This is nice if it leads to a switch to cheaper localized non monopolistic electricity. However, I wonder if the chain reaction could lead to widespread utilities bankruptcies and maybe even cascate to another debt crisis affecting the already fragile financial and government sectors.
Well, that's basically what private care ownership did to private streetcar and bus companies in the first half of the 20th century. Many of today's "public transit" agencies started life as bailouts (takeovers, the only reasonable kind of bailout) of private companies who could not compete with the car.
More likely that you'd see an informal/distributed 48VDC grid spring up. Less than 50V isn't considered "real" wiring by the NEC and goes largely unregulated. Think low voltage path lighting, doorbell wiring, thermostat wiring, etc.
So if you and your neighbors can share power via 48VDC with no approval then you can run your own inverters to power your household stuff. There are plenty of grid-following micro-inverters that can be purchased fairly inexpensively.
Forklift batteries cost a few grand but give you many kilowatt-hours worth of energy storage. Considering that the average US house seems to use about 1kW of power on average a 40kWh battery pack would allow huge amounts of flexibility to decide when to run a generator, use solar cells, wind turbines, etc. http://www.midwestlifttrucks.com/offgrid.html
The problem is cost per delivered kWh over the life of the battery, sans charging inefficiencies.
No Lead-Acid I know of actually beats out grid power in this application yet (you can about break-even, but what's the point?).
Some of the new, cheap Lithium-Ion batteries may do it, but a game-changer would be a low-cost fuel cell of some kind (rechargeable Iron-Air for example would be incredibly cheap).
