Well, I'd expect to not get full retail rate selling power back to the grid, after all I get the convenience of using them as my unlimited battery. But I will agree that 1.5 cents going and 9.4 cents coming does feel like a mighty wide disparity. Here in PA, we've always gotten the same rate both ways, although I know that's changing.
Have you done a cost analysis of just buying and arranging your own local storage? Where's the break-even on that?
I've been aggressively researching for about a year now. I have an electrical engineering background so i'm at least basically familiar. I'm building my own system, but I want to make it scalable. Solar is simple, but the software in the inverters has been a bit tricky considering it's not very well documented. People just have the systems installed and don't know much about it.
My electric bill is high. Was high, then i cut back on usage by getting more efficient equipment, dropping my usage by about 1/3rd. Then electric went up by 50% in a month. I picked up some panels and an aio inverter to fiddle around with things, got my deep freeze off the grid. Was going to do grid tie, but then I was looking at the fee's to tie in, then the rates that they bought back, and thought that was insane.
So I switched focus to off grid, and that became super expensive, even DIY, mostly because the massive battery investment. So I was focusing on reducing usage and increasing efficiency all while buying solar panels when I found them cheap. I've been building a racking system to mount them when I figured out a hybrid system. It basically provides the best of both worlds. It's off grid, but if you have a period of poor light/overcast/storms/etc you can set it to tie into grid power to charge the batteries and provide electricity when needed.
As of right now, I'm at 24x240w panels and I'm going to be adding another 20x250w, the hybrid inverter i'm looking at is 13kw and takes 15kw of pv, and the battery i'm looking at is a 30kwh lifepo4. The system is just barely meeting my requirements. All in it'll cost me about 15k, the batteries being 9k, inverter at 3k, and panels around 2k, plus odds and ends at 1k. Payoff time is about 4 years at most if everything goes as planned.