Scott, thanks for saying this, it helps to clarify where we have misconceptions. I have a lot of respect for Amory, and for your good self. We most of us are doing the best we can, given our understanding of things, and the means we have at our disposal. Amory's grasp is obviously better than most, but maybe still missing a vital systemic problem, if it is not clear how his developments fit with, or expand to a general system economy applicable to all people.
On what you get paid from the utilities company, for the energy that you push to them, there is a mathematical problem; your solar product adds Joules to Earth, whilst the product of the utilities company subtracts Joules from Earth.
Imagine every Joule of your solar energy received, and everyone else's was converted to hydrogen fuel (with perfect efficiency of course!).
That fuel would be adding to fuel stocks on Earth.
Notice this is the opposite of how traditional utilities energy works, it subtracts fuel (Joules put to use on Earth), per Joule produced.
When we connect the two together, they physically cancel each other out. Your electrical meter actually goes backwards, even if it indicates otherwise. This is the only way it can measure throughput power.
Even unconnected, these two mathematically opposite kinds of energy do the same, they cancel one another out with their effects on Earth.
The money paid to you by the utilities company is not money you gained, it is only a refund, of what you paid previously.
The only thing your solar energy achieved, connected to their energy supply system, was to reduce their business by a little.
Yet you added Joules to Earth, whilst the utiliities company can only subtract, because they have to work for profit, there has to be labor associated with their business, the labor of extraction, which everyone effectively promises to do by accepting and using money issued only as debt. Otherwise the debts can't be paid, and the value of money is destroyed, it becomes useless, the first indications of which are inflation.
As things stand, the inflation we are seeing has to get steadily worse, until money becomes worthless, mathematically zero, at the point when all of the Joules added to Earth by solar equal all the Joules taken from Earth.
Obviously we will get nowhere near that, practical economy will break down, when we each can no longer find enough money to feed ourselves and keep the roofs over our heads, as we are seeing.
So things have to be revised, to maintain something like economy.
Hence why Kardashev Money has to have an exact definition, (Like I put in Medium), it is monetised solar Joules, whereas the money you are getting from the utilities company is effectively the opposite, the de-monetisation of your Joules.
Sorry I couldn't find a way to answer your comment more succinctly, but hopefully you see the issue more clearly now, it isn't simple, it is systemic, even the most accomplished of scientists have trouble seeing this, because it requires a development of concepts we've thought we had ironed out since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Nikola Tesla, and maybe JP Morgan, seem to have been the only folk who might have understood it in history. The trouble is, we didn't learn from it.
Here is a numerical evaluation of our current predicament in UK, which you will no doubt experience also in the US, soon eneough, all countries will come up against the same problem:
To assist in understanding it, it might be best to begin with this story:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/understanding-energy-d14b313586d2
Actually (Looking again to confirm), the story linked to that one is a better foundation, more clear:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/the-reason-why-degrowth-is-not-what-is-needed-4416025899a2
