Optimizing for factors other than universal service is completely valid, but I’m guessing each of those municipal power systems pre-dated rural electrification and thereby get to somewhat free ride on the system more than anyone would reasonably allow Walnut Creek to do in the year 2025.
There is also a huge moral hazard problem where we make it cheaper than it should be to live in fire zones by subsidizing electricity and insurance. So people build a lot of houses in fire territory that burn down.
In the meantime we make it more expensive to live in the safe places. We should stop doing that
The real benefit is that the people who don't have any reason to actually be rural, say remote software developers, will now have to either cover their costs rather than externalising them, or move to the city.
A $100 million project to bury the lines to 1000 houses is $100k per house which just ain't worth it. Not saying this is a real number but it could easily be if it's costing $0.20/kWh to do distribution.
This is very similar to how Africa will leapfrog the legacy model with cheap solar and batteries.
In Australia, they have a model of colocating stationary battery storage in neighborhoods to balance buffer solar production locally for time shifting purposes (vs shipping that power far only to bring it back in the evening).
The local solution to solve local problem absolutely works, but that is not what you are describing.
Africa is not going to substitute a continental scale grid with solar and batteries. That's just pie-in-the-sky levels of delusion.
Without them the grid is like a bunch of dominoes where a failure can cascade unless grid operators, or automated systems, react fast enough. Battery systems are like power firewalls; if the main grid goes down, the battery keeps right on chugging.
If circuit protection devices or an equipment failure happens on a main transmission line, the utility has hours to fix it, and meanwhile everyone has power. Ditto for maintenance. Need to replace that big huge switch that feeds part of the county? No problem, just...shut it off. Long as you're done before the battery bank runs out, everything's fine.
Right now you can end up with situations where a power plant will "trip" and go offline, such as when a large amount of load is disconnected due to a transmission line failure or substation failure. The grid frequency goes up if the power plants on the grid can't throttle back fast enough, and instead, to keep the grid from going over-frequency, the plant goes offline entirely.
If a lot of areas are on battery - those systems can be commanded to start charging to stop the plants from speeding up. If the grid goes dead, it's not nearly as big a deal, because the grid operators have more time to do things like sequence the re-connection of all those areas.
I'd imagine that with a bunch of battery systems distributed around a grid, they could potentially be able help black-start a plant if needed.
Battery systems also reduce the need for a transmission line upgrade; when demand is higher than the line's capacity, the battery system steps in. When demand is below the line capacity, the battery system charges.
All the microgrids you describe provide basic needs. None power serious industry anywhere.
Batteries are a good solution for certain situations, not as a fix-all. All the batteries in the world can power a large power system like California or Quebec for minutes. That's right - minutes.
https://www.undp.org/energy/africa-minigrids-program
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/02/26/s...
https://www.esmap.org/mini_grids_for_half_a_billion_people_t...
https://www.nrel.gov/reopt/projects/case-study-sub-saharan-a...
