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Why Community Microgrids Are Illegal in Most of the US #350 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Cameron Brooks: It costs on the nominal cost here in Colorado was $4 million a mile to bury power lines, once we add in the financing costs, because that's paid out over many years through the rate base. You know, it depends on whose estimate you want to look at, but let's say it rises seven, eight. In California, it's even $9 million a mile to bury a power line.
• 1:14
  Cameron Brooks: That means that every 20 to 25 feet you have you have just put as much money into the ground as it would have taken to electrify a home with a battery backup system that would be capable of riding through a 48 hour outage.
• 1:30
  intro: The clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger, the technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar, storage and micro grid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all each week, your host, Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of clean power consulting group brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now.
• 2:00
  intro: Here's your host, Tim Montague.
• 2:05
  Tim Montague: Community micro grids are functionally illegal in the United States, in most territories, yet resilience from storms, fires and floods is needed more than ever. How do we think our way out of this grid modernization conundrum? My guest today is Cameron Brooks.
• 2:20
  Tim Montague: He is a Colorado based clean energy executive and policy strategist who has spent more than two decades at the leading edge of US energy markets, utility regulation and environmental advocacy. He's known nationally for translating complex regulatory processes into practical strategies that accelerate deployment of distributed energy resources and micro grids. He is the founder of think micro grid and e9 insights. Welcome to the show Cameron.
• 2:52
  Cameron Brooks: Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.
• 2:55
  Tim Montague: I'm looking forward to bringing this content to my audience. You know, we energy professionals, we clean energy professionals are geeks for micro grids, because solar is wonderful, but it only works during the day. Batteries are wonderful, but they can be expensive, but when you combine the two things start to happen that are quite powerful and relatively affordable. In the greater scheme of things, when you take into account what utilities are doing, and you wrote an opinion piece about one of these instances where utilities want to bury power lines because of the risk of fire in Colorado. And on the one hand, I can appreciate that I want a safer grid, but on the other hand, bearing lines can be very expensive. And so why don't we just dive into that topic for a second, and then we'll back up a little bit and and zoom out.
• 3:51
  Tim Montague: But why do you oppose burying lines in Colorado?
• 3:58
  Cameron Brooks: Well, I'm not quite sure it's fair to say that I oppose burying lines. I do think that it's an incomplete strategy overall. So I think that burying lines is something that can and should be done strategically, and where it makes sense to do that, and where the risk is is so high that that really is the best solution. But as a general approach, no, I don't think it's the best solution. I think it leaves a lot of opportunity costs, and the reason for that is that it's very, very expensive. And so what that means is that if we're investing all of this money to put power lines underground, and really by doing that, the only benefit that we get from that is it now that line doesn't need to be turned off when, when the winds get high or there's a Red Flag Day here in Colorado. But there's other ways to achieve that same result. So over and over again, economic analysis shows that a much more cost effective way would be to use micro grids as a way to be able to de energize whatever those risky line, whatever that risky line is, but leave people with power. And then the other benefit of that is that now that we've created that micro grid, usually a combination of solar and storage, and it can that can be, you know, at an individual's home, up to a substation level, the microgrids can be infused at all scales throughout the energy system. But once we've done that, once those are there, and, for example, taking advantage of battery storage, now that benefit is there, not just on the red flag days when there's extreme risk, but throughout the year. Better through through the blue sky days, just to be able to better manage our energy. So back to the back to your question. I think that it's a it's a very blunt instrument that's being used in a very unstrategic way to that that is burying power lines, and I just think that there's a lot of better solutions for us available, and also better solutions that bring benefits right now. I mean, the other challenge with burying power lines is that it doesn't help us this year. It doesn't help us next year. It might help us over the course of 10 years, but even then, you know what? What are we doing in the meantime for customers?
• 6:34
  Tim Montague: You mean, because it takes so long to actually perform the bearing of the lines,
• 6:39
  Cameron Brooks: that's exactly right.
• 6:40
  Tim Montague: Yeah,
• 6:41
  Cameron Brooks: yes,
• 6:42
  Tim Montague: yeah. So I'm curious, when did we invent this model that utility operators are incentivized to install infrastructure, because that comes up time and time again.
