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How Virtual Power Plants Save Millions in Energy Costs · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Jeff St John: Right now, I think in the US last year, 93% of all new additions to the grid were solar batteries and wind in that order, and it's going to be about the same for the next year, and to be frank, for years to come, because the supply of, you know, turbines for natural gas power plants is so constrained that new orders are facing, like a 357, year backlog, depending on who you ask. And so if what we're going to add that's new that can come in the next few years is going to be these three technologies, and primarily solar and batteries, and
• 1:25
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• 1:36
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• 1:52
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, how do we incentivize the development of battery and micro grid projects in the United States? My guest today is Jeff St John. He is a journalist. He is the chief reporter and policy specialist at Canary media. Welcome to the show,
• 2:08
  Jeff St John: Jeff. Thanks. Tim, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
• 2:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I really appreciate all your work and all the work of Canary media. If you're not aware of Canary media, just check it out.
• 2:17
  Tim Montague: Canarymedia.com amazing resource for authentic news on the Clean Energy Transition, writ large.
• 2:27
  Tim Montague: And today, we're diving into how battery projects and micro grids are getting developed in the United States. And like so many things in clean energy, the leaders are California and California, and you know now things are starting to trickle down a little bit. Texas has an initiative because of storm Yuri, there's an interesting project in here in the Midwest, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that clean coalition was fundamental in but Jeff, for our listeners, why don't you just set the table a little bit? What is your beat and what drives your work?
• 3:10
  Jeff St John: Thanks, Tim, you know, so I've been covering this stuff for almost 17 years now as a specialty former journalist at an outfit called green tech media, and my colleagues and I formed Canary media, a nonprofit newsroom to cover the climate and climate crisis and energy transition when GTM got shut down, and we've grown a lot since then, and our goal is to take the complexity of things like, how do we incentivize and structure policies and economic incentives for things Like distributed energy, like solar and batteries at, you know, big industrial sites or in neighborhoods or at community centers, so that they can successfully grow and expand and help not just those customers, but everyone writ large across the grid. We try to take those complex issues and boil them down in ways that I think people can understand, and that help people understand the solutions mindset toward getting these things done. You know, this is just solar panels and lithium ion batteries are truly revolutionary technologies, and we're trying to understand and then articulate how they can get out there and put their impact to work to help everybody.
• 4:38
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and as many of my listeners know, and many of my guests point out, you know, globally, 80% of new grid energy is solar, wind and batteries. It is the dominant source of grid power now, and that's mostly because of the cost of the technology. Money makes the world go around. When it comes to the built environment, there just is no arguing with that. We also want to create a more sustainable future for humanity, but that's that's way down the totem pole in terms of humanity's interests. Truly, unfortunately, we need to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak. But Jeff, let's go. Let's get into this on batteries and micro grids. When you when you think about this landscape, it's a very dynamic landscape. It's changing fast.
• 5:31
  Tim Montague: Solar, you know, has been around since the 90s, right? Really, that was like the the beginnings, and then it took off in the mid 2000s and now we're in the modern. An era where it's like gone mainstream. I just noted that ERCOT grid is 50% solar, wind and batteries now. I mean, it's amazing how much solar, wind and batteries is in a market like Texas. You wouldn't imagine a red state going green like that, but it has happened. And yeah, yeah.
• 6:11
  Tim Montague: Storm Yuri was like a cherry on top and a catalyst for a lot of development of solar, wind and batteries, but it was already a major player in wind before Yuri happened, right? So how do you see this landscape? And then we'll talk about some specific phenomenon, projects and legislation that is helping to catalyze this phenomenon?
• 6:38
  Jeff St John: Yeah, well, as you said, the costs are consistently lower than the alternative, and the speed to deploy is also much faster. I mean, right now, I think in the US last year, 93% of all new additions to the grid were solar batteries and wind in that order, and it's going to be about the same for the next year, and to be frank, for years to come, because the supply of, you know, turbines for natural gas power plants is so constrained that new orders are facing like a 357, year backlog, depending on who you ask. And so if what we're going to add that's new that can come in the next few years is going to be these three technologies, and primarily solar and batteries, and these are inherently modular technologies. You can have as little or as much as makes sense from enormous utility scale projects like those that you know, are happening in Texas, which now has the lead and solar and battery deployments large scale over California, but also at the distributed level. And that's where they kind of, you know, circle back to the whole idea of a micro grid. And a micro grid, you got to define what you mean by that word? I mean, there have been big, you know, like college campuses and corporate campuses that have been micro grids for decades.
