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Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power
HughPickens.com writes Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600,000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In Hawaii, the current battle began in 2013, when Hawaiian Electric started barring installations of residential solar systems in certain areas. It was an abrupt move — a panicked one, critics say — made after the utility became alarmed by the technical and financial challenges of all those homes suddenly making their own electricity. "Hawaii is a postcard from the future," says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
IT's early (for me) and my standard disclaimer of "the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet" applies, but "a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction" doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me.
I admit that circuits was a long time ago, and I never took (or had to take) the high power courses... But what does that even mean? The system is still AC, isn't it? So it's been handling carrying things in both directions forever.
Is this industry BS, or is there something to this claim?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
The complaints that the rooftop systems are invisible to the power companies "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them" can be addressed pretty easily with updated electric meters.
The power companies are all moving towards "smart meter" technologies anyway. Why not make sure they've put one in that can monitor the output of a PV solar (or even a wind turbine) installation while they're at it?
When I had my solar system installed, the power company had to switch out my meter. And even though we're one of the last remaining areas around here that doesn't yet use smart meters, they still upgraded me to a bi-directional meter so my power generation vs. usage can be tracked. So they're spending $'s on labor and hardware to mess with your meter each time a new solar system is put in. It's their short-sightedness if they don't put more useful equipment in place while they're doing that anyway!
And when it comes to solar, I think the output is fairly predictable too. The only real "fluctuations" you get with the output are based on the day's weather conditions. If you compare my panels to my friend who lives on the other side of town and has a PV solar installation, our daily power generation numbers are within 2-3KWh of each other, and the hourly rates on a graph look almost identical. The power company receives and has to sign off on a registration form stating you've installed a small power generation system and they're made aware of its exact size/maximum output at that time. So even with NO other metering capability, they'd be able to predict that in a certain part of the circuit, they now have someone who will add, at most, a specific amount of power back to the lines between the hours of 10AM and 2PM (when the panels produce the most power). It seems like this is data they should be able to work with.
It's pretty simple. If the excess power I generate has more value to me if I store it in a battery, rather than sell it to the grid, then I can just cut my connection to the grid. The fact that they're being such jerks would increase my incentive to cut them off.
I was island hopping in the Philippines last week. Coal there is very expensive. Oil there is very expensive. Power, in general, is very, very expensive. An AC unit is within financial means of many people who already own a flat screen TV and/or western game console. Yet they live without air conditioning in very hot/humid conditions. Malls there are really popular as a result.
The first thing i noticed when I got in a taxi from the airport was the number of Solar + Wind advertisements. Solar has already arrived in SE Asia, and it is here to stay. There's about a billion people in SE Asia outside of China. Solar makes a heck of a lot of sense in the developing world or disconnected parts of the world, where a surprising number of people live. That's right you don't have to go back one sentence, I said a Billion with a 'B'. There's about 30 million people living in the Metro region of Manila without air conditioning because electricity is too expensive. The other half of the country is lucky to have reliable electricity.
These places exist, and they're prime candidates for distributed solar in a big way. Solar is already cheaper than mains electricity, even installed, even with big import duties. Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.
Why does this matter?
America is still waiting for price parity of mains electricity and home grown solar, but while you can stem the tide of Solar in America temporarily, the price is going to drop like a rock as manufacturers race to supply the third world with Solar, and soon American electric companies will be competing against the price of affordable solar in the third world. It may be five or ten years before Solar truly takes off in the US, but as soon as someone rolls out a $500 "Air Conditioning assist" kit that tells your AC to run at full tilt whenever the solar panels have enough juice to keep it running (who doesn't love coming home to an icy cool house when it's 100F/35C out? especially if that AC was free?), the reasons not to go Solar are going to fall like dominos.
moox. for a new generation.
Batteries need to come down in cost before it makes sense to switch to an off-grid solution. I have a 1kW battery/solar system (not grid-tied) as an emergency power source and I have to replace the lead acid AGM batteries aver 5-7 years at a cost of $500 to $1000.
The only way to beat the utilities is to go completely off-grid, but that is too expensive at the moment.
Have hierarchies of power distribution.