• 6:57
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and I want the utilities to be profitable. I want them to stay in business, right? There's there's, it doesn't serve anyone if the utilities are periodically going bankrupt, like in California, and there's a variety of reasons why that happens, but we also want to incentivize utilities to build infrastructure that is modern and resilient. We have to remember that we're only at 430 ppm in the atmosphere. We're going to 450 right? The world is going to get gnarlier before it gets better, and and the world is already gnarly, and so but, but that cost plus model, on one hand, it makes logic, but on the other hand, it also holds us, in a way, captive. So, yeah, what's the story there?
• 7:51
  Cameron Brooks: Well, I mean, I'll do my best to reduce 100 years of energy regulatory history, but, but, you know, there's good reasons why that model existed when it did. And again, without, without going into the entire history of the utility industry, very broadly, we can say in the in the latter, latter part of the 19th century, the late 1800s as electricity was essentially being developed and applied to businesses and factories and people's homes, we started to see a couple of models develop around how utilities were were built, and essentially there was, there were some cities that had municipal utilities and others that had private companies. As we stepped into the early part of the 20th century, it started there. I'm pausing and hesitating for a second, just because I don't want to dive into too many rabbit holes. But let me back up and say there's a model under which or a reason why, in the early part of the 20th century, states began to regulate utilities, and a lot of it has to do with the economies of scale. That is to say, in that those earlier days and for much of the 20th century, it was true that the economies of scale favored larger, centralized generation. If you built a bigger power plant, you essentially got cheaper per unit costs. So the per unit costs were falling somewhere toward in the latter half of the 20th century that stopped being true.
• 9:35
  Cameron Brooks: It stopped being true that bigger was necessarily better, that bigger brought brought lower costs overall. So back to your question, how did we end up with this cost plus model? It starts in that period where the economies of scale favored capital investing into big projects that would drive down costs. And so therefore it made sense to incentivize utilities to say, you know, please go invest in these large projects.
• 10:08
  Cameron Brooks: We're going to give you a fair rate of return. Sometimes that's termed capital attraction. You said you want utilities to be able to make money, and I think that's a well accepted principle, but and is often referred to in regulatory circles as capital attraction, you want to be able to set up the policy environment so that capital will be attracted to come in and invest. But as I say, towards the latter half of this century, that stopped being true. The first real, palpable instance of that was in the 1980s 1990s as combined cycle natural gas, a much smaller footprint and profile of a natural. Gas turbine was able to produce electricity economically competitive to large scale plants. That's what led to the restructuring of many of our wholesale markets. Was this fundamental dynamic that now you could have smaller resources.
• 11:10
  Cameron Brooks: And so the economies of scale have shifted and and the cost plus model, or cost of service regulation that we live with today is an artifact from a period where it made sense. Now there's all kinds of ways that that has become entangled with the utility industry itself and with regulatory policy, and so it's very difficult to try to unwind that, but that's really the challenge that we're facing today, especially with micro grids and distributed energy, where the current regulatory model really disfavors Those kinds of solutions, because it's so heavily focused On, how can we invest more money? I mean, that's sort of the addiction of the of the utility industry right now.
• 11:57
  Tim Montague: The model that I like is what Craig Lewis has started to develop in California. Primarily. His organization is the clean coalition. Check out episode 160 with Craig Lewis. But he you know, he says, Look, the utilities want infrastructure, fine. Let's build community scale micro grids, large scale battery, solar, wind, and let the utility own the asset and but don't build more transmission and distribution.
• 12:32
  Tim Montague: Build micro grids. That model seems to work, but it is. It is a rare breed of stakeholder. You know, stakeholders coming together to find the resources to make that happen? Why? Why are community scale micro grids so difficult and deemed illegal in many jurisdictions in the United States?
