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Today, the company is announcing a new milestone: Since 2015, it has installed a worldwide total of a gigawatt-hour of energy storage–technology that is critical for using renewable energy at scale. For comparison, that’s nearly half of the entire amount of energy storage installed globally last year.

The cost of battery storage keeps falling; between 2010 and 2016, the price across the industry fell 73%, from $1,000 a kilowatt-hour to $273 a kilowatt-hour. By 2020, it may drop to $145 a kilowatt-hour, and by 2025, to $69.5 a kilowatt-hour.

The growth is only a fraction of what’s needed to transform energy. In 2015, when Elon Musk talked about the company’s new energy division, he estimated that it would take 2 billion Powerpacks to fulfill the world’s energy needs. “Even at 300%, we’ll need to grow it this way for decades, frankly, to really solve the problem,” says Straubel. “And not just us, but other companies need to get involved, too.”

The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the interior. It’s between strong communities and weak communities. You can find weak ones along the coast and thriving ones in Appalachia, and vice versa. It’s community, stupid — not geography.The communities that are making it share a key attribute: They’ve created diverse adaptive coalitions, where local businesses get deeply involved in the school system, translating in real time the skills being demanded by the global economy.

Show me a community that understands today’s world and is working together to thrive within it, and I’ll show you a community on the rise — coastal or interior, urban or rural.

What is wrong with America is that too many communities, rural and urban, have broken down. What is right with America is the many communities and regions that are coming together to help their citizens acquire the skills and opportunities to own their own futures. We need to share and scale these success stories.