Latest / Clean Power Hour / How Microgrids and Batteries Future-Proof Grid Resilience

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How Microgrids and Batteries Future-Proof Grid Resilience · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Paul Gerke: Let's, let's just level a little bit like we have an excellent grid, but it's, it's antiquated, and it's nowhere near what we need it to be. And in many parts of the country, it's aged well beyond its expected quality of life.
• 1:05
  Paul Gerke: And you know, I keep going to China as an example every time I have this conversation, because they're having the opposite problem as the United States right now, where over building has always been the ethos, and now this data center problem is not a problem as much as it's a solution to soak up all that extra generated electricity, and that's why we're behind in the AI race.
• 1:25
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:36
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition
• 1:49
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, we continue our journey into our exploration of batteries and micro grids. The grid is changing. There's a confluence of things going on that are stressing the grid. The climate is changing. The technology is changing in our society. There is an explosion of AI data centers coming on to the grid. We have electrification of everything simultaneously, and so this is stressing the grid. The good news is we actually have really robust technology to transform the grid, and batteries and micro grids are a big part of that. I'm joined today by Paul Gerke. Sorry. He is the director of renewables for Clarion events and the host of factor this podcast. Welcome to the show, Paul.
• 2:47
  Paul Gerke: Thanks for having me. Tim. Really appreciate it and your interest in this space, which, as we were just discussing, off air, is just like growing every single day.
• 2:55
  Paul Gerke: It's getting bigger and deeper this well, that you're digging,
• 3:00
  Tim Montague: it's a really wild time. It's the best of times and the worst of times in some ways, right? We have some headwinds at the federal level, but from the ground up, right? If you're a utility operator, you need batteries, and you want micro grids for your constituents, because they provide resiliency.
• 3:22
  Tim Montague: They allow you to isolate aspects of the grid and keep them running in the event of a larger outage, and that that resiliency is worth millions when the shit storm happens. But Paul, for my listeners who aren't very familiar with you, give us a give us a cliff notes version of what what you're up to in the world, because there's a lot going on there.
• 3:47
  Paul Gerke: Yeah. So just a quick perspective of where I come from. You might know my voice from the factor this podcast. We do a once weekly episode called This Week in clean tech with Mike Casey from Tiger com. And then on the second Monday of each month, I drop a standalone podcast also branded factor this factor, this is the rebranded version of three legacy publications that you might be familiar with. They were around for decades, renewable energy, world, power grid, international and hydro review. So now under one mass dead said, it's modern day and age, and nobody's going to three different websites trying to find news. We've curated all three of those sort of verticals in one space that's called factor this. And so on the day to day operator we, you know, go through in our content team chat, what are the big stories?
• 4:30
  Paul Gerke: What are we working on, everything from day to day business to business news to longer form features, and then, in addition to that, the podcast. So I have a really close pulse on the utility space. Tim, because our company, Clarion events puts on the largest utilities conference in North America, D tech. And so we see both on the conference side of things and on the content side of things, this demand that you're talking about for resilience and reliability, in fact, it's so important right now to us that we created a special section for it on our website, because it was like the thing that everyone's talking about right now. And I could say a lot about a testament to your remark about utilities and how important batteries are to them.
• 5:11
  Paul Gerke: Look no further than my home state of Michigan, which is one of the fastest growing states in terms of utility scale battery adoption, and it's a good thing, because the outages I grew up with were not something that would be acceptable in today's day and age, and the batteries provide so much resilience, a lot of other benefits we'll get into. But anyway, that's the Cliff's Notes version of who I am and and what I'm talking about and where I come from.
• 5:35
  Tim Montague: It's interesting how regional differences, how there are regional differences in the amount of outages here in the Midwest, okay, I'm in I'm in central Illinois, and here in Champaign, we very seldom have outages. But apparently. See, there's a C shaped region that includes parts of Michigan where there are more frequent outages.
• 5:55
  Tim Montague: And this very likely has to do with weather patterns and storms. I was also the most recent outage I experienced was in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I go every summer for the Fourth of July, and there was a really intense Windstorm, and that knocks down trees, and those trees fall on power lines. There's a lot of trees in New York. We don't have a lot of trees here in the Midwest. It was the prairie before there was corn and beans, but so and then I was, I was preparing a talk that I'm giving at Tennessee in October on this topic. And it turns out that in 2024 there were several major outages that impacted hundreds of 1000s of people. The three noteworthy ones were one in Maine, which was caused by a nor'easter, one in California, which was caused by a hurricane, and there was one other which I can't remember now, but these events are happening on a regular basis. It's well documented that the extreme events, you know, these billion dollar plus risk events, are occurring more frequently.
