Such interconnections between resources allows us to keep the idea of a power plant without our necessarily needing the power plant itself. A virtual power plant is thus primarily an organizational tool that uses information about electricity transmitted by electricity (digital smart meters most especially) to respond to the ebb and flow of power on the grid with a degree of timeliness and nuance that a human simply cannot match. We have always been too slow for electricity, but with smart meters, thousands upon thousands of distributed microsensors and the right computer programs, we can at
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