• 13:03
  Cameron Brooks: Yeah, well, so there's a couple of questions in there, but let me start with the last one about community micro grids. Every state has some version of what would typically be called or considered a wires law, and what that means is that the only entity that is allowed to legally run electric electricity infrastructure across property lines is the electric utility that has the franchise for that territory, and so yes, it's functionally illegal to have something like a community micro grid that is an independent connection of physical interconnection between different properties and different resources. That doesn't mean that you can't have a micro grid, but only in those situations where the utility is essentially either the key partner or the owner and operator of that micro grid. So that's a pretty narrow slice. I mean, when we think about micro grids and distributed energy, there's really three big pools of funding. It's the utility rate base, so captive customers who where the utility is, is essentially making investments on behalf of those customers and recovering those investments through the rates that they charge. It's from public sources. So could be government or, you know, school districts or whatnot that would own and operate that equipment, or it's private, whether it's individual customers or businesses or whatnot. So out of those three pools, only the utility rate base is allowed under rules right now to to connect multiple customers together and create what I think most people would define a community micro grid, which is a mix of multiple owners of different pieces of equipment,
• 15:00
  Tim Montague: and the utilities are somehow threatened by that.
• 15:05
  Cameron Brooks: Well, look, I would hesitate to necessarily get too deep into the board room to say, you know, what kind of emotions, if we want to call it, that are threatened, but I would say it's very clear that they have, as we just talked about, that regulated utilities have a very clear incentive to be favoring investments that Are that involve more capital. I mean, that's the fundamental tension that exists right now in the regulated utility business, is they are looking to invest more money. So I applaud Craig and the clean coalition and a number of other organizations around the country that are trying. Trying to push for these clearly obviously better solutions around putting batteries and intelligent optimization at the ends of the wires, and therefore being able to reduce the need to invest in transmission and distribution infrastructure. The challenge that I think still exists and is pretty hard to to get around without, I think addressing it head on is the fact that any business that's regulated under a cost of service model is going to favor investments into distribution and transmission by the very fact that a that a micro grid offers a lower cost solution, that's intention with the fundamental profit driver for the regulated utility business right now.
• 16:47
  Tim Montague: I mean, I don't know that that's true. First of all, I've been looking for information about the economics of community scale micro grids.
• 16:54
  Tim Montague: And there's, there's very little out there. And what, what's present for me is we're, we're building this system and rebuilding this system as if we live in the 1920s basically. And meanwhile, we've had this massive Information Age transformation and communications age transformation, and now AI transformation and and we're not taking into consideration the cost of resilience. Climate Resilience is becoming front and center an imperative for many, many communities in the US. And trust me, if it hasn't been an imperative for you yet, that doesn't mean that it's not going to be soon like things are changing and it is going to get a lot scarier before it gets better. But so that's one thing is like, just the cost, and then the how do we? How do we put a value on resilience? The value of resilience, the clean coalition calls it vor and they have a hierarchical approach, where, you know, life saving infrastructure. Hospitals, for example, are top tier and that and that's all well and good, but micro grids are only expensive, in my mind, if you're not weighing the value add of being you know, of having 24/7 power in the face of a crisis, whether that's an earthquake or a storm, right? Micro grids offer so many goods, but I guess let's, let's circle back to think micro grid and what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing, because one of the things that I love about think micro grid is it's trying to become a beacon of good information for policy makers, so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel 50 times or 14,000 times, like we have 1000s and 1000s of hJS in this country, all reinventing the wheel. It's like this technology a is not new. We've had batteries for over 100 years, right? And we've had a grid now for over 100 years and and so what are you what are you trying to accomplish with think micro grid, and how far are we away from, in your mind, mainstreaming this phenomenon of everyone is attached to a micro grid?
• 20:29
  Cameron Brooks: Well, again, a lot a lot of questions in there that I could probably spend all afternoon unpacking. Let me start with some of the basics.
• 20:36
  Cameron Brooks: So think micro grid is, is essentially the unified voice of the micro grid industry, that's that's was its mission when it started in 2021 and so these are businesses and organizations that are involved in the micro grid industry. Want to see better information out there.
• 20:58
  Cameron Brooks: And so we sort of break our work up into a few different categories. A lot of it is around education, just trying to put forward, you know, what are micro grids we try to do, convenings, bringing people together to have conversations and and hopefully to get beyond just the talking points, but actually to try to think about what are some creative solutions to the challenges that the different jurisdictions face, and then engagement. We do a lot of outreach to public policy makers, to community leaders, so that they understand what micro grids are. And really we take an approach where we love all micro grids we're not put. Pushing one particular market model from from a particular ideological point of view. You know we, as we were just talking I think there are some structural challenges that exist in many parts of our industry that make certain kinds of market micro grids more challenging than others, but, but we really are interested to see micro grids flourish, because, as you call out, you know, there are some really compelling drivers that are going to make micro grids more and more relevant in the years ahead. It's it is going to get gnarlier. It is gnarly right now, and you know, going back to sort of some of the costs and the value of resilience. One of the challenges that we face is that we often are trying to look at sort of the average values across let's say, Well, what is this resource going to produce through the course of the year, through the course of a year when when there is information that is available, we do that.
