After some more "rate adjustments" here in So Cal. Southern California Edison has managed to get my electric bills back up to almost where they were before I installed the solar panels. As far as I can tell, I do not see any direct charge for how much I can generate, but the "non bypassable charges" have gone up 3 times in just a year, and the forced "Time of Use" rates have also all increased a bit. True it has been very hot so I used a lot of A/C, and with the fires' smoke and ash etc. my solar production has been down, but my last 2 bills both topped $200 which is not good. I used to just top $200 on very hot months before solar. So it is pretty silly now. There is no doubt they are working hard to make people NOT install solar.
With that being said. It would be very difficult to try and work around it all and put in solar without having some agreement with the electric utility. If you did make absolutely sure it never exported any power, you could try and get away with it, but if you do end up getting caught there could be fines involved.
One idea I thought of was to build basically a full off grid system that runs the house, and if all goes well, you never have to buy any power from the grid. But just in case.... Have the grid only connected to a battery charger. If the battery get's too low, it can turn on and charge your battery far cheaper than any fuel generator. I have a 600 watt charger, 10 amps into my 14S pack, and I could line up a few of them and just turn on as much as I need to get by, and of course, only at the cheap rate time.
Using a system like this, I do not see any legal way they could say you are violating any codes or laws etc. Make sure the off grid system meets any electrical safety code and zoning and you just have to pay Big Electric Co. a monthly connect fee, and once in a while, when you kick on a charger, a few KWH's here and there. No chance of any back feed ever, they can't charge you to have access to your power, and the only bad thing is when you do top up your batteries, you have to throw out any excess power, because you can't sell it to the grid. Maybe add an electric water heater that it can power to save some gas when you have a lot of solar and don't use enough.
Of course, this is not cheap, as an off grid system for a normal family home is going to be pretty big and expensive. Batteries are still going to be the biggest part. I only have 17 KWH's which is clearly not enough if I want to run my A/C at all. To truly go this off grid route now, I would need 3 times the battery, and maybe a second inverter. 6,800 watts just might not be enough to take it if I fire up the welder and the AC happens to kick on.
I wonder what would happen if I went back to So Cal Edison and said.... "Thanks to your crappy rate schedule, I have disconnected all my solar gear, I want to go back to no Net Energy Metering, and go back to tiered power billing." But then the next month, I only use 50 watt hours total as I am running off grid?? It would not be a lie if I "disconnected" all me gear from their meter, right?