• 7:58
  Jeff St John: They run on, you know, big, you know, steam boilers, or they have turbines, and they run on fossil fuels, and they pull that waste heat to, you know, supply heat to the buildings and stuff like that. And they can stand up during a storm when the grid goes out, but solar and batteries allow you to really modularize and atomize the concept of a micro grid to the individual home or building level. Theoretically, there are some limits on how long you can run a house or a building on battery and solar alone, right, which is where you might have some backup generation and stuff like that. But, you know, it's becoming a possibility, and that's making it a solution set not just for homes and businesses or organizations that want to have both lower cost power and some resiliency against blackouts. It's also becoming a tool for utilities and regulators who are looking at the enormous costs and the time spans it takes to build out traditional infrastructure like power plants and transmission lines, and saying, Well, maybe we can fill in with solar and batteries in a lot of these places in ways that are not traditional, but which might really make sense from a cost and a, you know, resiliency against climate change driven extreme weather perspective.
• 10:11
  Tim Montague: I mean, historically, one of the major drivers has been the RPCs or the or the RPS, the the renewable portfolio standard, RPS, excuse me, and, and, but some states, you know, are outliers in that regard, Florida and Texas don't have strong rpss, and there's lots of solar and batteries happening in those states for different reasons. And then, and
• 10:40
  Jeff St John: fast. Sorry, it's cheap and it's fast,
• 10:43
  Tim Montague: yeah, it's cheap and it's fast, but, but So there, there is a bit of a layer cake politically, okay, you've got RPS driven phenomena. You know, here in Illinois we have sija and fija and now sija climate and equitable JOBS Act, which ostensibly is to achieve the RPS goals. I mean, it's both in the both and the the RPS is baked into fija, sorry, sija, the climate and equitable JOBS Act. And you know, we're on this path to 50% clean grid by 2040, something like that. Anyway, that's that's great. But when it comes to batteries and micro grids, you know you need additional incentives. You know less and less as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper.
• 11:42
  Tim Montague: Cheaper. But what is going on?
• 11:42
  Tim Montague: You know, in the places where you see large battery and micro grid deployments, and I'm interested in both macro grids, like you mentioned, campuses, I call these community scale micro grids, which doesn't have a hard definition, but it's a micro grid that can power hundreds of buildings, 1000s of homes. And you know, I'll reference clean coalitions work there in California and in Ann Arbor Michigan, here in the Midwest.
• 12:13
  Tim Montague: But what else? What else are pucs, for example, public utility commissions and other entities doing to incentivize the development of infrastructure that ultimately allows for value plus resilience,
• 12:33
  Jeff St John: right? Well, there are a couple of good examples.
• 12:36
  Jeff St John: One of them is actually in Illinois, where there's this project called the Bronzeville micro grid, kind of on the South Chicago area, where you've got a bunch of different buildings, including a university campus and a large affordable housing complex that for the past five years, utility comed and a bunch of different partners have been using some Department of Energy grants to put together solar batteries, gas generators, and all the grid technology that you need to get all those systems to work together to provide on site power when the grid goes down across different distribution circuits, right? Because, you know, powering your house is one thing you can kind of like, throw a transfer switch and you're off the grid, and you know, you're just powering your house, and maybe your battery can or can't kick on your AC compressor or not. But you know, you're not, like, sending power across circuits that were designed to take it one way, and now you're going a bunch of different ways. In Bronzeville, it's taken a long time. I mean, they got that launched in, I think, 2018 ish, and they just officially, kind of like, turned it on, I think, last year and this year it ran a series of tests that say it's ready to go.
• 13:48
  Jeff St John: But that work is really important, because you got to get all those grid controls and, you know, protection equipment and the kind of brains of the inverter based resources that got to work, you know, in synchrony with synchronicity with the spinning generators that make all this alternating current grid work, and that's a really important set of foundational efforts it takes five years the first time.
• 14:14
  Jeff St John: Hopefully it won't take five years the next time, hopefully everyone can learn from that, right? And you know the learn the lessons that you know comet and DOE and all its partners have learned can can propagate out. So that's one example of where utilities are making it happen. That's with DOE grants, as for how to make it pay for itself. Utilities make money by spending money regulated utilities get a regulated rate of return on what they have to spend, on what their regulators say they can spend on their power grids, and if they operate power plants, on their power plants. And so utilities like to spend money, because they make more money the more they spend.
