Surely they were offered a deal akin to municipal water vs private wells in many jurisdictions: if you want on-grid service, you either forego independent sourcing or route that into the grid and get equivalent credits back. Municipal sources don’t want the competition: if enough homes can go off-grid sufficiently, customer base collapses; corollary is if enough homes accept the deal, they’re beholden to the grid working.
I expect many CA residents will do exactly what environmentalists [claim they] want: go 100% renewables (a la “at least if my power system fails, it’s my own d@mn fault”).
A curious thing about supply-and-demand: when elasticity hits a brick wall, demand instantly becomes acute. Negotiating over high power costs is one thing; having no power is very different, as suddenly homeowners decide $50,000 for a 100% off-grid system is cheap.
Tangent...
Russian scene:
Customer: “How much are pork chops?”
Butcher: “5 rubles.”
C: “Other butcher, he sells pork chops for 2 rubles!”
B: “So buy from him.”
C: “He has none!”
B: “When I have none, I will sell for 2 rubles too.”
I’d be retrofitting that bad boy with a valve.
As for solar, you might as well drop a battery bank in and do wind too. In doing that you can put a shunt on the solar plant and divert the power during an outage.
They will never know. As soon as the power comes on the shunt opens back up and diverts the power back to the grid.