I think municipality-sized microgrids are a big part of the future, but they still don't remove the requirement for a grid, simply because of weather. Most renewables are very dependent on local weather conditions: you don't get solar when it's cloudy, and you don't get wind when it's calm. The grid needs to equalize power generation and consumption, and it's probably more economical to have a few transmission lines running between cities and to remote power generation facilities than it is add the utility-scale batteries needed to power through a week of cloudy weather.
I could however see a future where cities refuse to subsidize rural homeowners and communities, disconnect from the country-level grids that exist today, let them de-energize and fall into disrepair, and then maintain only a few transmission links over major transportation corridors to connect with other major cities.
That's not true, and stems from mistakenly thinking of electricity as a fluid instead of working through the math of the laws of electrodynamics themselves.
With AC, there is no net current anyway - nothing physical is being transmitted any substantive difference. The actual electrons travel on the order of 0.2 microns per 60Hz cycle, and then move back the other way. [1]
In reality, in the absence of fundamental electric components like resistors/capacitors/transformers, all points of a circuit have the same voltage and same current. The transmission lines are just connecting different cities into the same circuit, there's nothing flowing between them. This allows your solar array in the Mojave Desert to power your data center on the Columbia River, but there aren't fewer electrons traveling between them just because you also have a hydro power plant on the Dalles. The load from all devices on the grid is shared across all generation sources.
I could however see a future where cities refuse to subsidize rural homeowners and communities, disconnect from the country-level grids that exist today, let them de-energize and fall into disrepair, and then maintain only a few transmission links over major transportation corridors to connect with other major cities.