• 7:07
  Tim Montague: There's just no questioning that math. Okay, it's happening. And then you have this other layer right of AI data centers, electrification coming on, and it's a bit of a clash. But from where you sit, Paul, I'd love to hear kind of how you see grid operators and other stakeholders working together to kind of solve this, what I call resiliency gap.
• 7:39
  Paul Gerke: I think that we need to start by talking about the way the industry is becoming un siloed and fast, because it needs to be. For the longest time, utilities were able to operate more or less the way that they wanted to, particularly when we're talking about relatively flat load growth, as had been the case for decades in the United States.
• 8:00
  Paul Gerke: But now faced with this challenge, coast to coast, although much more dire in some situations, like data center alley in West or in Virginia, it's now an imperative that these utilities break out of their silos and start conversations with people that they never would have interacted with outside of a court deposition, project developers.
• 8:23
  Paul Gerke: We're talking about people that are running studies to run right of way, transmission lines to support data centers, these Co Location conversations. I mean, these are things that would not have been in the mix not that long ago. And I think some of the larger utilities started to understand how they needed to open their doors a bit sooner than some of the smaller ones.
• 8:45
  Paul Gerke: You could say much of the same way with AI adoption, where everyone wants to be nobody wants to be left behind, but nobody really wants to be the first mover. First mover, because once you let AI into a grid control room, there's a whole new level of liability that that utility is assuming, or that transmission operator is assuming. So I think to circle back to your question, it's it's an imperative that now that these billion dollar events are happening every single year. I mean, okay, let me just give an example. Tim, look at the look at the wildfires in California.
• 9:16
  Paul Gerke: Those three main utilities in California had assembled a wildfire fund. I believe it was$14 billion that they could share to protect the utility against damages from wildfires.
• 10:19
  Paul Gerke: And then was it the Eaton wildfire, the most recent big one out there, the damages are more than $14 billion just one single fire. So that resiliency measure that those utilities thought might save them is not even close to what they'll actually need in the face of the sort of climate disasters we'll be facing. And so I think, especially as AI starts to take more foothold and starts to provide solutions that maybe some other grid operators had not considered. We're going to start to see these utilities continue to break down those silos and find ways to get more transmission out of the lines we've got, and find ways to get other projects online faster, because even if a quarter of the projections come through on load growth, we got a lot of building to do.
• 11:05
  Tim Montague: Yes, a lot. I think the stat I saw is that data center load is going to grow something like 30 fold in the next decade, and that's just mind boggling. Now, one I'm curious. One discussion that I don't see a lot of is like, Okay, we need more. There's more demand on the grid, and that stresses the grid. And so there's, there's this, there's a certain voice that we see in society. Okay, let's build smnrs, small, modular, nuclear.
• 11:39
  Tim Montague: Factors, let's continue to build natural gas power plants. Let's not build wind batteries and solar. There is that a certain voice about that. Unfortunately, those are the most cost competitive technologies that are most timely to deploy on the grid, and so those are going to continue to be deployed. And there's so So, yes, you can build more power plants, but you can also do things like build micro grids, where you don't have to build transmission and distribution lines. You can build a battery generator, solar farm micro grid that can isolate from the grid and provide resiliency at the community scale. You could also reconductor Your power lines, and I don't, and maybe you know about this, like, how much of that is going on to solve this problem?
• 12:39
  Paul Gerke: Yeah, so the reconductoring is a big thing.
• 12:42
  Paul Gerke: You know, I recently did a feature on Heimdall power, which has the the ball, the neuron ball, that you may have seen on some lines. They've rolled out a few pilots with utilities started up in Minnesota, I believe, up in our neck of the woods in the Midwest, and I believe they were able to get an average of 30 or 40% more out of the lines just with that dynamic line rating device, of course, that the utilities have got to be pursuant to those FERC orders that mandate them knowing a little more about what's happening on their lines. The reconductoring, it is a thing, and I think reconductoring is going to solve a lot of the problems that might otherwise be solved by new transmission. But I think it's it's technology in general is what's exciting right now. It's everything from from drone applications. Recently did a story about a company whose drones charge conductively on power lines, so you could theoretically leave them up and operating and maintaining and this sort of like 360 degree 24/7, grid edge visibility is what reliability and resiliency really looks like in the future for these utilities and Tim, I love the focus continuing to come back into micro grids and these community resiliency endeavors, because it's of my opinion that eventually, all of those major community centers will have to be micro grids.
