The huge power companies still control the grid in many countries though. I hope improvements in batteries/storage will remedy this and we'll shift towards community grids of sorts. You'll still need the traditional grid for peaks but the power is shifting (pun non intended). It's a great development, I haven't looked into the net power needed to produce solar/photovoltaics panels but it was dropping quite a bit as well.

I'm a bit surprised there are no mini wind turbines. I read about some promising developments (with close to 0 noise output) but it seems to have fizzled.