[throw__away7391]

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

[ghaff]

And it’s not universal. Just heard a talk today from someone who lives off-grid along with a well, rain collection, and septic.

[throw__away7391]

Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).

I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.