Sort of. Battery storage for micro grids can pay off if there’s a market for frequency response services and energy arbitrage (see: Tesla’s Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia). If your frequency response market is sane, your energy prices are already low (most of the US), and outages cost you little to nothing, entirely true, no one is paying for micro grids.

Now, if you get rooftop solar (which makes fiscal sense in most states), and you get local storage, you get a 26% federal tax credit towards the battery storage if it’s configured to only charge off of solar (although I believe you can precharge off the utility in emergencies with no impact to your tax benefit, Tesla calls this Storm Watch mode). So depending on the market, you skip the utility and go straight to the end user (as Tesla does with solar and PowerWalls). Again, this is entirely dependent on the local energy market conditions.

I propose that you’ll see micro grids take off as battery prices comes down from EV manufacturing scaling up.