I can tell you've never dealt with an HOA or Strata before. Neighbourhood-level organizations of busybodies are way ahead of everyone else on winning the race to shittification.

Putting them in charge of your electricity won't be all sunshine and rainbows.

I'd rather the county utility manage such a neighborhood level grid; I don't trust my neighbors over the long term to consistently make good decisions regarding such technical matters. But then that's sort of what the major grid operators already do with smaller localized circuits. It's just that it was all built multiple decades ago with centralized unidirectional distribution in mind.

> the county utility

the what now?

Do you not have a utility that covers one or a few counties where you live? Here it's some sort of strange public-private partnership scheme with private investment, strictly capped profits, and a few publicly elected officials at the top. I've also lived in places where the local government owned and managed the entire grid themselves, including directly employing the workers. I've also lived in places where the operation was entirely privatized (IIRC there was some sort of rate cap and a broad SLA in exchange for being granted the natural monopoly).

Here in New Mexico (USA), all power generation and distribution is privatized but theoretically overseen by a Public Regulation Committee. There are some co-operative generation and/or distribution organizations, but these are still private (and very regional in scope). No actual public utilities at all, though many here would like that.

Sure so in that context by county utility I mean the regional provider. In short if it involves hundreds of kilowatts of power and a timescale measured in multiple decades I want a large stable body consisting of professional specialists to manage it. I don't trust an HOA or other gathering of non-expert locals with potentially high turnover with that sort of infrastructure.

Even the battery installation for a large house borders on questionable. That's not a utility closet your average person should be wandering into under any circumstances and it's easy to run up a massive bill in an instant (if you aren't lucky you might simultaneously kill yourself) but at least that's limited to your personal property.

We had this in the 19th century. We moved to a centralised grid because when you don't use it to rent seek it is vastly more efficient.

But now we have storage, distributed production, power meters, etc.

It's relatively easy to set up a grid in which several houses produce, storage and exchange energy with a simplified free market pricing system.

Alas, in most countries it's illegal because you aren't allowed to set up such a network. Energy is one of the big control levers the State has over people.

Again this was done in the 19th century. It is horribly inefficient. The only reason why it seems like a good idea today is because power companies are now rentieers instead of service provides.

How is it inefficient? You have production, storage and consumption right next to each other. You just miss the high voltage lines required to not lose a lot of energy that is produced hundreds of miles away and the transformers and switched that come with it. I would even say that it can be more efficient.

Back in the day having hundreds of nets that are not interconnectable and running everything on coal or gas made things hard to scale. But today interconnections can easily be done through a converter, you don't even have to match demand and production as you have storage and the more productors available, the cheaper and more stable the energy gets.

You also have individuals on the microgrid that actually care about the quality of the microgrid.

So it is a good idea because power companies, or anyone else who has you over a barrel, are not going to change this behavior.

Energy independence is good for individuals, not just countries. Just like privately owned cars are horribly inefficient, independence wins out.