• 22:46
  Cameron Brooks: We use those averages mostly as a proxy, because other information isn't really available. As information technology gets better, as techno fundamental technologies get better, it's much more visible and available to understand what the real value is. So let me give you a couple of examples. You know, I do live here in Boulder in December, we had a four or five day incident where most of the city, or significant parts of the city, lost power. Some of it was purposefully shut down as a power safety shut off by the local utility, and some of it was just damage that happened.
• 23:27
  Cameron Brooks: Trees that fell my house, the power went out because a tree fell on the line, but we were out of power for four days.
• 23:36
  Cameron Brooks: There was a study that was done of several 100 businesses that lost their inventory or had business disruptions during those periods and so and the average was about $25,000 per business. The impact to them.
• 23:53
  Cameron Brooks: Now, I know that some of those, because it's been reported, were restaurants that lost, let's say, a cooler full of full of meat, so they have a very clear understanding of what their value of resilience was there, and it was pretty significant, in fact, based on the numbers that I understand, just back in the envelope, probably an investment into some kind of backup system to keep that cooler going would have paid for itself from that one incident, from losing that inventory, and that is driving a lot of micro grid activity right now, which is to say, essentially commercial and industrial behind the meter applications to protect businesses or inventory.
• 24:37
  Cameron Brooks: Think grocery stores, Walmart, et cetera. When you talk a little bit about the cost and the value, again, if we look at back to the question you asked at the beginning, is sort of my trepidation or concern about burying power lines as the key or only strategy to address wildfires. It costs on the nominal cost here in Colorado was $4 million a mile to bury power lines, once we add in the financing costs, because that's paid out over many years through the rate base. You know, it depends on whose estimate you want to look at, but let's say rises seven, eight. In California, it's even $9 million a mile to bury a power line.
• 25:22
  Cameron Brooks: That means that every 20 to 25 feet you have you have just put as much money into the ground as it would have taken to electrify a home with a battery backup system that would be capable of riding through a 48 hour outage.
• 25:39
  Cameron Brooks: That's an incredible opportunity cost to me, so it doesn't strike me that that's that it's actually expensive to to be deploying micro grids. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I think usually in those cases where you begin to factor in, what are we comparing this to, and what's the value of of the damages that might be caused, it starts to change the equation, at least in my opinion.
• 26:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah, you mentioned the the time it takes to bury to bury lines. I have nothing against burying lines, but, yeah, it's going to take a lot longer, probably than installing batteries and solar, and that's the thing. It's like, there's, there's talk in our society of a lot of things right now because of the crunch, you know, the cost crunch the consumers are facing. Power prices are going up and the demand on the grid is going up because of the build out of AI Data Centers. And electrification. And while we're in a lull on the electrification of transportation, trust me, that's going to come roaring back. And it, you know, economics do not lie. It will be cheaper to own and operate an EV and that's where consumers will gravitate. And that market is going to come back. And if you want to see the future, go to Northern Europe. Go to China.
• 27:12
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• 27:44
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• 28:48
  Tim Montague: They did it for economic reasons, because those outages from storms like Yuri are extremely expensive. I mean, life lives are lost, and that's a real bummer, but the economic losses are what I think really get stakeholders attention and the and the attention of elected officials and utilities. So when you think about transforming the American grid, the first one of the first things I think about is taking away some of the power that we've given to utilities to make all these decisions on our behalf and give us just this very limited sliver of options.
• 29:30
  Tim Montague: But what is it going to take for America to become more friendly to building resilient infrastructure like community scale micro grids.
