The main lobby group for electricity network operators in Australia is pushing for compulsory connection fees for all homes and businesses – even if they are not connected to the grid – and penalties for those who choose to disconnect, as part of a last-ditch effort to protect their declining revenue streams.

The Energy Networks Association says the proposals are deliberately calibrated to stop people from leaving the grid, and kicking off what is often described as the “death spiral”, as the networks seek to recover lost revenues from those consumers who remain.

The change to a decentralised grid, based around solar and storage rather than big centralised generation, is seen as inevitable, and many analysts say that networks – which in Australia account for more than half of most bills following a massive ($45 billion) and questionable spending splurge in recent years – will have to change the way they do business, or even write down the value of their assets.

But the networks are digging in, refusing to countenance write-downs, and now want consumers to pay for the networks whether they use them or not. Alternatively, they want any households that leave the grid to pay their “historic” share of grid capacity as a penalty for leaving.

Grid defection is likely to become a real option for many consumers, because of the huge falls in the cost of rooftop solar PV, and the falling cost of battery storage. Soaring network fees and rising fixed charges is reducing the pay-back for solar-only installations, but is likely to encourage more battery storage.

As well, many households currently receiving high solar tariffs – such as the 160,000 households in NSW – are looking to battery storage to avoid the situation where they are exporting their solar power back to the grid for little or no compensation.

The networks are worried that, as network fees continue to rise and battery storage and solar costs continue to fall, it could be economic for individual households and businesses to quit the grid altogether, rather than pay high fixed charges.

Some analysts say this could happen within years, driven by technology breakthroughs, and the mass-market uptake of battery storage caused by new arrivals such as the Tesla PowerWall. They say it will be accelerated by the recent moves to lift network charges, and to increase the fixed component of those charges, meaning that consumers that use less electricity get hit twice as hard.