Using less, or selling back, doesn't save an electric company anything. By that logic, the owners of Los Cabos are getting rich off of me not eating there.
Electric companies are not like restaurants. If you really want to go down that road, you pay Los Cabos to get in the door whether or not you eat anything, and the person with the grid tied renewable is also acting as a server for a discount on the meal.
During peak power events is generally when DG homes pull power from the utility, not provide power back to. They may not be pulling as much, they are generally pulling.
Pulling less saves the utility money by reducing transmission and distribution loss, which is at its greatest during peak load, as well as shaving peak load, which is generally the most expensive for them to buy.
If the utilities buy DG power at rates like they pay other wind/solar plants, it would raise generation costs. Most power generators negotiate and buy/sell at their own rates, but I can only assume that the utilities will be required to pay a flat rate set by the OCC even if they don't want it and even if that price is above what it would otherwise cost to generate it.
You assume wrongly. Oklahoma does not require utilities to buy power from residential renewable installations at the retail rate like some other states do. Moreover, if a residential generator is selling power to the utility, they then get to sell that power to the generator's neighbors, at a profit.
And as far as the meter, based on what Patric says they don't really work for a house selling electric back onto the grid. It sounds like they would need a separate or different model of meter. (not to mention that there are only a few of those kind of meters in Oklahoma as part of a pilot program, so hard to assume what the future is given a small beta program.)
It saves the electric company money to replace meters with remotely readable models, which just so happen to all be capable of metering both directions. New technology is amazing.
In other states, it has been shown that residential generation is on average actually cheaper for the utility by a couple of cents a kWh than the retail rate, even before considering the difference in carbon emissions. As in they make money buying from you at retail because they, like every utility that doesn't have time of use billing, are losing money on energy sold at peak demand and that more than makes up for having to buy from you at not-peak times.
Basically, distributed generation reduces their capital costs and their variable costs, yet somehow we're expected to pay them for reducing their expenditure. It's weird.
