wattmatters
Solar Wizard
It's a bit hard to miss the definition of something which hasn't been mentioned before.
I'm not criticising the self reliant lifestyle choice you are making. I'm just saying it's impractical for the vast majority because it is an inherently inefficient use of resources, which is a big reason why societal structures, communities and ultimately, cities, form.
Where does the technology you use to enable this self-reliance it come from? What happens when it stops working? You won't be building your own PV or inverter or mining, refining and manufacturing your own copper wiring.
Like it or not you still need the grid and the rest of society to be functioning as it does in order to provide the things you need to be self-reliant.
Viewing the grid as a tool of control is rather sad.
It's one of most complex and incredible tools our species has ever invented and it should be nurtured and protected. Yes there are some bad actors in the mix but in general electricity grids are astonishing for what they enable our societies to achieve.
That one state government owned utility has decided to provide a local micro grid service rather than maintain several hundred km of highly vulnerable power distribution lines for servicing a handful of customers is not some mad conspiracy. It's just good policy to run an operation using more cost effective options which have been enabled with newer technologies.
It's no different to some locations where the utility does the same thing with local diesel generators, except now it's solar PV and energy storage with some backup capacity. We are talking about locations where the ratio of customers to distribution line length is very low. These same locations experience a lot of outages because the power lines are vulnerable. The local micro grid provided by the utility is likely to be far more reliable than what they previously had.
Customers may choose to not use it, and build their own. But given the price of electrical energy supply is by law the same as for everyone else in the wider region then these customers are hardly being placed at a disadvantage and the reward/risk ratio for building their own system is not particularly high.
Such cost/benefit for these utility-provided micro grid solutions does not exist where the number of customers per distribution km is greater so I don't see this being some thin end of a wedge.
For places with halfway decent grids, going off-grid is still relatively expensive relative to grid supply. It's also worse environmentally.
