For more than a century, people plugged their electrical appliances and machines into an outlet and were content to have the power flow from some far-off, unseen location. Electricity arrived from a power plant managed by a rather faceless utility company that most customers didn’t think about for more than a few minutes a month, as they wrote their monthly checks.
All this began to change over the past decade as technologies for generating electricity from renewable sources—solar panels in particular—became more affordable and easier to acquire.
