Casey Handmer

It transports almost instantaneously at the speed of light.

So it's actually performing a spatial arbitrage.

So the idea being that right outside the local nuclear power plant, power is really cheap because they make a lot of it.

And in your house, power is really expensive because you don't have a power plant in your house.

And you pay the intermediator a small fee and they allow this trade to take place.

And that's basically how the grid works.

And until quite recently, the only way we had of meaningfully storing electricity on the grid was pumped hydro.

And that only works in a handful of places in limited capacity.

And it doesn't work all that well either.

The efficiency is not great.

Now we have batteries.

Batteries store power at one time of day, and they release it at another time of day.

So batteries are performing a temporal arbitrage, an arbitrage over time.

But they can be local or they can be more remote.

I think we'll end up seeing batteries next to the solar arrays and batteries in the middle of the grid at substations and batteries on the sites of existing power plants that get turned off and batteries in your house and batteries everywhere in between.

One way of thinking of this is what is your per capita allocation of batteries in kilograms per head?

And like when you and I were much younger...

You know, the lithium-ion battery was in a cell phone, say, so you got like 10 grams per person or something.

And nowadays, half the people in this town drive Teslas.

So your per capita allocation of lithium-ion battery is...