I beg to differ
"interconnected microgrids fueled by smaller distributed power generation plants, such as wind and solar"
That's fairytale thinking. To manage a grid, keep inertia, and have the resilience and excess capacity to meet modern demand you need huge plants. To meet consumer and business needs, not to mention decarbonisation of heating, cooling and transport, you need lots of huge plants. Depending on where they are in the world they might be solar, they might be wind, but let's scupper this greeny folklore about smaller plants being the future. I'm surprised the article didn't throw in worlds like "pro-sumer", "wholegrain", "community cooperative", "beard oil", and the like.
The biggest solar plants are in the 1-2 GW range, not a collection of unmanaged panels scattered across the roofs of pensioners bungalows. China hold the title of the world's largest solar farm - a monster outlier at 15.7 GW across nearly 350 square kilometres. The same is true of wind farms, where big is beautiful. Hornsea 1 is 1.2 GW, and Hornsea 2 is 1.4 GW. The latest wind turbines aren't for crappy little micro-grid setups of one or two local units, they have individual outputs in the range of 14 MW and rotor diameters of around 240 metres, with a total height in excess of a third of a kilometre. You don't scatter a few of these around and call it an "affordable self healing grid", you have one of a small number of globo corp build them, another globo corp project manages the construction a farm of hundreds of these, yet another finances them, and another still operates them. And this isn't "self healing" in any way at all. Solar won't offset low wind conditions as you build the solar output into your ops profile. Like wise high wind won't necessarily correlate with any demand spikes, or loss of output from other units or grid linkages.