• 14:00
  Paul Gerke: They'll be micro gridded by the very nature of their existence, your hospitals, your schools, your community centers. And I think our ticket to that, and from where I sit, is EV to grid technology. Every story I do about electric school busses, every story I do about Ford's advancements in EV to grid and EV to x technology, you think about factors of scale ahead of Tesla power walls, and what you could do with that power, if it's wrangled correctly. And I think that's the really encouraging part of this space, yeah,
• 14:30
  Tim Montague: when you think about electrifying every vehicle, truck or passenger vehicle, right, or bus, that is a lot of gigawatt hours of electricity that is stored in mobile batteries that can be deployed. I love the school bus analogy, right? That is a VPP on wheels man. And if you just took a couple of school busses and take them to a hospital or a community center when there's a storm coming, you can power that facility for a long time and that, and that would be an amazing thing right now, we're just, we're just just really starting that journey, right?
• 15:10
  Tim Montague: Okay, in California, 20% of new vehicle sales are peer. EV, but nationally, I think we're at 2% right? And we're taking away incentives right now, there is still an incentive in the US.
• 15:23
  Tim Montague: The window is closing, though, right to get that tax credit.
• 15:28
  Tim Montague: But, yeah, I love the mobility play for sure, for sure. And if you know other experts on this topic, I would, I would love to do a deeper dive on that. So, you know, looking at the landscape of how we have established a utility industry as a regulated monopoly, it is fundamentally designed to be slow moving. And I think that that model is really not working for society right now, because things are changing so quickly, both on the tech side and on the nature side, and I feel this tremendous push to say, let's kind of let go of that and re imagine how we are delivering reliability and resilience to our to our nation. What are your thoughts about that? How can we transcend? Include. Best, right?
• 16:43
  Tim Montague: We have a very good, reliable grid in America, which is a wonderful thing. It's amazing,
• 16:49
  Paul Gerke: but we need to do better. Yeah, I mean, like, it's, let's, let's, let's just level a little bit like we have an excellent grid, but it's, it's antiquated, and it's nowhere near what we need it to be. And in many parts of the country, it's aged well beyond its expected, you know, the quality of of life. And, you know, I keep going to China as an example every time I have this conversation, because they're having the opposite problem as the United States right now, where over building has always been the ethos. And now this data center problem is not a problem as much as it's a solution to soak up all that extra generated electricity, and that's why we're behind in the AI race. I think the imperative to evolve the offerings of EVs in the United States is going to be, is going to be whether it's going to be the tipping point as to whether or not we see that percentage of EV sales change.
• 17:46
  Paul Gerke: Tim like, it's, it's, you see Ford's new offering, that sort of universal base where they're going to build all sorts of their models on top of it. I think that might be one of the ways to keep EVs more cost effective. I'm curious to see where that goes, because in China, we couldn't even compete with the EV market, the stuff that they're selling, it's like a third of the cost, and it's cooler than anything we have on the market. And that's really frustrating, but, like, it just is what it is, and until we get that innovation in the US.
• 18:14
  Paul Gerke: Sorry, I got off on a tangent about EVs. What was the original question?
• 18:19
  Tim Montague: Well, I see a need to transform how we deliver resiliency and a reliability, yeah? And this the utility model of a regulated monopoly, yeah?
• 18:34
  Paul Gerke: Okay, I'm gonna interrupt you because I knew exactly what I was gonna say.
• 18:36
  Paul Gerke: Tim, okay, it has to change because power prices are out of control. Like there will be an imperative at some point. I live in New Jersey right now, native Michigander, so I know what's going on there, but I really know what's going on in New Jersey, because I have to pay the electric bill in this house, and I believe it's gone up something like 30% year over year out here, it was 20% and change alone, just based off PJM debacle of a power auction last summer when all of the red lights flashed and everyone realized That, holy smokes, we've got a capacity problem out here. And I think that the power prices, Tim, are what's going to drive a change in that utility model, because it is impossible for a lot of people to keep paying what we're paying. And as the summers get hotter and the summers get longer and the the inclement weather events get more severe, it's going to become more and more of a problem for people to pay their air conditioning bills. We talk about data centers a lot. My favorite fact about load growth in the United States right now is it's not data centers that are spurring the most load growth. It's air conditioning.