• 14:56
  Jeff St John: But right now, utility rates are going up. They're going up primarily because, you know, deferred maintenance and build out of the distribution grid, plus the costs of dealing with extreme weather, the storms, the wildfires in California, the hurricane damages, are really driving up those grid costs, and so utilities are under pressure from regulators, or at least they should be, to reduce those grid costs. And there can be ways in which these technologies, solar, batteries on site, generators, you know, Power Systems controls can be cheaper than the alternatives.
• 15:27
  Jeff St John: I'll give you an example from California. There's some projects that are being done by Pacific Gas and Electric in Southern California, Edison, two utilities, where they're basically taking remote customers, people at the end of Long, long distribution lines, and saying it costs us more to keep that line up and running and safe against wildfires than it was than it costs us to go put solar and batteries and a generator at your place and just run it as a utility asset.
• 15:55
  Jeff St John: That's a micro grid that's utility owned and operated, and it's cheaper than the alternative and utilities have to serve everyone. They just can't cut off that line. You know, there's another example like that in North Carolina, where Duke Energy is working on has built a micro grid in a fairly remote town that has, once again, one of these really long distribution lines. That micro grid after a couple hiccups, getting it up and running after the enormous hurricanes there last year did power that town. So there are ways in which this can be cost effective. Now. There are also a lot of third party companies and developers that would like to kind of build it and run it themselves, and there's a very interesting conversation to be had about which part. Of the micro grid landscape are more appropriately built by utilities, and their costs are kind of shared across their customer base, versus which ones should be done as kind of a customer centric thing where they're taking the load off of the utility, but there are a lot of different models to get it done.
• 17:00
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I just hosted a conversation with AJ Perkins, the microgrid mentor, and he's working in Hawaii and in California on projects where third party ownership of virtual batteries, so lots of residential scale batteries.
• 17:22
  Tim Montague: These are in the 20 to 40 kWh, so they're large residential batteries, but there's many of them. One project is a mobile home park in California, and one project is a native Hawaiian community. I'm not sure on what Island. I couldn't pronounce the name, but anyway, and it's kind of a win win, because here you're getting this relatively expensive capex. Batteries are not cheap, right? So getting that equipment into the infrastructure, but then allowing the utility to operate that as a VPP, as a virtual power plant, really serves the utility right when it needs instantaneous power, or if it needs to shut off a circuit to a community. For some reason, it gives them that flexibility, right, right? And so these, you know, we're talking like a distributed, 20 megawatt hour battery. It's a big battery, yeah, now, obviously there's bigger utility scale installations happening all over as well. It's a both and, right?
• 18:38
  Tim Montague: So it's like small, medium and large. The medium being these VPPs of distributed residential or small commercial projects and but, but again, California and Hawaii have unique circumstances in that power is very expensive and getting more expensive, and they have unusual weather patterns that cause these public safety shutdowns and and AJ tells a funny story where jigger Shaw tipped him off on this phenomenon that the utilities in California were about to roll out rolling blackouts and and this was a economic opportunity for distributed energy developers. But anyway, in other markets, Jeff the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more. What other forces do we have in the American political system to incentivize the development of micro grids?
• 20:37
  Tim Montague: Because it really is super good for consumers and business owners when that storm hits, and you might think you're protected, right? Asheville, North Carolina, is a great example. They were a quote, unquote, resilient community, protected from climate change. I almost moved there. Thank God, I didn't, and then they were just wiped out by that storm that came inland and dumped huge amounts of rain on them and caused massive flooding, which just ripped through and destroyed so much infrastructure, roads, buildings, power grid, hospitals, you name it like it was a massive natural disaster, and we want to provide this kind of resiliency across the board, to every community in America, ultimately, right? No place is safe from from weather,
• 21:32
  Jeff St John: yeah, well, I think there's, there's this defense in depth kind of concept, when you think about resiliency, I know that in in Asheville and in. In places like parts of Louisiana after the hurricanes down there, you had companies rolling in with basically solar panels and batteries on kind of, like flatbed, kind of like trailers, and setting those up as kind of power stations for people to charge their phones or do some relatively low power applications. But you can, you can scale those things up. You know, the other option is rolling a bunch of diesel generators which need to be consistently refueled. So where appropriate, where cost appropriate, those kind of emergency things can can roll in. Of course, those aren't making money for the people who put money into them when there isn't a blackout to deal with.