• 29:45
  Cameron Brooks: You know, Tim, it's a great question. I wish that I knew the exact prescription, and unfortunately, I don't that said. I do think that there are a number of i I often think of it as sort of like tectonic fault lines that are building up pressure, and that pressure is going to need to go somewhere. It's going it's going to turn kinetic at some point, and much like an earthquake, you know, it will probably happen very suddenly and very irreversibly. At least, that's been the history of a lot of technology innovation. So now you know what is it going to take. I mean, I think back to some of the themes that you just raised. To me, fundamentally, this is not an environmental or a clean energy story. I think there will be a lot of great environmental and clean energy benefits that come from what I'll call the advent of micro grids, but it really is about quality of service and economics and quality of service, in this case, including resilience.
• 30:56
  Cameron Brooks: These are the challenges that we face today, and if I can't rely on, you know, this centralized model to be delivering me energy, and there are other options available. And I think that's the key difference. There are other options available, then I'm going to move towards those. And I think more and more, as some kind of disruption happens and one house or business has power and the other doesn't, the one that doesn't is going to be looking over the fence and saying, What's going on over there, and why can't we do that here? So, you know, Boy, I wish I knew exactly what the prescription was. I do think, as you call out, that there is something that I think we need to have a frank assessment.
• 31:40
  Cameron Brooks: About what are the incentives for the utility model right now, and which of those are actually causing harm or standing in the way of the kind of progress that we want to have. And I think so a lot of attention needs to go there, around Utility Reform of the business models and accountability of the actual players that are involved.
• 32:04
  Cameron Brooks: There's also something that I would call out that is relates to the fundamental architecture of the grid. So, you know, you brought up before that, we're often looking at how to invest in the in the grid from a, really a 1920s perspective, or pick some period of time before 1950 and that that is really true. I mean, it's sort of a trope in the energy world that almost any conference you go to, one of the speakers is going to make some kind of observation about how, you know, if Thomas Edison showed up again, he would understand everything about our electrical system. And it's usually put forward as some kind of observation of how how amazing this is. And I usually scratch my head a little bit.
• 32:49
  Cameron Brooks: And I think if Thomas Edison came back and he saw that we hadn't taken the innovations that they had put forward at the last half of the 19th century in the early part of the 20th century, and that we're still using that technology, I think he'd be pretty angry. Frankly, I think he'd be pretty disappointed to say, you haven't moved forward. But to me, one of the key innovations of the so I bring this up to say, you know, there was a time for most of the last century where we had this large, interconnected grid that needed to be managed in a synchronous fashion because there really weren't storage capabilities available. That's fundamentally changed now. So micro grids, we haven't defined what a micro grid is, so let me just take a minute to do that, because it involves three qualities. You know, one is that it's a physically interconnected, intelligently managed set of resources. So that physical interconnection is important, and that's what triggers some of the wires laws that we talked about before. But it's also connected and intended to be interactive with the larger grid. So it's physically interconnected to the grid with the intention of being able to be interactive up to the point of being able to island itself or operate independently. So those three qualities of intelligence to be able to look downstream and manage the resources that are part of the grid, to be interactive and look upstream and interact with the larger grid, but also to be able to Island and step away when needed. That's what creates a micro grid. Now those are fundamentally different qualities, especially the ability to go into an island mode essentially breaks that need to be in synchronous harmony with the rest of the grid at all periods. And I think this is something that, you know, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Probably an overused analogy, but I think it's very apt. When we look at the telecom revolution and what allowed us to move from landline phones to mobile technology, one of the key elements there was the ability to actually store data and to be able to move the data in packets, break it apart, let it reassemble, and then have that communication on the other side. We now have that same capability in the electricity grid in the form of energy storage. So if we start to think about, well, how might we think about packetized energy so that it doesn't need to all be delivered at one time in this synchronous way, because we've got intelligent micro grids that can manage up to the point of being independent. As I say, that changes a lot about what what the opportunities are in the grid architecture.
• 35:41
  Tim Montague: I'm glad you brought up the tech the telecom revolution, because I do think that there's some important analogies. And you think pre cell phone network, post cell phone and there's still big telecom companies, right? Ma Bell is gone, but there's still big telecom infrastructure and services companies, and so there's still an economic opportunity for big business.
