While utilities have long discouraged energy storage by homeowners and industrial consumers because it threatens their revenue model, Brown says it makes a lot of sense, not just for enabling more renewable power but for lightening the load on old, creaky infrastructure. If products like Powerwall catch on, the necessary restructuring of the electrical grid will create opportunities and demand new expertise well beyond designing and manufacturing batteries. For example, AES Energy Storage in the U.S. now sells electrical storage the way server farms sell data warehousing. Stem, a California startup, helps large energy users such as hotels finance their own battery arrays. “There’s a whole industry developing here that is all brand new,” Brown says. “There’s a whole bunch of spinoff businesses that are going to start popping up.”
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