.“How Tesla’s Batteries Can Change the Solar Power Game” by Hal Hodson

The dream of a solar-powered society has tantalized us for decades. But the costs involved in piping the sun’s energy into the electricity grid remain prohibitively high. Now, solar power could get the efficiency boost it needs, thanks to a corporate takeover.

Last week, Tesla, which makes batteries big enough to power your home and also happens to make the biggest-selling electric car. Last week, the company announced that it is buying SolarCity, one of the leading installers of solar panels in the US. Elon Musk, who co-founded both Tesla and SolarCity, could provide the breakthrough the fledgling solar industry needs.

The price of solar panels has fallen significantly in the last decade, but providing stable power from solar is more complex than just plugging in more panels. Grid operators need a way to store the sun’s energy to smooth out the supply during the night and when it’s cloudy.

The Solana solar power plant in Gila Bend, Arizona, pumps excess heat energy into huge vats of salt. These vats are good at absorbing heat. When the energy is required, piping water through the salt causes it to boil and produce steam that drives a turbine. In Texas, a giant array of batteries backs up the Notrees wind farm. This backup keeps energy flowing when the wind dies.

Both projects turn unreliable renewable resources into dependable power plants. Doing this is at a cost. “While deployment of storage is increasing, it is not widespread,” says Matt Kromer, who leads the SunDial project at the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems in Boston.

Simply plugging solar panels into a battery isn’t enough, says Aminul Huque at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Batteries get stressed every charging cycle and die quickly if they aren’t carefully managed.

To get round this, firms are turning to software. Kromer says SunDial taps into various data: electricity demand, weather forecasts, electricity prices, and solar panel and storage system data. The software uses all this information to make better decisions about when to charge and discharge batteries, increasing their lifespan. It can also help energy providers balance supply and demand, ironing out peaks.

Tesla and SolarCity could do the same. With batteries in cars and homes that can store solar power for when it’s needed, Tesla can smooth the supply of solar power to the grid.

A similar approach is already being tested in pilot schemes around the US. Arizona Public Service serves the Phoenix area, plugs into the Solana plant, and is in the midst of deploying solar panels and batteries to 1500 households.

Even though the panels and storage are spread across many rooftops, they are effectively roped together into a single 10-megawatt power plant that APS can control. The SunDial project is planning a pilot in Massachusetts in which 2 megawatts of solar power and storage are controlled by the local utility company.

This kind of integration is exactly what the tie-up between Tesla and SolarCity promises but on a much grander scale. There might soon be a power plant on every roof

question : Identify the central idea of the entire article and explain how it is developed throughout, using specific examples from the text. Explain your answer in one to two paragraphs
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