The problem is that no one really agrees on how to price the services of hundreds or thousands of homes with batteries all acting in concert with digital controls. Pay too much and that could nudge up bills for a utility’s other customers. Pay too little and solar households have no reason to sign up for a program to help the grid. But with the right cost/​benefit trade-off, virtual power plants make the grid cleaner and more cost-effective by leveraging already-existing private infrastructure for the benefit of everyone else.

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Which makes last month’s decision by Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission all the more surprising. Instead of making Battery Bonus permanent, the regulators approved a successor program that strips away much of what made participation so enticing for customers.