Distributed electricity network is coming to a neighborhood near you.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) plans this year to place equipment in residential areas capable of storing a few hours of electricity, one of the first tests of distributed storage on the power grid.
The storage units would be the size of a relatively small "backyard transformer," each wired to provide enough electricity for four to six houses, he said. Together, those storage units could provide back-up power to neighborhoods during outages and potentially for other applications, Nourai said.

"Aggregated, hundreds of these units controlled (by AEP)...effectively do the same as one big storage unit," he said. "It's closer to the load, and it has the potential to (create) competition on price."

This is great news. The development of distributed storage will enable efficient local energy production: solar, wind, termal, etc. Rather than sending electricity into a vast inefficient regional grid, household will be able to store, and later consume, energy locally. In the future, we might even see a partial transition from AC to DC, because the new distribution scheme significantly reduces energy distribution distances, therefore, DC becomes more practical than AC.