[Bluestrike2]

Maybe for some applications (low usage residential), but not for all. Certainly not for energy-intensive industrial applications. And if you're running lines to industrial sites--which are located all over the country in all sorts of areas--you might as well hook up residential developments to the grid as well to be more efficient and cost effective. That's not to say that distributed generation is a bad idea, or that it isn't going to happen. It's not, and it will. But it'll still be connected to the grid. No one's really proposing doing away with grid connections, outside some very limited and specific types of situations.