Not only is local, sustainable low cost energy production getting cheaper and easier but the post-industrial household energy use is going down.
We've replaced CRTs and incandescents. Our new buildings have better weather proofing and even our kitchen appliances have dramatically improved.
Even in places like Los Angeles, the public have been clamoring for and enthusiastically voting to gasp tax themselves to build mass transit systems. The average vehicle fuel economy has been going up consistently for years. This trend towards lower cost, more efficient things is one consumers have been wildly supportive of and will continue.
The future of low energy at low cost is the stated reason that companies like PG&E are moving away from nuclear based primarily on financial forecasts.
People can have their own wells, or collect and store rainwater, but most don't if utility water is available.
Every home in any remotely civilized area is already wired for utility power. Utility scale renewable energy, if that can be done cost-effectively, probably makes the most sense for the most people.
Otherwise you have an expensive purchase and installation of solar panels, a transfer switch if you keep utility power connected as a backup, battery installation so you have electricity at night, etc.
It's just more complexity and expense than most people want to deal with, compared to paying a hundred dollars or so a month to the utility.
By this time, the cost threshold of things in the class of solar is perhaps a few hundred dollar fixed cost for your needs. Just like you don't need to be an energy-saving enthusiast to get a non-crt computer screen today, low-cost commodity energy generation hardware will dominate the marketplace and essentially be the only consumer-facing option.
If you are an "I don't care" consumer like most are, the cheapest and best business model would be to have either someone come by and put the thing in or to franchise it out like 7/11 so every neighborhood gets their own low-cost plant.
Either way, large power-generation infrastructure projects are likely to give way to an even larger consumer-facing power-generator infrastructure.
In the shorter term someone somewhere (maybe reading these words right now) will come along and make a version of solar or solar-equivalent tech a sexy luxury toy for wealthy people to show everyone how rich they are. It will get hyped-to-hell-and-back. Big players will slap their head and say "oh darn that was obvious" and quickly move in to snatch the market and there will be a wild ride for all the VC groups involved. It'll mint a few 22-year old billionaires from either MIT or Harvard who will be paraded as visionary geniuses for our time. So lovely.
Don't know when, don't know where, but it's coming. (ok, my real guess is geopolitics will destabilize oil prices and create a climate for adoption within the next 3 years - the cost metrics have just started working out in the past 12 months)
The thing is, a water collection system requires constant upkeep. A solar power system requires some maintenance once in several years (like your roof). Even if they want to stay connected on the grid (batteries still require maintenance), they'll probably want some solar power.
Unfortunately, he pays something like $1900/month, because he is distant from the nearest fire station, and again, city-based insurance companies see that as a big problem.
The house is in the Yukon, far out there.
This post of mine has a photo of their "cabin" that is just down the road from their house. http://theroadchoseme.com/chillin-yukon-style
I just went through my photos, I don't actually have one of their house online anywhere.
I took these on a walk from their house: http://theroadchoseme.com/northern-lights-1
Also, "off-grid house in the Yukon" is extremely common :)
Anyway, my friend asks the insurance assessor how often he has a power failure at his house "Oh, only a couple of times a year" says the man.
In 10 years living off grid, my friends have never had a single outage.