Cowicide, your scenario may be the case in the ill-defined future, but for the next decade or three, the grid will be what prevents most of the population from freezing in the dark at the wrong time of year.
The real challenge is it becomes very expensive to provide a grid that is needed only 5% of the time, and yet just taking the total cost of supporting the grid and dividing it by number of customers won’t sit too well, either.
Of course, the land-line telephone companies are facing that problem, with people getting enraged because the companies would love to just close down the grid in certain spots.
