Basically the power company is renting your roof space for solar panels to provide energy to the grid, and you get paid in kilowatts. You and your neighbors will still be subsidizing the purchase of the panels by various line items on your bill. They don't have to buy or rent any land for their equipment and get the bonus of spreading out the equipment and lessening the impact of critical failure on a large scale.
Since you're subsidizing the purchase of the panels even if you don't get them on your roof, you might as well get them if at all possible and reap some of the benefits.
I'm willing to bet that you can't use storage batteries on the free system though as you're going to be expected to provide as much power to the grid as possible. They may also look at past power consumption to see who uses the least amount of electricity on a daily basis as part of the approval process. Hopefully your roof has a good orientation to the Sun.
This is all speculation on my part of course.
At worst, if things went wonky and civilization collapsed you could cut the cables feeding the grid and be ready with batteries and an inverter (if necessary) for your own power supply.
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