• 36:07
  Tim Montague: Clearly, meanwhile, the advantages for consumers and business owners are way, way improved, right? Like our lives are transformed. We are super connected. We can work from anywhere. We're much more flexible, and that does give us a higher quality of life period full stop. And now we want that with the power grid, right? We want a decentralized grid. We want to own our generation with solar and batteries. We want to have the ability to be on a micro grid, whether. A nano grid building level, or a community scale, like, if there's a if there's a big ice storm where I live, and luckily, this doesn't happen a lot. The power goes out, though, right? There are no community scale micro grids, period, full stop. Like, those feeders are all just out there dangling. The feeders are just like fingers on a hand, right?
• 37:05
  Tim Montague: And when the storm takes out a feeder, everybody on that feeder is Sol for some period of time, until a truck can get there and fix that pole and that wire. And that's fine, unless there's a bunch of those poles and wires that are damaged, right? And that's why these storms lead to millions of people being without power for days on end. So it's so ironic that we made the utility system. We invented the system. We made them regulated monopolies, whether we're talking public power or investor owned utilities. It's very similar how the utilities now rule our lives and tell us what we can and can't have, basically, right? Oh, you can have net metering, or you can't have net metering, which makes solar friendly or not right. Or you can have plug in solar or plug in batteries. Like there is a revolution happening before our eyes with plug in solar and batteries, right? And so we just so clearly have the technology that we need to have community scale, micro grids, and it is just a matter of deploying said technology we have to, we have to either, you know, change the way utilities make decisions, or we just have to say, Okay, we're just going to, we're just going to stop using you Right? And, you know, in some ways, that's, that's what is is happening, you know, in some communities, right? Some cities are just saying, Look, we're just going to be our own utility and we're going to do things our way, and that's cool in those few places, but most American cities are not going to form their own utility and make micro griding a thing.
• 39:01
  Tim Montague: So I guess in our last few minutes together, Cameron paint us a picture of who are the shining stars, you know, who are the organizations and the communities that are getting things done the right way?
• 39:13
  Tim Montague: Because there's obviously a lot of the wrong way happening in America, and it's just not, it's really, it's not that exciting.
• 39:23
  Tim Montague: It's, it's pretty much the grid of the past. And I want to know where is the grid of the future?
• 39:32
  Cameron Brooks: Well, I think there are glimmers of that. And, you know, I want to pick up on something that you said as well, because right now, there is absolutely a dynamic of, you know, I sometimes think about it. It's almost like the jingoistic response to, you know, America, love it or leave it. It's like, Hey, here's the grid. You know, accept it or leave it. And and I think it's a huge missed opportunity. It's a bad outcome if communities or businesses or homes are looking out and saying, the best thing that I can do is to be independent and disconnect. So going back to some of the things that I called out about the fundamental qualities of a micro grid, one of them is we want to be interactive, and humans and communities in general, are oriented to be more cooperative with one another than just isolationist. So I do think that some attention needs to be given, or at least some some voice to the idea that there is a third way here of how do we actually we want people to be investing in battery storage and intelligent management systems.
• 40:40
  Cameron Brooks: We want buildings that are more resilient and have better control systems in them. These are all good things, and a lot of times, the companies or people that are investing in these things are branded as defectors, and essentially treat it as though they're they've got a scarlet letter, what, I guess, on their meter, or something like that. So I think that's an unfortunate outcome. You know, I'll point to a couple of examples, but I'll also say, you know, we worked, for example, last year with a group in California called Agile electrification, and they're really looking at exactly this dynamic, you know, how do we find a better tool, a better way of engaging so that we can be more cooperative? Because, to your point, mostly right now, we're in an environment where people are leasing their energy for. In the utility company or there, it's just an ongoing expense, but part of our culture and and the way that wealth is created really comes from ownership. And we want people to be investing in these technologies the same way, going back to the analogy of the telecom revolution, you know, yes, there were centralized investments that went into a lot of the backbone infrastructure, but for the most part, people bought computers. They bought smartphones with their money, the same way that people are buying batteries and control systems with their money. And that's a good thing, because that means that the rate payer capital that right now we think of as funding everything that touches an electron. That's the only capital that's available under the utility model, and it's tapped out. People are frustrated, upset. You know, energy has become part of the political conversation in a way that it's never been part of in my lifetime, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. So creating opportunities where people can invest money and own things and build wealth that way, I think, is one of the keys to answer your question about, you know, who's doing it right?
