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Based on its monitoring of electricity prices, the Stem system determines when it should store electricity or release it.

According to a story in MIT Technology Review, the market for the Stem technology is small right now but it does provide a snapshot of how distributed storage and management could change the electric grid in the future.

Brian Thompson, Stem founder and executive VP, was quoted in the story as saying "This sort of thing was not possible five or six years ago. For every given site, we will literally run millions of simulations a day." Thompson also said "As battery prices and the prices of computing and data and bandwidth drop, we're going to see these devices in every building in the world, whether it's in 20 or 30 years. These types of systems will us to move to a 100 percent renewable future."

The guts of the Stem system are basic lithium-ion automotive batteries connected to power electronics that switch between providing power and storing it, and Internet-based analytics delivered to a computer at the building site.

The company is running pilots with a number of small to medium-sized businesses. And while Stem's entry sounds promising, Lux Research analyst Jaideep Raje said startups typically need to work with large corporations or utilities to earn credibility and customers. He was quoted as saying "The smart money would say that as go the large utilities or large industrial players like Honeywell or Johnson Controls, so will go the industry."

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