Federal... or across state lines
State...
County...
City...
Neighborhood.
The management of solar power should be bounced around a neighborhood. It doesn't need to go farther than that. That means the federal, state, county, and city networks all remain clean. No back feeding of power.
Each segment could also fall under different jurisdictions and be the responsibility of different institutions. That might be helpful or not. It should be done to the extent it is helpful.
Here some complete asshat will tell me "but in this circumstance it might not be helpful"... then don't do it in that circumstance. I wouldn't need to explain this if reading comprehension were especially dependable on this site.
Then we really need to work on storage. If these houses can store their power then they might not need to be connected to the grid at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.
Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways. In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
National Grid has capped the amount of energy people/companies/government buildings can put into the grid in Nantucket, MA way below then any other part of the state. One would think that due to high demands in the summer for energy in a tourist town they would be for more people adding energy to the grid, since there is talk about running new power cables to the island. NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately. But with their recent double price increase people are switching to cheaper brokers and adding more solar to their homes.
communication mechanism to control power output.
So what happens when the utility system operator has a block of cheap power switched onto the system and says, "We don't need all this solar right now. Switch it off." Conspiracy theories will spring up all over about how the utility is trying to 'do in' solar. Not that some of these won't be legitimate. Power companies like to buy the cheapest blocks of power first and put the expensive stuff on standby. Smart grids and technology aside, I don't think many solar system owners are going to like their generating plug pulled when it suits the utilities interests. So most of these systems are designed to push max power onto the grid and only disconnect due to a fault condition.
Have gnu, will travel.
Change the business model. Make the grid global for generating and load distribution, and everybody can pay a flat fee for infrastructure hookup.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If really good batteries were available a great option would be to use them as a buffer between the grid and the solar. This way a person would dump their solar into the batteries and generally use the batteries for day to day use. Then if and when the solar couldn't keep up with the demands the grid could be tapped to charge the batteries.
But as both solar and the batteries get better this would then become a natural migration to where people would go completely off grid and have some sort of crappy generator (that is cheap but possibly not efficient) to top them off on the occasion that they don't have enough.
Great batteries could even keep the utility relevant for a while by giving them a more reliable source that they could tap when they wanted to from people's homes.
So right now the utilities are having growing pains as this small but growing source of energy is introduced it is that moment that people actually start going off grid that they have a serious problem. As then they will have to risk raising rates that could drive people off the grid which... then the power company will be left with a scattering of customers who simply can't generate their own power using the space they have. This could be apartments, unlucky houses, hotels, and energy intensive industries. That would be a large grid to maintain for far fewer customers.
Personally I have found my local power company to act like total scumbags. While this will provide an extra sense of satisfaction when I go off grid it also will harm any "greater good" arguments they might try to make in the future to get subsidies to maintain the grid. Quite simply people won't buy the arguments and assume that they are trying to keep their obscene bonuses and monopoly returns that the shareholders demand.
The grid can't handle micro-generation. So... who is going to pay for upgrading the grid? And guarantee electricity during peak need but lowest production?
A far more economical solution is a more intelligent home that uses all of it's produced electricity. Run the AC more when the sun shines, charge the electric car, etc. Eventually the grid gets rebuilt to handle 2 way with far more local rebalancing, but that's a decade or three away.
The power companies could offer people the panels, installation, proper set up and maintenance. You have the money and resources to do it why not make money off those that want to get fully/partially off the grid.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yes, you do.
Here is a business model for you: pay a low rate for electricity from sources you can't monitor, pay full* rate for electricity where you put a little Internet of Things gizomo on the line to measure (or even control) output from the source. You could even get the homeowners to pay for the gizmo out of future revenue.
* Yes, I know "full rate" also has its problems, but it'll get set somehow and the point is only IoT installed houses will get that rate.
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yes, it's laziness. Not massive costs associated with having to build up monitoring and measuring on massive scale but "laziness".
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yeah. These electrons belong to Duke Power, those electrons belong to Con Edison, the ones over there belong to...
