This study seeks to analyze competitiveness in electric rates in the U.S. residential sector under a market-based solar sharing network platform and/or a market-based energy trading platform. We argue that under the solar sharing or trading platform there plausibly exist social welfare gains from economics of distributed generation (DG) of renewable energy among grid-connected, photovoltaic (PV) system households. Thus, in this work, we consider a theoretical analysis framework using a model where grid-connected PV-system households are both simultaneously consumers and producers of electricity.