aren’t recovering costs from a kWh basis but instead it’s more of a fixed cost to all customers to just maintain the grid.

Let’s say 50% of the customer base installs solar - now the utility must cover the same costs to maintain the grid, yet their revenue is substantially lowered, so the money has to come from somewhere. Do you just increase the rate cost and now the half of customers not using solar are paying double what they were? Well that doesn’t make much sense since anyone with solar is still benefiting from that entire grid.

Perhaps the best solution is to break out electrical bills to generation costs (fuel, maintenance at power plants, wind sites etc. ) and charge those through a rate structure $/kwh, then take the grid maintenance side and just charge that evenly across all households. Many people wouldn’t think this is fair either, but it’s one option.

Not sure how you think they cashed profit margins - again they create new wealth from a guaranteed rate of return on invested capital - both of which needs to be approved by the state utility board. All other costs are transferred to the customers on a 1:1 basis. And there is no doubt every company/utility could cut costs in some way, but to say they are intentionally overcharging to make a cash profit is not correct.

If by someway they could see the future, perhaps they would have built the grid in a more robust state, but that would have been more expensive back then and customers at the time would not have been happy about it - costs would have been higher, let alone the utility board approving rate increases for extensive costs to cover what would have seemed to be an imaginary future scenario.

I hope this helps some in understanding how this works, it’s very complicated and has taken me years to understand. Nothing is black and white.

It’s not an excuse it’s real. If you want to go ahead and disconnect your home from the grid, go ahead. Utilities can’t continue to support a reliable grid for you to use when your panels aren’t generating without some sort of compensation from the customers to do so. Where are they going to get the money to maintain the grid if everyone did this? All operating and maintenance expenses are passed directly to the customer. Utilities “make money” on capital investments.

Every solar installation at a home requires a model be run for that distribution area to see if it will cause overloading or voltage issues. It’s not an excuse, it’s a very complicated issue that many people around the world are working on.