Sorry, quotes and editing still not working for me. I maintain that it wouldn't take as long as you say Bofferbrauer. When I talk of microgrids, I'm talking about things like solar panels on the roof with batteries mounted on the side of the house, each getting enough energy to power an average home, and store several days worth of electricity. Then multiply that by every house in the neighborhood, and they all sell any excess electricity they couldn't store in their home battery back to the grid, where the local power plant has lots of extra storage, heck, it might not even need to be a power plant, it could probably just be a node of storage capacity on a network of such nodes, with a few power plants supplying excess demand to any parts of the grid that are taxing their stored energy and need the help.
I suppose the reason I'm skeptical of your argument is that of COURSE it would take years to do, it would take years to convert the grid to renewable even without storage, so I don't see the point here. If you consider the storage part of the price of construction, and build solar plants and solar home systems with accompanying storage, the necessary storage would get built along with the renewable energy. Unless I'm mistaken (I'm basing it mostly off my own shopping experience for home solar systems), that's already standard practice in the States, no need for special regulations. Why would you build a solar system for your home or a solar power plant if you didn't also plan to build storage for it? And why on earth would you build storage you don't plan to use? Your objections don't make sense to me. Though perhaps we're just both missing each other's points, since I think what you might be saying is that if the microgrids have batteries on each home, it would be possible, and that's precisely what I was proposing with the concept of a microgrid.
I believe these microgrids could really help the as-a-service business model, and as for the energy consumption issue, that can be alleviated by offering a discount to customers who generate more electricity than they use. They're supplying the grid, not taxing it, so any consumer of an as-a-service plan should only receive a marginal charge on days they use no electricity, much like the current model also has a similar charge for simply being connected, separate from generation and distribution. Perhaps if they meet a certain threshold of energy fed into the grid, they could even have their bill be $0 for the month? There will always be those who waste tons of energy, and those people would actually keep the business alive if the company has them in the right ratio with those who feed into the grid. A certain percentage massively overgenerate and are connected for free (perhaps even paid, to incentivize keeping them connected to the grid?), another percentage don't contribute as much but still have a steep discount, another percentage pay the normal price because they draw from the grid about as much as they contribute, and another percentage might reach a certain cap, much like internet plans have a data cap, and would have to start paying by the kilowatt-hour.
Oh, and another benefit of these microgrids? They're decentralized by nature, which gives them incredible resiliency against terrorist attacks on the power grid.