Disconnecting from the grid - that sounds like there's some kind of clause in the area that you live that essentially ties you to the utility. You must live in on the pacific coast or SW.

EDIT: To all the responses - I'm talking off grid as in all functionality. Sure you can add solar / solar thermal etc though in many places it isn't cost effective and doesn't make a lot of sense in a city where the alternative is that those costs are defrayed across a large base that provides reliability and service. I don't have much love for utilities but they do provide a valuable service.

I'm all for it where it makes sense but it isn't a blanket statement.

My primary complaint is in agreement; solar is not cheap once you take them into account

For reference what you quoted was 0.7 $/Watt not 7 cents.

While the cost of the panels has dropped - you still have balance of system and, yes, the unbelievably high interconnection costs (location dependent)

I think in most of California it is still legal to do home electrical work, provided it is permitted and inspected, but I'm not sure if this is true for solar as well.

Everyone has a use for hot water. You can always have off-grid solar heating an auxiliary tank to take the load off the primary water heater.

You are talking about incremental improvements.

New bulk panels can be be purchased as low as $0.07/kw or $7,000 for 10 kw nameplate. You can get 10kwh of lead acid batteries for another 2 grand, a 10kw combo MPPT for ~1 grand or a 10KW charge controller + 5 KW AC inverter for the same.

I'm out of budget so I guess I'm racking with 2x4s and using chicken wire for cabling, but you get the point

Why not treat them as independent problems - an off-grid solar system for most of your electricity, while also maintaining a nominal (/backup) grid connection? If your home is already connected to the grid, then I would think the ongoing cost would be minimal and could be viewed as just another tax.

Or if you can get away with having a power inlet on your off grid system and powering that system from the grid with an extension cord during temporary backup/maintenance conditions only, go for that.

For my own AHJ, grid interconnect has nothing to do with whether permits/licenses are required (and for homeowner work, they're not). So an off-grid system and grid-connected are under the same requirements there regardless. A grid-tie system that can feed back power to the grid requires additional signoff/agreement with the POCO though.

(I'm very sympathetic to the situations where the utility will demand some stiff fee to build out a grid connection to a new residence, while local regulations require this connection for occupancy. But this isn't what you described)

Wait, what? What happens if you just don't pay your bill?

Edit: Or just disconnect internally, meaning you use no power.

This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.

Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.

In the context of the OP, which is a federal agency, whether or not you can build a house that is disconnected from the electrical grid is determined first by your local laws, and secondly by your state laws. You can certainly build houses in the US that aren't on the electrical grid, demonstrating that there's no federal prohibition against it.

I've seen a few people quoted more than 500K for PG&E to run power to their house. That can buy a lot of redundancy and peace of mind. Similarly, many cities have power outages longer than 24 hours on an annual basis in California. At this point most people in my neighborhood have gas generators for when the grid goes out.

Friends have lived off-grid in the Yukon in a very nice house for 20 years.

It's hard to get house insurance when you're not on the grid, and whenever they get asked about it, they ask the insurance person on the phone "When was the last time you had a power outage?" (inevitably the answer is sometime in the last month or three - the power grid in the Yukon is a fickle thing).

In 20 years, they've never had a single second of power outage in their very nice off grid house.

Before home generation, everyone needed both. The cost of the infrastructure was amortized over all of the customers. As it turned out, rich people used more power, so by having a single charge just based on usage but that covered the cost of both usage and the grid, rich people subsidized poor people.

But the home solar came along, and the rich people started getting it. So now the power companies have a problem. They still have to maintain all of that grid infrastructure, whether you're connected to it or not, and they need rich people to subsidize it.

The could have simply split the bill up and put the infrastructure on the property tax bill and then just charge people for their actual usage, but that would be complicated and would reveal how much they pay for each part.

So instead they lobbied for laws that don't let you go off grid and force you to pay a minimum "connection fee" each month.