The idea that the Free Market makes any sense in the simultaneous transmission of commodity objects (or forces) over a common medium is one of the most insane artifices that anyone ever invented. All you are really selling is the right to bill something that you probably didn't produce going over lines you probably don't own. Capitalism at it's finest!
Bullshit. Hawaii power was forced to do an ACTUAL study instead of pulling number out their ass like you. They have areas with 50% of the power solar and the study found they can handle it just fine.
The utilities should keep in mind here, they push back hard enough and the cost savings of going completely off-grid will eventually reach the point that people just unplug entirely. It's better to offer backup power than no power at all.
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler. While the electrons are on the line they belong to the distribution company, just like while products are in Walmart's distribution channel they belong to Walmart.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's why the linemen say it's not dead until it's dead and grounded. They are supposed to bond the line to ground before working on it and that bond is supposed to only be disconnected right before the line is turned back on.
But since mistakes happen, it's a good thing that home inverters won't power a dead line.
The biggest danger to linemen (and has been for a while) is id10ts wiring their portable generators in or plugging them in with a "widowmaker" (A generator chord with a male end to plug in to the wall) and not disconnecting from the grid first.
As far as I can see these complaints are all coming from investor owned for profit electrical utilities. What do publicly owned electrical districts (like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to name a couple of big ones) have to say? Do they make the same complaints or do they just get on with the business of making it all work? If they're not making the same complaints then I think the complaints of investor owned utilities are more about profits than anything else.
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...
And because the lines are not owned by the power seller, when an ice storm takes them down I would probably get a bill for my portion of the repair! Yes, they already pass those costs on, but it is spread amongst many more customers. I don't want to see the bill for my exact share of the repair of the circuit that runs from the power source clear to my meter. I could end up paying for work done on a generation station, sub-stations, etc. that are not even in my state.
Utility companies buy and sell power to each other as demand and supply dictate, and their overhead (including normal line maintenance) is factored into the system. Having a third party control distribution would simply add another entity feeding off the revenue stream... that's OK, they can just pass that on to end users and it will be business as usual!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
In an unregulated market the power line company charges a flat government regulated fee to carry the power and maintain the lines. If the line company needs to adjust the fee they must ask for a rate adjustment. The line company at no time owns any electricity on the lines. The electric providers purchase electricity from generation utilities and contract with the line company to deliver the power to the consumer. If power goes out you call the line company for service but for billing issues you call the electric provider.
In a regulated market the power company is generator, line carrier, and electric provider. They can purchase extra power if they need it from third parties but it is tightly regulated.
Historically incentives for home electric generation have guaranteed a certain price minimum for anything sent to the grid. This works in a regulated market because the price is regulated but it doesn't sit well in an unregulated market because the price may be significantly more than the current market rate. Of course if you made it fairer many homeowners would cry foul even though it wouldn't be. But at some point that decision must be made and no politician wants to be the one to take something away from his constituents.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
what about a massive, hazardous flywheel?
I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...
I really don't understand what worries you, over here the lines do belong to a separate company and I can shop around for a supplier of electricity
Exactly the same as with internet or telephone, many providers to choose from, one utility that does the delivery.
I pay one bill that has the KWh's and transmission as separate items, transmission is then paid by the electric supplier/provider to the cable company, it's not my worry at all.
Oh yeah, surprise, there's a third item on that bill, taxes ):
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In a distributed power generation, who needs power lines (technically, in any power transfer no one should use cables. As, Tesla has shown, 110 years ago, the most economical and efficient way of transferring power is using the ONE conductor with, realistically, an infinite power transfer capacity, from humanity energy use point of view: the Earth. The problem with that, is that there is no way one can SECURE this transfer, everyone with appropriate receiver ( plugged in the Ground ) can extract the current vibrations on particular frequencies, build there as standing waves. Of course, such a system, is absolutely a loosing investment (from transfer-profit point of view), and this is why no corporate (energy) entity will come close to such ideas. Interestingly, some of the new informational giants may decide to explore this now forgotten, and very little understood, art. Of course, there are garage enthusiasts that will always be ahead of everyone around (in any industry), but in order for something like this to be a game changer (for humanity), if allowed, due to its hugely disruptive force, it has to be implemented on relatively massive scale.