• 19:34
  Paul Gerke: We will put more into air conditioning load growth in in the next 30 years than we will with data centers. It just is what it is. It's a very it's a fundamental nature of living in the the mess that we've created in this era of of climate change. So so the utility model must change, because I think the consumers will be unable to pay for it. I think we're starting to see the first cracks of that coming from the hyperscalers, where they're injecting billions of dollars to speed up processes and get things online and working directly with utilities, maybe changing specs you want 300 megawatts, we can give you 208 months. Is that okay? All right, let's do it. Talk about flexible load programs that we're just getting started on that tip of that iceberg. How flexible can you be? 50 hours?
• 20:18
  Paul Gerke: Can you give us 75 hours? These sorts of conversations will change fundamentally the grid that we have. And in 10 years, regardless of how this shakes out, we'll be looking back and that model will have fundamentally changed. I don't know how it's going to change.
• 20:35
  Paul Gerke: Throw a dartboard. I guess
• 20:37
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• 20:48
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• 21:32
  Tim Montague: That's a behind the meter project for a community college which is in the distance. And these devices, these buildings, are. Assets that can be ramped up and down. Right. Every building is a battery. It has warm air, hot water, things that can be turned on or off as batteries right to increase or reduce load on the grid. We need to get much smarter about that.
• 21:57
  Tim Montague: We need to turn on vehicle to grid because electrification of transportation is going to happen. Look to the future. Go to Northern Europe. Go to China.
• 22:11
  Tim Montague: You see that EV adoption is going to be very high. It is going to be more economical.
• 22:16
  Paul Gerke: It's a better mousetrap. Ultimately, it's a better mousetrap.
• 22:21
  Tim Montague: The shift from internal combustion engines?
• 22:24
  Tim Montague: Well, from from horse and buggy to internal combustion engines is a great example, right here, there was one ice engine, right?
• 22:30
  Tim Montague: 12 years later, it's all ice engines and there's one horse and buggy. People had nothing against horses. Internal combustion engines were just more convenient, more cost effective. You can go further, faster, and people like to move around, apparently.
• 22:44
  Paul Gerke: So charging at home is a perk, and when it's a resiliency measure, and you can keep your power from going off for six hours if you need it, that's another perk. And I don't think rolling a BPP and make residual income with it, that's another perk. You're not going to be able to do that with your car unless you're letting somebody else drive it, and nobody wants that
• 23:00
  Tim Montague: until you own an EV. You don't realize how big that battery is like my model Y had a 60 kilowatt hour battery to have a off grid solar and battery home, you just need a 30 kilowatt or 40 kilowatt hour battery. So the 60 kWh battery in a model Y is awesome, right?
• 23:17
  Tim Montague: And these trucks have double that, or sometimes triple. So the batteries in EVs are very big. And not not to mention the commercial vehicles, the busses and the trucks, right? Huge batteries. So if you're, if you're a PUC Paul, you know, looking at this kind of shit storm that's happening, good things are happening here and there, you know, and I would look to California, I would look to New York, I would look to New Jersey, I would look to Massachusetts, I would look to Illinois, for kind of some best of breed things that are happening legislatively. Jigger is all excited about DCP in Minnesota that Excel is pushing it's not rolled out yet, but it's in the wings. Apparently, I don't fully understand that. But when you think about, you know, how we humans, organizationally tackle this problem, what are the bright spots, as far as you're concerned?
• 24:23
  Paul Gerke: Oh, that's a tough question right now, because it goes without saying that there are a lot of dark spots right now. I was having a lot of fun in the end of the Biden administration writing about all the projects that were getting LPO funding. You know, you brought jigger Shaw into this conversation, the former head of the LPO. He he's got a lot of great ideas. He's an excitable guy. I'm not surprised that he was excited about something very passionate about all the cool projects going on. What I really hope to see, and this is a bright spot that I can relate directly back to that IRA investment, that I still hope is a bright spot is the factories like Blue Oval, talking about the Ford battery factory, one of those, one of those that got some late LPO funding when the right side of the of the aisle is screaming, hey, hey, hey, it's all being doled out too fast, no checks on it. We're just handing out to green scam sort of deals. This is not a green scam. We're talking about building the next generation of car batteries in the United States and supporting a big three automaker. As a Michigan man, even though my dad was a Chrysler guy, I still feel a need to support Ford and their efforts, and it sounds like we're as long as for an entity of concern, the Fiat clauses aren't too much of an issue. We might still get the blue oval factories and still might be able to build some of that battery capacity domestically, that's a big bright spot for me.
