I'm not quite sure what he meant. The small producer.... The utilities don't like distributed generation, but the future will have to be that way, so there's a lot of work to be done.
When you interact with the grid, there has to be an interface so that when the solar is producing energy, it's feeding it into the grid or you're using it yourself. It's basically free energy in terms of the fuel.
I'm not quite sure what he would have meant by balancing.