@Carter the government (at least for some states in the US) has provided subsidies to help offset the costs of adding renewable energy like solar panels to a home. The issue is that these subsidies still don’t offset the cost enough for most people. The prices are still coming down and the efficiency is getting better but we are still not there yet price wise.
As far as us becoming more of a renewable energy company, we are really pushing in that direction. If you notice from one of the earlier posts that I made in this thread, Duke is looking to purchase and operate 16,000 MW of renewable energy by 2025. That would account for nearly 1/3 of our entire generation capacity right now and we provide electricity to approximately 7.5 mil homes and businesses from Florida to North Carolina (where I’m located) to Indiana. Definitely nothing to sneeze at.
One of the issue with putting solar panels just about everywhere is the managing of the power flows on the grid. Since the grid wasn’t built for the use case of “reverse” power flow from things like solar panels, we could cause more harm than good by putting solar everywhere without having the capability of managing it. Plus, having lots of “small” renewable energy being generated everywhere is just not as cost effective at the present time as having a smaller number of “large” renewable energy sites. That is why all of these huge central generation plants like coal, hydro and nuclear were originally built.
One of the things that we have looked into is the possibility of “community” microgrids. Here a neighborhood would have a centrally located “large” solar and energy storage site that could help power the neighborhood in case of power outages on the grid. The neighborhood could disconnect from the grid but still power the homes within it from this “larger” site. Again, at the present time, setups like this are still just more economical than having it on every home.
Hope that helps.