A prime example is the Intermountain Intertie which was built to carry coal-electricity from Utah to So Cal. That’s now available for large solar installations along its route. (And Utah could get it together and tap their newly found geothermal resources and stick them on line as well.)

The Intermountain and Pacific Interties are being repurposed to bring late afternoon and evening wind-electricity from Wyoming to the West Coast.

Then, we don’t need a lot of new generation. We need to replace fossil fuels. We can largely deal with increased demand by demand cutting via efficiency. That means we can put large solar arrays on the same lines with natural gas. The gas plants will be shut down when fuel-free solar is producing.

Some local lines are overloaded. Certainly not all. Distributing solar around the neighborhood and increasing efficiency will help with that problem.

If we’re melting insulation off lines (something I’ve never seen) then we have significant overload problems and we are wasting significant power. Distributed solar will help with that problem only when the Sun is shining. If we can’t cut demand then we need to upsize those lines.

If local distribution is strained and more supply is needed it makes no sense to solely charge solar for improving local transmission. That’s a cost that will have to be born regardless whether supply comes from solar, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro or any other source.

And yes, large scale is much more attractive to traditional utilities companies, that local. Since local PV looks like lost sales to them, just like efficiency improvements.

Right now large solar arrays are financially attractive to utility companies.