Illinois passed the Future Energy Jobs Act December 1, 2016 to encourage community solar projects, train workers for renewable energy jobs, and provide 25% wind and solar energy by 2025. Anyone living within the grid of a solar project can subscribe and receive a discount on their utility bill. Individual rooftop projects are rare around here, I think, but there has been a big push to take churches, non-profits, and schools to install solar. Once again, non-profits could encourage their low income clients to become subscribers.

Wired seems to think solar is building some mass.

Much of the US Electric Grid Could Go the Way of the Landline Phone

So you want to do solar power in a big way and be off the grid. Look at a system that will give you 10KW a day to store the power, and have a long life system of say 8 years for the batteries. lets use 31AGM batteries the Qty 40 is a nice number cost 12 grand. That is just one part of a system that will give you $1.11USD worth of power a day. That last number is based on the cost of gird power in my part of the world. Life rots with the end of cheap oil. If you run the numbers to power a electric car by solar electric, Nissan leaf or Ford the cost is WOW. But just might do a leaf if I only drive a few days a week the system will cost less than the car.

California is requiring solar panels on all new houses.

Here’s what that means. More expensive houses for now, but maybe cheaper in the long run.

"California has become the first state to require that new homes be built with solar panels. The rules go into place in 2020 and are part of the state’s ambitious efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But these requirements also make it more expensive to build in a state where housing is already extremely expensive."

Rocky Mountain Power here in Utah is also pushing back on rates and pay back to those who install grid tied solar arrays. These installations are springing up all over Salt Lake area roofs. I was an early adopter and joined the first community solar project in Salt Lake. Naturally my installation is grid tied and some day I would like to have a battery bank so I can tell RMP to kiss my you know what, but they are expensive. The best I hoped for from my PV array is to keep my electrical bill as low as possible.

My familly's mountain cabin has a small, solar installation with batteries and a propane fired backup generator. The cabin isn't heavily used, but both of my parents lived there all summer long for several years and now just my Mom does. This system as worked well for all of the cabin's electrical needs for many years, but there are limits and ongoing costs. I believe we have replaced the battery bank at least three times; replaced the inverter and charge controllers twice; and all the PV panels once. I think the generator has also been rebuilt once, plus the necessary maintenance work as needed each year. Our system isn't big enough to run things like washing machines and dryers and I can't convince my Mom to hang out the laundry in the summer, so the generator gets a regular workout.

It is good to cut your electrical usage as much as you can, but an off grid system still needs regular input from the grid.

I can't say for sure as that is my brothers area of responsibility. I think with the inverter, it was an upgrade to allow Mom's new sewing machine to run off of the batteries. As for the solar panels, our original ones were not compatable with any new ones on the market and my brother wanted to expand the system a bit so that they would charge up the batteries a bit better and we wouldn't have to run the generator so much. I suspect that these are Chinese ones, but they don't have the micro inverter on the back.