My own situation: I live 10 minutes from the nearest town (pop ~6000), and 45 minutes from major urban areas. The electrical grid ends 600 metres away from me (more about that below).
I’ve been living on electricity provided by solar PV, batteries, and a petrol backup generator for 19 years. The house is almost self-sufficient in water - rooftop rainwater collection into 2 x 22500 litre tanks (occasionally we have to buy some water), and I have a rayburn wood-burning kitchen range that provides for cooking, heating and hot water. It’s a hungry beast, but I’m also growing some of my own firewood - about 10% of consumption - that’ll go up as the firewood trees mature.
We don’t have air-conditioning, but apart from that, there’s very little we don’t have, e.g. ADSL internet speed isn’t blazing, but it’s adequate, computers, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, kitchen appliances, etc.
There’s advantages and disadvantages, but the best one was 3 years ago, when a cyclone went through the district and knocked out mains power for 3 days - those neighbours on the electrical grid had no backup, so the contents of their fridges and freezers went in the bin. They also had no power to run their water pumps (being as they were, on the electrical grid but not the water grid), so they had no running water - no flushing toilets, no showers. I had sufficient fuel to run the generator to keep the batteries charged enough to keep the fridge and freezer cold, the water pump running, and for some lighting at night. We played cards and board games to keep ourselves amused - it was fun. Speaking to the neighbours later, they were in shock about how fragile the local power grid was, and how quickly their own sense of civilisation broke down when their toilets stopped flushing 
When we last upgraded the system (more panels, new batteries), we needed a quote for connection to the grid (600 metres away), in order to qualify for the off-grid subsidy available at the time. it was going to cost upwards of AUD$33K PLUS tree-clearing costs, to get the grid extended down the street to our house. The upgrade cost about 2/3 of that, so it was definitely cheaper to stay off-grid.
In general, the PV system provides more energy than we need, but we still need the petrol grid sometimes, and we seem to be dependent on the internet grid, and sometimes the water delivery grid, but it’s satisfying to know that better than 80% of our electrical energy use is from solar, and not the electricity grid.