• 42:54
  Cameron Brooks: Or what are some of the things that we look for? You know, I'm very excited by a couple of things, and I don't know exactly, you know whether they're just anecdotal or what, but one of them I would point to is the city of Ann Arbor, where voters there authorize the city to create what they term a supplemental energy utility. So the idea here and this, I think, gets exactly to the point of, how do we come up with more cooperative and complementary models? So they're not saying we're not going to take our power from the electric utility anymore. They're saying the electric utility provides one kind of service, but there's a whole bunch of other services that we think the city can help foster, and one of them would be back to the example of the ice storm, a shared battery system so that multiple homes could invest in one system and if the power goes out. Now at least, they have the ability as a supplemental service to the normal power that would be coming in. They're being offered backup power. Now, I know that's one of the things that they were looking at. I honestly can't say exactly like you know what their priorities are right now, or or what they're how they're implementing the authority that they've been given. Other examples that I would point to, there are cases where legislators are beginning to look at, how can we create some exemptions around things like the wires laws. So if you come in and you can demonstrate in the state of Maine has a law on the books, for example, that does this and demonstrate that you're providing or advancing one of these public benefits, then we will exempt the franchise rules and allow allow you to cross wires under limited circumstances. I think there's a lot of opportunity. There another thing that, you know, and there's a little bit outside the realm, but it just, it goes, it speaks to the the notion that there are some technology innovations that I think are bubbling up. Colorado just became the fourth state to authorize customers to use what's termed plug in solar, or plug in storage. Sometimes it's called balcony solar. So these are smaller units that are intended to just simply plug directly into the wall. No interconnection agreement required. Clear value for the consumer again, going back to the idea of just even getting resilience for a couple of hours, I think we're going to see more and more of that. And the fact that these are economically viable options right now that cross political lines. I mean, I will, just as one more anecdote, the first state in the country to authorize this plug in solar was in Utah, and I can promise you that that was not driven by an environmental ideological interest from the left in that state, it was very clearly around It makes sense. It's economic. It, it boosts our competitiveness overall. So I don't know if I have examples of every place that's doing it right and and I think that fundamentally we're not going we still have to address the overall challenge of the of the built into the utility regulatory model. But there are a lot of a lot of sort of points of light out there. One last thing I'll say on that at think micro grid, we actually maintain a tracker. At tracker.thinkmicrogrid.org, and that lists out a lot of the state activity that we're paying attention. To and we put that forward largely as an engagement tool, because we want to hear from other people to say, Hey, I'm involved in that docket in Oregon, or we're involved in this effort in New Hampshire. So we hope people would go there and actually reach out to us, because we do see as part of our mission, just building a community of like minded people that want to see these solutions thrive.
• 47:06
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the Ann Arbor story is a good one. That was a clean coalition project, and we talked about it with Elisa wood in Episode 342, I believe, fairly recently. So that's a bit of a shining start here in the heartland, and then there's a handful of projects out in California. There's some in Maryland, there's some in Florida. So there's, you know, there are success stories in a handful of places. I'm on a mission to discover the playbook of how we create a micro grid friendly playing field. So if you're listening to this and you have case studies or thought leadership on this subject, please reach out to me at cleanpowerhour.com, or message me on LinkedIn. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial, but wanting to scale into large C&I solar. I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects. I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you. Just go to cleanpowerhour.com click on strategy and book a call today.
• 48:29
  Tim Montague: It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. And with that, I'll say thank you so much. Cameron Brooks of think micro grid, how can our listeners find you?
• 49:08
  Cameron Brooks: Thank you, Tim, yeah, it's been a great conversation and and like you, we're very eager to hear from those out there that are looking for interesting solutions or trying to drive more conversations people can learn more about think micro grid at thinkmicrogrid.org as I mentioned that we also have on the site there our own tool for just sharing some of the activities that we're seeing around the country, that's at tracker.think microgrid.org and people can find me Cameron at thinkmicrogrid.org I'm
• 49:44
  Tim Montague: Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage.
• 49:46
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much.
• 49:48
  Cameron Brooks: Thank you. You.