• 25:43
  Paul Gerke: I've covered a lot of how the American Solar supply chain has sort of come together over the last couple of years. The big players in that everybody from the track, the trackers, at next tracker, to sort of the the Hellions and the manufacturing space with their modules, all the way down to the the stuff that q cells is doing in Georgia with their end to end facility, and that's really encouraging.
• 26:11
  Paul Gerke: We've got to get the price down, and I don't know if that happens by driving up the prices of foreign competition into, you know, the 1,000,000% and now we just have to use domestic or if we actually improve the manufacturing methods and get the market right. But as you said earlier, it's, it is still the most cost effective generation technology, solar, wind, batteries. It is still the fastest to market, and by a fair margin, the wind, wind turbine weight is four to five years.
• 26:39
  Paul Gerke: And that's, if you've got friends, it's, it's going to be a minute and. Nuclear is not going to show up at the front door and save our asses either.
• 26:44
  Paul Gerke: That's that's 910, years away, maybe, and that's if everything goes on this current trajectory of everyone's a fan of nuclear.
• 26:50
  Paul Gerke: Wait until something goes wrong, and we'll see how many people press the brake instead of the gas pedal, because this is not going to just go smoothly. I don't know. I'm a big proponent of the wind and in solar and batteries, and how flexible they can be, and how we can use retired farmland to create power at a much higher clip than ethanol can. And I think that no matter how many people I scream that to, it's, it's, it's not up to me. It's up to the states that you mentioned to make sure that they're passing legislation that protects their constituents as the tide shift federally, because on that side of the water, it's all dark right now.
• 27:28
  Paul Gerke: Tim, yeah,
• 27:31
  Tim Montague: yeah, I didn't realize the scale of the Blue Oval initiative. There are three or four factories being planned in states, one, two, I think, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan, yeah, and a total of perhaps 120 gig watt hours annually of LFP for transportation. I mean, another data point is that some of the some of the battery factories for EVs are now shifting over to stationary storage, because there is, you know, a boom in stationary storage. There's still extended runway for ITC on, on storage and, and so it's kind of a both and, but we need more
• 28:18
  Paul Gerke: win, by the way, keeping that extended, you know, runway for for storage. That's huge. I mean, Tesla's a great example, too. Their battery business is killing it way better than their car business is doing right now.
• 28:29
  Tim Montague: Yeah, they're really the gorilla in the room when it comes to stationary storage. That as far as I know, they don't really have a competitor yet. There's a couple of companies coming. I just had, I just had Attica ag on the show, and they're rolling out this very interesting oil immersed technology, which is very fire resistant, but they don't, they haven't put steel in the ground. And jigger commented, this is interesting.
• 28:56
  Tim Montague: We maintain the 45x incentive right for manufacturing. But jigger commented that if you don't have steel in the ground, raising money for projects like that right now is very, very difficult. The factories that got going will see the light of day, hopefully, but
• 29:15
  Paul Gerke: yeah, my conversations about the bankability of those projects was such that if you didn't have a crystal clear case for those credits. You weren't there was no lendability. You weren't going to get money, because that was going to be the collateral if everything went south. So that makes total sense to me that if, especially as it looks like the administration is trying to tighten those solar and wind restrictions even further, yeah, if you don't have steel on the ground now, you needed to do that yesterday.
• 29:45
  Paul Gerke: It's so it's tough.
• 29:46
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I'm curious what you think about the relationship between clean energy and utilities. There is a fair amount of tension. But I recently interviewed AJ Perkins, who's a micro grid expert, and his attitude is, look, if you want to form partnerships and collaborations with organizations or companies, you need to talk nicer. And while I'm all about collective action and pushing back on the traditional model, I'm also kind of going, Yeah, we need to figure out a way to work faster and better together to solve society's problem. We're all in this together, right? We're all people. We all want 24/7, reliability, and we want resiliency. In the event of natural disasters, there's got to be natural disasters. We know this, right? And no matter where you are, it's something, whether it's fires, floods, tornadoes.
