We installed solar with battery back up and also purchased a couple mini split heat pumps. The Mini-splits saved us a lot of electricity this summer which is usually when I use the most electricity but I think this summer I banked electricity every month so far.
I won’t make as much electricity in the winter but the low temperatures make my solar cells much more efficient so that it won’t be horrible. Since having solar I have never had to use a backup generator and can’t even tell when the neighbors don’t have electricity until night time when we notice all the lights off around us.
If you depend on government you are unwise. Rolling blackouts will become more and more frequent in coming years. Even without a generator or solar a battery backup (large one) would keep you running during the rolling blackouts that are bound to come to more than just California.
Don’t let the government get involved in your preparations else they might decide to make you share what you have with those who were too foolish to prepare.
Prepare.
Summer, too, is when I use the most electricity. Now the EV is the most power intensive "appliance" (26K miles driven in it per year, with about 23K of those miles charged at home). If not for the EV it'd be cooling the home in the summer, like you. Then the next largest battle is heating the home in the winter. After that it's the water heater. With most people around here, heating the home is about equal to running the water heater (because the water heater runs year round, while the home heater is needed for just a few months).
But in my case, the hybrid water heater (water heater with built-in heat pump) operates so efficiently it's not close to the power needed for heating the home.
I wanted mini-splits but I didn't get them for two reasons: part of the downstairs of my home is built into the ground (no place to run the condensate lines). The other reason is I use the hybrid water heater to help cool my home. During the warm 7-8 months of the year I need A/C, I have the free cold air output from the water heater get sucked in by a new air receiver in the floor of the closet the water heater is in. Thus, my variable speed air handler, which is always running even if it's just at low speed, pulls in that free cold air and spreads it around the house. That makes my variable speed heat pump for my home not have to work as hard to cool the air during the 2-3 hours the water heater is running. The water heater draws 300 watts, runs only 2 to 3 hours after my wife and I take back-to-back showers (a total of only 0.9kWh to heat the water tank), all while giving me a free cold air bonus to save power on my variable speed heat pump. That's basically some home engineering to make the various components of my energy project work better than the sum of their parts.
Since I added onto my solar, batteries, and inverters Aug 31 of last year, it's provided 81% of the power we need in our all-electric two-story home, including charging the EV, which we do most of our driving in. My last 12 power bills averaged $84. Two of those were before the solar upgrade. So after I get the next 2 power bills I expect my average to be in the low $70's per month (most of that in the winter, as you pointed out).
Here in Alabama the rolling blackouts haven't become a thing ... yet. But costs are going up bigly. Thus, the main objective of my overall energy project is to protect my retirement investments from the Dims' sky high energy costs. The project is achieving that goal remarkably well. Like you, I wouldn't notice the few times the grid goes down if my solar system didn't alert me because I'm almost always running on my own power anyway.
But if the Dims go full control-freak on energy and force a mark of the beast level requirement to get power, I'll go through the steps to make us 100% energy independent. For me that'd be adding 10kW of solar to make a total of 30kW, adding another inverter to give us a total of 27kW of continuous AC power (and also be able to take in 30kW of solar at a time), doubling my battery storage to 180kWh, and building a hydrogen room about 100 ft away from the house in the backyard in the hill (like a storm shelter). The hydrogen room would have an electrolyzer to generate hydrogen gas when my batteries are charged at least 90%, store the hydrogen gas in a tank or two, and have a fuel cell to use the hydrogen gas whenever my battery SOC gets down to maybe 30%. Not that I've already done the math or anything. LOL I already use my inverters' "smart load" feature to power a separate electrical panel intermittently whenever the battery SOC is 70%. That's how we usually charge our EV (using an outlet tied to that panel if our EV is already charged enough for the next day, we'll charge the EV even more if the power is free, which might prevent us from using the grid to charge the EV on a future day when we have less free solar power). I could use the same smart load feature to run the electrolyzer (which is horribly inefficient, so run it only on days that we have so much free power we don't have anywhere useful to utilize that power). And my inverters already have a feature to automatically start a generator when the battery SOC gets low. I don't have a generator, therefore I'm not using that feature. But I could have it start a hydrogen fuel cell instead of a normal generator.
All of that would be too costly to implement as long as we're allowed to buy power from the grid. But I keep it in the back of my mind if the Dims force us to go there.