• 22:19
  Jeff St John: And you really want to figure out this combination of technologies that can meet your needs for resiliency during grid events and then earn their keep and reduce costs for the system and for everyone who pays for the system when the grid is up and running, which is like, thankfully still 99% of the time or More, I forget what the, you know, the Sadie data is for us, why? But, yeah, we don't have the most reliable grade, but we don't have the least reliable grade by a long shot. So, you know, we gotta and the circumstances are really very particular. I know that this is one of the challenges for regulators who want to go instruct utilities to build more solar and battery backed micro grids into their kind of plans for how they build out their distribution grid, or how they figure out how much new power plant capacity and transmission lines to connect new power plants are going to need to meet their climate or, you know, reliability goals, but the work and really propagating the work that has been done on this is really important. Like I said that that project in Illinois, the Bronzeville micro grid, took a long time, but you build on that if you can replicate that work more quickly if regulators are getting together with subject matter experts and utilities that have done this work to instruct other utilities on how they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they say, how are we going to make a complex micro grid that crosses a couple of circuits?
• 23:58
  Jeff St John: That's going to be really helpful. And then, you know, there are certain things you can do to prime the pump. Texas has$1.8 billion in funding that came out of a series of bills that were a response to winter storm URI, most of which were aimed at kind of bolstering fossil fuel generation, which has had mixed success right now, since it's so hard to get new turbines to build gas power plants that the Texas legislature wants to build, but 1.8 billion in micro grids is for natural gas generators, but also at least some mix of solar and batteries for like sites, like industrial sites, not places that necessarily already have backup generators, like wastewater treatment plants or hospitals. But it could be for them, but it could also be for places that really serve a public good when the grid goes out, like heb grocery stores across you know, the Houston area were up and running during the big hurricane there, and after 2023 and customers, or people who lived in Houston, were figuring out where the outages were by checking to see which, you know, which whataburgers Were still serving food, you know, you've got a lot of, you know, kind of the customers of the utility can play an active role in this. The question is, how to compensate them properly. And you can get into real complex questions of, how much does it cost compared to what what are? How do we measure the value of reliability and stuff like that? But just the raw numbers are looking pretty good. There was a report that came out this week actually about California's biggest home solar battery virtual power plant program. It's called dsgs.
• 25:43
  Jeff St John: It's been in place for three years. It's gotten to about 700 megawatts of nameplate capacity.
• 25:46
  Jeff St John: That's 700 megawatts of battery it can inject into the grid for a couple hours during the time when California is, you know, demand is outstripping supply, like in as the sun's going down and it's still hot and everyone's ACs are jamming and and it once prices hit a certain peak on the on the energy market, you dispatch those batteries. And Brattle found that the benefit that comes from everyone in California, from having that resource there to keep energy prices down and to avoid the need to build more expensive or keep running more expensive peak or gas power plants, the cost benefit ratio is a two to one ratio you're making. You're saving two bucks for every buck you spend, kind of incentivizing those people who already have solar and batteries in their home to just let the grid use them. So the numbers are looking good, and people are saving the grid.
• 26:39
  Jeff St John: Puerto Rico's had their, you know, distributed solar. Battery resources, saving saving the grid from rolling blackouts over and over this summer. I mean, these resources are proving themselves in that purpose. And if you think about it, would you rather have a micro grid for when the grid goes down, or would you rather have your micro grid help keep the grid from going down in the first place.
• 27:03
  Jeff St John: It's kind of like, you know, you got to think of it both ways, right?
• 27:07
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and that, I guess that's like another layer of value that these VPPs provide. If, if the battery does function as a VPP, you know, it doesn't have to, right? You can, I think some states have opt in programs, right? You can install solar and batteries and then participate or not in the VPP program. The VPP program does serve the collective good and help keep the grid up or prices down. It's a both and, right, depending on the scenario, yeah, and. And then you can also hit the red button and go, Hey, okay, hurricanes coming. I'm sheltering in place. I'm going to use, I'm going to, you know, charge my battery and not not let it service the larger grid at this moment so that I can have some resilience when tomorrow the grid is down. And I guess, you know that's a question of then, does the VPP really provide community scale resilience in the case of a wide spread outage? Probably not. So you need to do other there need to be other backstops in addition to VPPs. VPPs are very good, yeah, but they're not the sole answer.
• 28:25
  Jeff St John: Well, yeah, nothing's the sole answer, right? I mean, during the rolling blackouts in California in 2020 and during winter storm Yuri in 2021 this largest point of failure was natural gas power plants in the heat they got over over loaded and had to de rate in California, and in the winter cold snap in Yuri, they lost access to the gas they needed to run. No system has a silver bullet, right? VPPs are a part of a portfolio of resources. I think it has been an interesting challenge for utility kind of grid operators and kind of system planners to get the proven points that they require, and they should require, as you know, the stewards of our grid reliability, to know that these things are really there. And that's been a tricky thing because, you know, this whole realm of paying customers to not use power, you know demand response, or to inject power into the grid. It's a tricky area, especially when you talk about not using energy.