• 30:53
  Tim Montague: That was the one I missed at the in the in the earlier there was a tornado in Ohio that caused an outage last year. So you know it's coming. Nature is going to come for us, but we can modernize the grid and allow it to be more and, you know, allow it to be more resilient. What are your thoughts about this, this, this, this kind of clash of Titans. We're a big industry now, but they're the they're they're like, God, the way the utilities are empowered in this country. I'll tell
• 31:26
  Paul Gerke: you. I'll answer your question by posing another question, and that's I and that's how much load growth do we really get from these data center customers? Because I start to worry about the utilities long term plans. Which are not as long term anymore as they used to be. Forget about a 10 year outlook. We're talking about two years, one year, next year. What are we doing if that, if that gold rush goes away, I worry about what's going to happen, because you saw the chat GPT five rollout wasn't so smooth. Maybe Facebook's not hiring AI folks anymore. Maybe that's a nothing burger story.
• 32:07
  Paul Gerke: Who cares? Maybe funding is getting a little rougher for some of the outliers that aren't the big players. But like, this is a bubble that's sort of holding up the US economy right now. Like, if you strip all the energy stuff out of it, Nvidia is about 8% of the stock exchange at the moment. So I do worry about, I just want to add that caveat, I guess that I do worry about all of this. If all of a sudden the load growth went from 5% projection in PJM to point 4% what's going to happen to a lot of these initiatives, especially the smart grid stuff, and getting the stuff where we need to be Now, to answer it more directly, I think it depends on where you live and it depends on the disaster that you're dealing with. If you're in California right now, you should be encouraged by all the undergrounding efforts that are going on and all the wildfire mitigation, the AI detection software that's being installed out there. California utilities just let AI into their control.
• 33:00
  Paul Gerke: It was a big announcement from dtech this past year. OA ti had one of the first software clients that's actually being allowed to interact with the grid and manage I don't know if it's directly power flow quite yet, but making some decisions and using analysis, that hopefully is the implication it's like that we talk about AI as like the problem, but also potentially as a solution. And this is potentially part of the solution we're starting to see now. So, but if you're in California, it's wildfires. If you're in the Midwest, you're worried about those those thunderstorms. You're worried about those big tornadoes, like the one in Ohio you mentioned. I remember countless times as a kid in Mid Michigan sheltering from tornadoes as a kid, and I know the weather there is more supercharged than it was when I grew up. If you're in Florida, if you're on the coast, it's about flooding, and it's about how do you protect that utility infrastructure from these high winds and potential hurricanes that that might show up every single year, and how do you ensure your infrastructure against that is another question that's becoming a more and more of a thing as insurers back out of some of these markets. So I think that the it's the it's a dynamic conversation that everyone in the United States is a part of in some capacity. But it's different conversations depending on where you are, and all of us are being dependent on this growth that is, that is data centers and electrification of everything. And you know, I'm sort of torn, as a journalist, you don't want to see machines take my job, but at the same time, I want everyone to have jobs. So maybe supporting AI economy is ultimately a good thing. I don't know, Tim, it's, it's probably a too complex discussion to have in a single conversation.
• 34:29
  Tim Montague: Well, I mean, I think the theme of AI is not going away anytime soon. For sure, there is going to be a bubble. There's no doubt about that. But it's like, the internet, okay, yeah, there was a bubble, and there's a lot of blood in the water when that when that bubble bursts, but we still have and need an Internet, and we're right now, we're still gonna have AI and we're going to need it, because the AI tools are so good and so smart. Okay, they're not conscious. Will they ever be I don't know. Will we ever be able to what? Hopefully not. Okay, well, yeah, I'm good with them staying unconscious.
• 35:11
  Tim Montague: Will we be able to upload our brains to the internet, that kind of thing? Like I was asked in an interview, what if I could take any genie out of a bottle?
• 35:20
  Tim Montague: What would that be. And I said, Well, I would gladly create 100 digital clones of myself so I could just have a bigger impact in the world. I'm a mission driven entrepreneur. I want to speed the energy transition. I'm making a very small impact today. If I could do 100 times more, why wouldn't I? And I think many companies are going, Well, yeah, if I can be 50 times more productive and profitable, I have to do that. That's my fiduciary responsibility to my investors and owners, and they're right, and they're glomming on. I mean, major companies are integrating AI into their DNA as we speak.
• 36:01
  Paul Gerke: And to circle back on the clean energy component of that too. You raise, you raise another good point, and that's the relationship with utilities and clean energy. And you touched on it a little bit, and I kind of skirted around the answer, but it's a, it's a relationship of convenience. Now more than ever. Yes, there are states, I believe there's a dozen or so that have codified their intentions to be, you know, carbon free, whatever percent by whatever date, 50% by 2030, 100% by 2040, whatever the state is. Yes, those state laws will still encourage the clean energy transition. But in the other places, and very much so in those states, it's about the cheapest to market. It's about the lowest cost generation. It solar, wind and storage will still. Ultimately went out because it's the better mouse trap. And I know that the federal, the Federal jargon and and hate speak doesn't doesn't speak to that right now. But I think the people that are actually getting power online, and the utilities that are actually putting pen to pencil and figuring out which projects actually work for them, are choosing renewables over and over and over again, like 90% of all generation that's coming online right now is renewables.
• 37:07
  Paul Gerke: If that doesn't speak to their utility, for utilities and beyond, I don't know what does
• 37:15
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's, you know, subsidy free solar, wind and batteries is within sight, and photons are free and super abundant. The wind is super abundant, and it's just very hard to argue with that. Yeah, we have a lot of fossil fuels, and I think we should sip the fossil fuels instead of guzzle them. Save them for a rainy day, okay? Because there will be times when renewables fail. But as Storm URI demonstrated, right, all of our infrastructure is vulnerable, not just wind turbines, okay, all of our infrastructure is vulnerable, and we need to harden our infrastructure. We need to get much smarter about that and creating a more resilient society. Yeah, it's
• 38:03
  Paul Gerke: interesting. You bring up hurricane Yuri, though, because ERCOT has really done an amazing job at hardening its grid over the last couple of years. And I know that the Texas grid gets a lot of flack, and deservedly so, but I also got to give them credit where credit is due, and the last two summers have been some of the hottest ever in the southwest. And they haven't. There hasn't been a single call for Conservancy.
• 38:25
  Paul Gerke: There hasn't been a single brown out or big outage. As a result, I think they learned a lot from those big storms that messed up a lot down there in Texas. And the scale at which they've added renewables, particularly batteries, to their grid, has fundamentally changed the way that they handle peaks, and it's not as much of a problem for them anymore. There's like, I think it was a sub 1% chance of a blackout this summer, and that's just mind blowing, considering just a few years ago, what we were dealing
• 38:52
  Tim Montague: with, that huge red state is now 50% clean powered, with solar, wind and batteries, more
• 38:59
  Paul Gerke: renewables in California, believe it or not, and DFW, I believe, is completely wind powered. I flew into there earlier this year for an event, and I saw the big sign that was like, wow, oh, I didn't know that powered by wind. I did not know that,
• 39:12
  Tim Montague: yeah, I mean clean, clean energy is big business. That's the that is the theme that I love from my conversation with jigger Shaw.
• 39:19
  Tim Montague: We are a major force. Now we need to start to behave more like we truly are. Right. The stat that he uses that is a wake up call, okay, we're installing twice as much capex than fossil fuels, but we're investing 1/20 into political power as the fossil fuel industry, we're being outspent. There's many ways to gain political power.
• 39:50
  Tim Montague: Money is just one collective action, organizing coming together, and we're doing some of that, but we're not doing enough. So if you're listening to this, Join your local Renewable Energy Association, your state organization, your Gulf States organization, whatever that association is, join. Be active. Support it.
• 40:09
  Tim Montague: Those organizations are very important for our industry to have a collective voice. Join SEIA, our national organization, or ACP American clean power.
• 40:23
  Tim Montague: Those voices really do matter.
• 40:23
  Tim Montague: 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.
• 41:01
  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, Paul. How can our listeners find you
• 41:21
  Paul Gerke: factorthis.com? When you when you when you put that into your URL, it'll probably reroute you from renewableenergyworld.com which was part of our rebrand back in February. Butfactorthis.com or you can just check out the podcast, look up, factor this on Spotify or Apple Music, or wherever you get your podcast, and you'll find our once a week this week in cleantech and our once monthly standalone and we'd love to hear your feedback on it. Feel free to. Reach out anytime. If you've got a story that you think that we should be writing about or talking about, I'd love to hear from you.
• 41:48
  Tim Montague: Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Tell a friend about the show and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners and energy professionals writ large. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks so much, Paul,
• 42:05
  Paul Gerke: thanks for having me. Tim. You.