There’s a good chance flipping on the light switch 10 years from now will feel just as ordinary as it did for your parents and grandparents.
But behind the scenes, a radically different system for sending electrons where they’re needed will be turning on those lights. Electrical power that today comes from massive centralized generation stations could originate from your neighbors’ solar panels, then wait a few hours in a mammoth battery in your garage until you get home.
That’s because the biggest change to our power grid since it was first built more than a century ago has begun. And this time we’re all sharing the control once held by the companies that generate power and ones that distribute it.
Ordinary citizens, startups and decades-old power companies are all involved in the transformation. But one of the trend’s biggest visionaries — and beneficiaries — is Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He’ll sell you solar rooftop tiles to generate electricity, a giant battery to store all that energy and an electric car to suck it up.
Musk is a few steps ahead of the market. But he’s helping to create a power grid where anyone can generate electricity as well as consume it, and where large batteries in the home — and even in utility companies — absorb electric power when there’s plenty and pump it out when there’s not enough.
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