Hundreds of thousands of homes in California, and several million smart devices, will be involved in the world’s largest virtual power plant (VPP) weighing in at 550 MW. That is a little more than twice the size of Tesla’s 250 MW VPP announced in South Australia a few months back. California won’t just profit from this kind of decentralized grid innovation – it requires it. The state has aggressively decommissioned 9 GW of gas power over the past five years – its absolute peak demand this year was 46.8 GW – but for now, only a small fraction of the state’s 9 GW planned energy storage developments for 2030 have been deployed to pick up the slack. This week Strategen…