Many/most cities will red tag your house (aka condemn as uninhabitable) if you don’t have an active grid connection.

Which does make sense in a way - they can’t tell if whatever your off grid setup is actually is working or has adequate capacity, but they can tell if your local utility connection is working and up (and up to standards).

And renters have needs. And medical equipment, basic fire safety stuff/lights, heat, etc. are generally required for habitability.

Almost every panel should have breakers that can be tripped to manually disconnect the feed from the utility though, if you don’t want to have to worry about being charged for electricity (beyond ‘grid connection’ fees, which aren’t going away).