We are all accustomed to thinking of electricity, or electric power, or energy as you may want to call it, as a commodity. After all, it acts the same wherever you plug into it!

Yet it is different from any other. What other commodity must be consumed immediately, the moment you extract/create/ generate it? What other commodity does not have an inventory? What other commodity goes through price changes of 100x in a single day?

This uniqueness has unusual consequences on how one can use and manage it. More…