Comment by bluGill

> it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states

No, because of scale. A large factory is one entity to deal with. Moving just one out of state is possible, but meaningless as even though houses are significant overall you need to deal with many houses before an actual difference is made, while if you can deal with a factory you can make a large difference for the same amount of effort.

A factory/hospital is also easier because they probably have a backup plan. if there is any possibility that the power will go out they are likely to have made backup plans. You are overall cheaper than their backup plans, but you can probably make them a deal where they run their backup plan instead of connecting to you. Since they already have the generator it isn't a problem for them to use their generator on your busy days, and so a small discount makes it easy to work with the factory than a home owner who is probably thinking about friends and family they are moving away from.

The power company has a list of who these deals are with and the priority order. I know of one factory with a coal boiler from the 1800s, and a generator from then 1920s - the whole is very inefficient and takes a full day to start up, but the power company makes it worth while to keep everything operational because every 5 years they can power it on and supply the whole town (at 5x the normal cost of power from the plants they run all the time). Meanwhile there is a store near my parents that is running their generator every hot day - a modern diesel generator when sized properly is not a lot more expensive than grid power so the store doesn't need a big incentive to use it instead of grid power.

Of course all of the above is for exceptions. Where I live now we have built far more wind than needed most of the time, and as a result 80% of our power is renewable. There are very few days when backups are even needed.