There are also institutional issues to resolve. A path-dependent technology pattern has developed in the energy field that encourages the current centralized generation model of energy supply. When shifting away the capital investments in technology from centrally planned facilities toward distributed generation, renewable energy technologies and their prospective customers must fight against a tide of perceptions, practices, and market structures designed to facilitate the old central-station ways. In the end, consumers have a difficult time interconnecting renewable energy systems to the existing utility grid, as well as rendering their up-front capital investment into monthly payments that are less than their.
