Irrelevant of what they're doing, you can cover your roof in panels and stick in some storage and forget that a grid even exists.
People spend a lot of time complaining about things they should just ignore.
Certainly some of the local legislation regarding such permitting is affected by local electric companies wanting to dissuade that. But I would hope that the tides are turning in the direction of easier personal energy independence over the long term.
The utilities foresaw this and didn't make net metering available to me. I presume my business model threatens the utilities somehow. They invented a kWh credit system to "pay" people with, and these credits expire every year if unused. Under these conditions, it'd be stupid to produce excess energy since I'd get nothing for it. Even if I were to somehow match production with consumption, I'd still have to pay them for the infrastructure.
It's a benefit to still being connected to the grid. Though I'm sure you'll find "service fees and taxes" eating up a majority of the power bill you thought you were cutting (e.g. my natural gas bill costs $20 monthly to run @ 0 usage, regardless of only using it for emergency heat for the furnace).
FWIW, Tesla's (crude) Powerwall calculator suggests 3 powerwalls would account for an instance of this with 100% power generation via solar (7 + days backup, it says). Of course I'd hate to see that installation invoice, though.