But such systems are already existing on large plants
I was recently shopping around for PV panels and found out Germany requires a controller for domestic use to have an interface for a future monitoring and controlling system.
In Europe the generator and distributor are already separate entities and it's the generator that has to pay x cents per KWh for transport.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler. While the electrons are on the line they belong to the distribution company, just like while products are in Walmart's distribution channel they belong to Walmart.
Not all products belong to the company selling them. For example Coke, Pepsi, and Frito-Lay commonly lease shelf space and stock product set price themselves while the selling is still handled by the store itself.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You are right and wrong. IN a lot of places you can get a second meter to subtract sewage costs from water that you only use on the lawn. I know this because i installed automatic lawn sprinkler systems for 5 years. So while yes its inferred in most cases, its still a separate cost.
Good-bye
.
Most people who put in solar, expect the power co to essentially provide them with free batteries. They in fact aren't free. So they have a point. No, transformers work both ways just fine, and it's quite rare someone has enough to push more net into the grid even at peak times than they would draw at peak times. No one puts up that many panels (room can be an issue even if money isn't). Even though the power co doesn't currently use batteries, the effect is the same - they still have maintenance costs, have to keep wires up, trees off them, and now with this new source, have to be a lot more agile. Older coal and I'd suppose nuclear plants don't ramp up and down quickly as the sun goes behind a cloud, leading to further waste, or having to use faster responding nat gas turbine plants to handle wildly variable loads. I hate to defend these guys - they are evil, no doubt, always have been while I've had this particular company in my neighborhood - their feed-in tariff has varied from 2c/kwh for electricity you produce while charging you 14c/kwh for electricity they sell you - and they demanded two separate meters, so you'd have had to make 7x the electricity you created (after your own use) to just break even. Jerks. For a little while, law made them kinda fair, but they got that overturned first opportunity (they get the best law money can buy, right?). Entitled to a profit...gheesh. Nice to watch from a distance...a great distance. Popcorn helps.
One advantage to living in the boonies off-grid. The power company is aptly named - they have power to enforce building permits - your stupid local gov delegated that one almost everywhere. No permit required, your PP taxes are nil....heh. So I was able to afford 4 homes, taxed as barns...yeah, the solar cost a lot, as did the batteries, and you have to adapt a bit during the "dark month". But...all in all - I win, they can go and die in a fire. This has little or nothing to do with being green. It's more like I'm Scottish. I don't hate nature, but that's not the motivation. Libre was. Freedom to not have to have a job for monthly bills, and other advantages ruled the decisions. Building my own homes was fun too. And you feel like you've done something net-positive in the world. In the boonies you can get this done before the .gov even realizes you're here. And it's fun when there's a major storm, and the power co brings in outside help that asks if they can give you power - despite being the only place with lights on, and can they read your meter? Yeah, I show them my computerized meters....I've even gotten the comment from them "you can't run a house on that" - while I was actually doing exactly that and had been for decades. Doh!
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
There is a federal law that makes it illegal for state authorities, local authorities and community associates/home owner associations/etc to have restrictions on the placement of TV antennas and satellite dishes. Maybe there needs to be a similar federal law regarding solar panels.
They've already got a method to forestall that available. Some areas make a house legally unfit for habitation (ie. condemn it) if they don't have grid-tied power. Expect to see more utilities pushing for this in the future.
Upgrade the grid?? This article is ridiculous. They are saying they can't measure power output of solar generation on homes? Almost every single solar installation out there has a data stream with this info. I think they are just too lazy to collect it.
Ridiculous? Not at all. This was a known issue when my parents were getting an extension built in the 80s and wanted a wind turbine. It wasn't possible to connect it to the grid at all back then due to the risk of substation fires, and the technology available wouldn't have powered anything useful, so they didn't get one. Since then, a lot of money has gone into improving the grid here and developing smart controllers to prevent problems, but many parts of the world still have networks that are physically incapable of dealing with micro-generation.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Seldom are contradictions so obvious.
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First world countries generally have more capacity than needed, otherwise blackouts and brownouts would be commonplace.
Just because water flows in rivers does not make it free. Damns are expensive and need to be insured against breaking, and those costs among others make the water not free. (More fundamentally, water rights are a part of the purchase price of riverside land.) You might as well argue that coal or oil is free, because they're already buried there, waiting to be used.
Well hooray for the economists. <sarcasm>They're like gods; they're never wrong. </sarcasm>
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I receive a single bill with several itemized charges: meter charge, transmission charge, stranded cost recovery charge, system benefits charge (WTF!), KWH distribution charge, energy charge, and electricity consumption tax. 7 items, 1 bill.
Repairs are part of the cost of doing business, not a separate line item on the bill. Of course, the consumer pays them eventually
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Yes, it's laziness. Not massive costs associated with having to build up monitoring and measuring on massive scale but "laziness".
If they hadn't been collecting fees to monitor and measure a massive utility scale operation the past 30+ years, you might have a point. My power bill shows line fees, power fees, fuel fees and all sorts of other fees made to look like taxes that are actually paid to the power company, which happens to also be the energy generation company as well as the distribution wires company.
If you fire a tech guy and hand control over all his servers to someone who does NOTHING to maintain them, they won't all crash tomorrow. Some will be fine even in a year. But when a security update missed does leave a gap through a firewall and every other layer, you don't get to claim it is an unexpected accident, you need to blame the past year of doing nothing. Or thirty plus years of under investment by record earnings producing power companies, as in these cases.
Yeah, we couldn't build them overnight - but it needs to be done. No time like the present to get started. We've got the Tesla Gigafactory being built, and there's others like Aquion building non-toxic long life batteries specifically for grid applications. And some locations have options for pumped water and other very large scale power buffers.
Yes, we could put them in peoples houses, but that greatly complicates the system and makes it more expensive - economies of scale apply. Personally I think a time-varying electricity market would be a wonderful way to help level the system out - let many somebodies with money independently invest in a large power buffer, and then buy power when it's cheap (high net production hours) and sell it for a substantial profit when it's expensive (high net demand). Heck, you could add batteries to your house without solar panels, just to level out your demand and save money that way. Maybe even make a bit of profit if you built large enough. Seems like a great way to gradually decentralize the power system more organically, rather than via some big central planning project with all the... "inefficiencies" that tends to accumulate.
But for it to work properly, I think we need to get the grid out of the hands with a vested interest in generating power - keep the grid managers less conflicted and focused on distributing power efficiently according to the emerging power-generating realities of the system.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Average voltage on an AC line is 0 volts. RMS is probably what you intended. But yes, Watt-hours are all basically the same for a given RMS voltage/frequency. We will ignore power factor, that would take a lot longer to discuss...
Just to be pedantic:
The electrons going through your appliances are almost entirely the ones that were in the wire of the appliance to start with. Some electrons may actually drift enough to have come from your house's wires. But for any significant number of electrons to physically be the same ones that were in the power plant is very low probability.
This may not seem obvious at first, but the reason is that the drift velocity of electrons is actually very slow relative to the currents typically used. In other words, a piece of wire has so many damn electrons that you don't really need to move a very large portion of them to get a large current. If we were all using DC mains, then eventually you would see electrons making a round trip. But with AC, as mentioned above, the average voltage is 0, so the electrons move back and forth, but not typically getting very far in either direction.
Also, a more direct thing to consider is that most electrical systems use isolated transformers. So literally, the electrons are not passing from the utility across that barrier (unless auto-transformers are used.) It is an energy conversion to/from a magnetic field.
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler.
While it sounds good in theory, power plants and grids take years to expand, and the information needed to project power plant demand would be in the hands of the grid owners. It would be much harder to scale power generation smoothly with demand, and potentially increase the number of power company crashes due to the potential boom/bust introduction. This would allow the line owners to control the winners and losers in the power generation industry, and create a scenario similar to the way content producers like Netflix interact with Comcast.
While the potential for competition would be nice, the potential for boom/bust crashes of power generating companies could create instability and brownouts, something many deem unacceptable. In this case, I think industry stability > industry growth.