I'm curious what you mean with that statement. Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar that they'd have to cover out-of-pocket for a grid-scale rooftop solar deployment?

> Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.

I mean, as a first approximation the utilities incentives are:

- keep capex and opex costs as low as possible

- while selling electricity at the prevailing rate inside their RTO

"Shorting The Grid" by Meredith Angwin paints an absolutely atrocious picture of the governance structures inside many RTOs and there are definitely perverse incentives at play, but fundamentally the utilities want to sell electricity while maximizing their margins.

I'm not even sure what the "customer incentives" are beyond paying as little as possible to keep their lights on and houses heated and cooled.