Milton Friedman once warned that the return of the company store wouldn't be a matter of logic —it would be the result of inertia. Today, the company store is alive and well, operating under a new name: the centralized electrical grid. It doesn't sell food or dry goods. It sells voltage. And virtually every single American household is locked into it—without choice, without portability, and without recourse when it fails.
The grid isn't just old—it's obsolete. AI data centers are projected to draw over 80 gigawatts by 2030, more than triple today's load. Add 26 million electric vehicles and 20 million heat pumps, and we're facing a demand surge that our 20th-century infrastructure can't handle. The centralized response? Build more power plants, lay more transmission lines, erect more substations. The timeline stretches 5–10 years, the cost balloons to $2.5 trillion, and every piece introduces new single points of failure.
We've seen what happens when the system buckles. In 2021, Winter Storm Uri nearly collapsed Texas's grid in 4 minutes and 37 seconds. Over 240 people died, and the economic damage approached $200 billion. Meanwhile, those with solar panels and battery storage didn't just survive—they thrived. Their lights stayed on. Their heat ran. Their neighbors charged phones in their kitchens.
A Monopoly of Design, Not Necessity
We didn't land here through natural selection. Utility monopolies are legislative artifacts, built to electrify a rural America that no longer exists. They persist because the system was designed to protect them. Their incentives are simple: build more, earn more. Every new substation or transmission line pads their bottom line, whether it's needed or efficient. There's no market signal for local generation, no price discovery, no reward for resilience—just ratepayers footing the bill for peak prices during grid-wide crises.
In markets like ERCOT, volatility is so concentrated that three summer afternoons can drive 14% of a year's price swings. This isn't energy economics—it's bottleneck capitalism.
The Solution Exists—at the Edge
The answer isn't bigger—it's smarter. Generation and storage should happen where energy is consumed, not where it's convenient for utility balance sheets. Distributed energy—solar paired with battery storage—cuts through the physics: it eliminates 5–8% in transmission losses, uses existing rooftops, deploys in 30–90 days instead of seven years, and scales without central choke points.
Proven Model
Our model, and those of others in the industry, proves that it works. We install systems with zero upfront cost, deliver 20–30% immediate savings, and offer affordable paths to ownership after five years.
Accessible Financing
Approvals hinge on utility payment history, not FICO scores—behavior trumps prediction.
Grid Transformation
At scale, this completely reconfigures the grid's topology. California now manages a 16,000-megawatt solar ramp daily, flattening the infamous duck curve with 6.6 gigawatts of distributed battery capacity at the edge.
Stabilizing Effect
When 10–15% of households adopt storage-backed solar, peak demand stabilizes, volatility drops, and billions in transmission upgrades can be deferred.
Grid Independence Is National Security
Distributed systems don't just perform—they protect. Centralized grids fail predictably in crises —transmission lines snap, substations overload, transformers fry. When the cascade starts, no regulation and no amount of investment can stop it. Distributed energy sidesteps those risks entirely. The decentralized "nodes" can't all fail at once. And deployment of these types of systems creates jobs: twelve to fifteen permanent local jobs per million dollars invested, compared to 3–5 temporary ones from utility-scale projects.
The Threat from Washington
But progress is under fire. A recent House bill axes investment tax credits (ITCs) for third-party owned (TPO) solar systems under lease and power purchase agreements. These credits have fueled affordability, enabling low monthly payments—often below utility bills—and defined paths to ownership. In 2023, over 1.2 million families tapped into these benefits, pushing smallscale solar to 66 gigawatts, a third of U.S. solar capacity.
Without ITCs, companies like ours can't sustain low payments and offer affordable buyouts, stalling adoption. This threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs and continued investment and deployment. Worse, it hits lower-income families hardest, widening the energy equity gap just as distributed energy is set to close it.
Residential and small-scale solar represent a third of U.S. solar capacity.
What Comes Next
The Senate can still intervene, amending or rejecting these provisions to save ITCs. Readers must urge their senators to act. We need an Energy Choice framework: let customers own generation, choose storage, and contract directly with providers. Our TPO model—immediate savings, clear ownership, zero friction—shows it's possible. The only barrier is inertia.
We've spent a century assuming stability comes from scale. It doesn't. Intelligence does. Locality does. A system that turns $30 million in tax credits into $100 million in deployed capacity does. The most efficient grid investment in America is already here—wired, mounted, and waiting. The question is whether we'll lead the transition or cling to the past.
Andrew Fuller is Director of Operations at Apollo Leasing, a vertically integrated distributed energy company deploying residential solar and battery storage systems across the United States, and founding member of SaveSolarChoice.org.