• 29:36
  Jeff St John: Batteries are a little bit easier, because you can actually meter them and see how much energy they're sending back, rather than kind of guessing how much energy you would have used if you hadn't not used it, and then try to pay someone for that, which is a trickier piece of math to do. It's like measuring something that didn't happen, but as the more, as more proving points, like what has happened in Puerto Rico or what happened in New England this summer, when you know the estimates are that, you know the distributed battery and solar fleet saved, you know, the customers served by the New England grid operator about $20 million or what happened in California when they ran a test earlier this summer and they got 500 odd megawatts of, you know, grid capacity from batteries. It was measured by the participating utilities are giving, I think everyone involved more, a little bit more confidence that these things are real, and you're totally right that some people are going to opt out for whatever reason, but bad stuff can happen. And if one of 1000 or 10 of 1000 or even 100 or even half of 1000 home solar battery systems opt out.
• 30:47
  Jeff St John: That might be better than having one big gas plant that's either on or off even or being derated or having to go offline. So the resiliency and that defense in depth, right? Of having a whole bunch of distributed kind of things, you got to measure it differently. You gotta kind of think of it stochastically rather than deterministically, right? But that's the reality.
• 31:09
  Jeff St John: Nothing is perfect on or off, and having that defense in depth of a whole bunch of stuff that's already out there being enlisted seems like a pretty good thing to want to go after and make the most of.
• 31:23
  Tim Montague: One of the things that really bugs me on an ongoing basis is that we have so many authorities having jurisdiction in the in the United States, I don't know what that number is. It's in the 1000s, though, right? And and just at the state level, right?
• 31:37
  Tim Montague: We have 50 states. They're all reinventing this wheel, right?
• 31:40
  Tim Montague: How do we serve our constituents with a reliable, clean, healthy grid? And they're doing it in 50 different ways, literally, right? And then within a state, you've got public power versus private power, like in Illinois, we have IOUs, that service the major metros, that's comet Ameren and Mid American. But then we have this whole Swiss cheese of rural that is public power. These are co ops and munis, and they operate by totally different rules. And literally, you can be a farmer one block over and being a totally different utility territory and not be able to benefit from the community solar program, which can triple your income as a farmer in Illinois.
• 32:33
  Tim Montague: It's probably
• 32:36
  Jeff St John: energizing your grid too. It's just that, you know, there's a jurisdictional boundary that electrons don't honor, yep.
• 32:44
  Tim Montague: So I'm curious, you know, in your work, if have you run across any think tanks or organizations that are solving for this and and helping to raise the bar for everyone, we're not going to have federal leadership anytime soon on this matter, clearly, but, but, you know, and so the state lever, as I talk about on the show, is very important. You need to support your state organizations and your and your regional organizations. But who has figured this out? As if anyone,
• 33:18
  Jeff St John: yeah, well, I know that last year there was a coalition launched, kind of, kind of led by solar United neighbors, which is the nonprofit group that's basically a whole bunch of folks who want to figure out how to pool their purchasing power in their neighborhoods to buy solar and batteries and bring them bring down the cost and make things better for solar installers.
• 33:38
  Jeff St John: They put together a kind of a template, kind of VPP state legislation package, and they've been putting that out over the last year. I think Virginia passed VPP legislation based at least partly on the model ledge that solar United neighbors and their partners put together.
• 34:00
  Jeff St John: There's a piece of legislation in Illinois that did not pass the regular session. I think they're trying to see if it would come up in the veto session.
• 34:07
  Tim Montague: Oh, yeah, yeah, the omnibus bill, yeah.
• 34:11
  Jeff St John: And, and so there are these model legislative, you know, model legislation that kind of puts what this particular cohort thinks of as the ideal, optimal set of kind of here's how a VPP program should be structured. Here's some things that make it harder to actually get off the ground.
• 34:30
  Jeff St John: Avoid those. Here are some features that we have found are really successful in places like Massachusetts. That is a pretty, you know, robust and growing virtual power plant structure called ConnectED solutions. So that's one example. I think, you know, research, I was going to say, the Department of Energy had some really important research through the loan programs, office, liftoff report series, looking at the potential for VPPs. The current Department of Energy has taken that report off the internet, but you can find it if you Google, DOE, LPO, lift off VPP Wayback Machine.
