Conventional wisdom in the US solar industry used to hold that the utilities were too blinkered and ossified to grasp the potential of distributed PV, and would be left on the sidelines when it inevitably became cost-competitive.

It turns out everybody was wrong.

Most utilities still fear distributed PV, and rightly so; some will fight the sector until their dying breath. But the days when it could be said that the utilities simply don’t “get” solar are gone forever, and a growing number are coming to like it very much indeed.

There