Part of this is driven by the end of net metering in lots of places. People are getting 10% or even 5% of the price for their energy that they themselves have to pay, which is why they'd rather consume it themselves.
Depending on when your local grid hits peak demand, and how much solar is already present, the excess electricity provided to the grid by solar power might be extremely valuable.
In particular, if your local grid's annual peak demand occurs on summer afternoons, when air conditioning is at peak use, then solar provides extra capacity exactly when it's most valuable. This, in turn, means that your power company can avoid building extra peaker plants that are only run for a few hours a day during a few weeks per year.
In this case, net metering is an extremely good deal for the power company and for other rate payers, and it may actually be a bad deal for the people with the solar panels.
How often does a scenario like this occur? Apparently, peak annual demand in many markets occurs during either summer afternoon cooling, or during winter morning heating. In the latter case, obviously, solar is not helping with peak demand. Similarly, this effect is only true until a region reaches a certain level of installed solar, and a few regions may already be well beyond that point.
Even if solar provides extremely valuable peak capacity, this doesn't guarantee that a residential solar owner will have any negotiating leverage. Most residential solar is unable to detach from the grid or to store significant amounts of power locally without US$7,000 to 20,000 worth of upgrades. So the utility could say, "Yes, the solar power that you're providing might be extremely valuable at market rates, even more valuable than the rate provided by net metering. But we've decided to pay you far below market rates, and there's nothing you can do about it."
This is one reason why major power plants often have signed Power Purchase Agreements in place before they can even be financed. This obligates the power company to pay a guaranteed rate.
So, the end of net metering might represent a blatant rip-off of the people generating solar power. Or it might accurately represent the fact that a local grid already has a surplus of solar power, and further capacity is fairly worthless.
Yeah, if distributors are not going to pay fairly for what you produce (much of these by legislation lobbied by themselves) then too bad, you deal with stabilizing the grid
(though of course, household generation can destabilize the grid - but you could deal with this with variable purchase pricing)