• 35:13
  Jeff St John: Wayback Machine is as a report, and you all can find it.
• 35:20
  Tim Montague: I was looking for that report today, actually, and I couldn't find it, so
• 35:25
  Jeff St John: go check out. I just did a story about that California Brattle group report about VPPs, and I include a link to the Wayback Machine archive in that story, if you just scroll down to where that's at, okay? And there are groups like the clean coalition that are working on kind of modeling this stuff, it is very tricky, because we are a federated is a loose description of how we have a, you could say, balkanized energy system, state regulated, investor owned utilities, municipal utilities, electrical co ops, entities that operate with independence from each other. In some ways, you can see that as a problem. You can also see it as a opportunity to try experimentation. I know there are electrical co ops, like Kit Carson electrical cooperative in New Mexico or Holy Cross in Colorado, they're doing some really innovative things with distributed energy, solar, batteries, kind of grid controls, EV charging management and that kind of thing. And municipal utilities and cooperatives do not make money by spending money like investor owned utilities do, so they have a bit more. Of a kind of put their money where their mouth is, motivation to use these kinds of distributed resources to reduce the cost that they have to charge off to their city residents or their electrical cooperative member owners, respectively. So that's an interesting place to look but those are some examples. I'm sure there are many, many others that I'm not thinking about right now.
• 37:08
  Tim Montague: Well, what else should our listeners know in our last few minutes together? Jeff, I really appreciate your time, and this topic is one that you will see me covering much more with the obbb of 2025 batteries and micro grids are all the more important. The ITC is extended on batteries and and so if you have a way to put together a value stack of earn, safe, protect, you can make solar and battery projects pencil quite nicely still, even without the OB, even without the solar tax credit, which is going away, it's not going away immediately, but, but it is phasing out now on an accelerated schedule. So what else should our listeners know from your perspective?
• 38:00
  Jeff St John: Well, on that point, I think I was just talking to someone who works at a investment fund that is backing a bunch of distributed energy companies, folks that do like solar on rooftops and batteries at substations and stuff like that. And the point that this gentleman made, which I think is important, is there's a certain sense that these distributed energy resources are policy proof, federal policy proof, I should say, you cannot weaponize the permitting authority of the Department of Interior to prevent a warehouse or a community college from putting solar on its roof or batteries in its Backyard. You cannot make it impossible to interconnect a distributed solar or battery asset that you're building on your own property.
• 38:47
  Jeff St John: You can make it hard, but you can always, you can always, you know, structure it so that it just serves your load and doesn't kick back energy back to the grid. And you can finance the cost of these energy assets against your retail electricity rates, which, as we've seen from data from groups like power lines and others, are going up quite quickly, I think twice the rate of inflation average across the country right now. And if you think of these distributed energy resources as a hedge against rising utility rates you are serving yourself, and if you think of these resources as a hedge against utility, utility costs having to build more grid because you didn't build that solar and battery stuff that relieves some of that pressure, you could think of you doing some service for your customer, for your neighborhood, you know, for the the people who live next to you, you can reduce your own rates in the near term against rising rates, and you can reduce the need to raise rates by investing in this stuff and making it, making its value apparent to the utility. So hopefully that proposition pencils out in some places it it will be interesting to see how state lawmakers and regulators and non profit organizations can do the work that will allow it to pencil out in more and more places.
• 40:23
  Tim Montague: Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI 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. 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. All right, we'll leave it there.
• 41:16
  Tim Montague: Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Follow us on YouTube, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners, and to that point, if you buy wired for sun, my first book, I'm also writing a second book now on batteries and micro grids, but check out wired for sun. If you buy the book on Amazon, I'll send you a free PDF. The Kindle is 99 cents, so.
• 41:42
  Tim Montague: Anyone can afford it. And with that, how can our listeners find you Jeff?
• 41:46
  Jeff St John: Come to www.canarymedia.com, check me out, Twitter and blue sky. I'm Jeff st John, but it's spelled out, S, A, I n t, because some of the Jeff St John got the shorter spelling. And please come and support Canary media's work. We are a non profit organization. We rely on the support of our readers and those who feel that we're doing a good job with the money you give us.
• 42:10
  Jeff St John: So come and support us. Learn from us, tell us what we need to be covering.
• 42:17
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much.
• 42:17
  Tim Montague: Jeff st John, Chief reporter and policy specialist for Canary media. I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage.