Latest / Clean Power Hour / The Grid Can't Keep Up. Can Linear Generators Solve the Power Crisis? #360

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The Grid Can't Keep Up. Can Linear Generators Solve the Power Crisis? #360 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Walt Jordan: Is a prime generator meant to run full time, meant to be on 24/7, 365, and so there is no combustion, there is no spark plug, there is no flame, there are no pistons hitting anything. They run.
• 1:03
  Walt Jordan: There's no lubricant in them.
• 1:06
  Walt Jordan: There's no oil. They run on an air barrier system, and there's two oscillating pistons, and they compress the gas, and they pull apart. And when they pull apart, that's what makes the power. The
• 1:18
  intro: 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 microgrid 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, here's your host Tim Montague.
• 1:53
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, a solar and roofing contractor who looked at the post-IRA landscape and decided to bet the business on a generator most of the industry has never heard of. It's called a linear generator. It has no crankshaft, no spark plugs, no oil. Two opposed pistons floating on an air bearing, compressing fuel in a low-temperature flameless reaction, 13 beats a second. It can run on natural gas, propane, hydrogen, ammonia, or biogas, and switch between them on the fly. My guest today is Walt Jordan, Chief Revenue Officer of DGen Energy Partners, one of the largest rooftop solar contractors in the country and the 43rd largest roofing contractor in America. We talk about why they pivoted, how roofing and solar became a single tax-advantaged capex, and why speed to power is beating the interconnection queue. I'm Tim Montague. This is the Clean Power Hour. Welcome to the show, Walt.
• 3:01
  Walt Jordan: Thanks for having me today, Tim. Pleasure to be here.
• 3:04
  Tim Montague: Great to see you again. It's wonderful to meet such an innovative EPC. Tell us about how you came to DGen and what the company is up to in the world.
• 3:16
  Walt Jordan: Absolutely. So my reality to DGen is DGen is the largest rooftop solar contractor in the country, and I came to them as a consultant four or five years ago, and they. they decided that they wanted to get into the roofing business. Well, my background is in roofing, and what I quickly learned when I landed in this space is that roofers are allergic to solar.
• 3:45
  Walt Jordan: Solar guys are allergic to roofing, and so when we we joined forces and and started putting the building blocks together. I took to the to the solar landscape like a duck to water. There's still some pieces to it that I don't quite know.
• 4:01
  Walt Jordan: The solar guys speak in their own language, but it's it's been a lot of fun. And that's that's where you know that's where it started for me personally. We've grown our roofing business.
• 4:12
  Walt Jordan: We're the 43rd largest roofing contractor in the country now.
• 4:16
  Walt Jordan: But you know, as we all know, and everybody's eyeing the one big beautiful bill, we we've we've taken a different approach. We recognized really right after the election when we saw the USDA REAP grants going away, and then all of a sudden, you know, low income went away, and the you know the wind subsidies were starting to go away. We we we had to make some pivots and make some changes, and we we've had a relationship with these linear generators for spans back to you know somewhere around 2223 and we decided to accelerate that and see where it's going to take us, and it's been a it's been a lot of fun.
• 4:56
  Walt Jordan: It's brought a lot of excitement to the world of power generation for our team. It's a different conversation than everybody else is having, and it's it's wicked cool the way that this stuff works.
• 5:09
  Tim Montague: Before we get into linear generators, you need to understand DGen's foundation, which is the marriage of roofing and solar. These two trades have historically been somewhat allergic to each other, and I'm famous for saying that 90% of commercial solar projects die on the vine because of roof condition. DGen turned that problem into their signature play, bundling the roof and the solar into a single engineered capex. I ask Walt how that works. Yeah, let's answer that question right away. How do you make the roofing and solar a.
• 5:50
  Tim Montague: Single capex from a tax perspective.
• 5:55
  Walt Jordan: Yeah, so that's a good question. It's it's and I got to tread lightly here because we've got some proprietary things that are attached to this, but essentially we're going to take the reflectivity of a bifacial module and we're going to use the reflectivity from the roof, and that's the biggest mainstay for that for how that works, and and so when you do that, you know there's certain criteria that have to be met, and the UV reflection index rate of the roof have to qualify. So you can't you can't go put a solar array on top of a black EPDM roof, because there's no reflectivity to it. There's nothing that's going to help you get that bounce back effect using a bifacial module. So it it limits you in the product offerings that you've got. But the reality is, in the product offerings that it limits it to you, they're a phenomenal.
• 6:48
  Walt Jordan: They're a phenomenal product for for most buildings across the country, just because they stop the transfer of heat, and you're turning your roof into an energy saving resource for you, as opposed to it just being a bottomless capex expense. And so, when you combine the two into one, they both turn out, you know, as a single unified engineered component, and that you know we have we have you know gone to the top of the hill using that, and and have our belts and suspenders through our C to C system pledge that allows us to do that. So we'll give a guarantee on the process, provide an audit defense on the backside, and help the customer through the process as they, you know, navigate the complications that are the that are the filings for that.
• 7:40
  Tim Montague: Dgen still installs batteries where the customer wants them, but Walt is candid that he thinks battery chemistry is a moving target, with sodium coming on fast.
• 7:50
  Tim Montague: Where he's placed his own bet is on a technology I'd honestly never heard of before this conversation, so I asked him the
• 7:58
  obvious question: But what the heck is a linear generator, and how did DGen get into linear generators?
• 8:06
  Walt Jordan: Yeah, so one of our we were introduced to them by one of our reoccurring revenue clients, large format logistics company, and that was where the introduction came from. Back fourth quarter of 22 first quarter of 23 somewhere in that range, and and looking at you know some prototype stuff with this and some extreme cold weather climates, and the the product performed great, and and so we've had it in the background, but with you know the IRA and the ITC being as hot as it was, you know if it wasn't broke, don't fix it, kind of a deal. And then we really started to dig in on the LGNs January of last year, and it's been a it's been a, it's been a, it's a lot of fun. It brings a lot of fun back to the, to the process.
• 8:57
  Walt Jordan: Customers are extremely intrigued by it. It's it's funny. I I sat with a customer yesterday, and he's like, I've never heard of this. I don't know what this is about. Tell me more. Well, and I I told him I said just about everybody we talk to has has the same conversation, and so essentially, what a linear generator is is linear generator runs on compressible gas. So that can be hydrogen, that can be ammonia, that can be methane, propane, natural gas, etc. And it compresses it; it doesn't burn it. So what a lot of people wanted to want to default to is they want to default to a backup diesel generator is what everybody wants to default to, and this product is not that.
• 9:40
  Walt Jordan: It's not that in any way, shape, or form. This is a prime generator meant to run full time, meant to be on 24/7 365 and so there is no combustion.
• 9:54
  Walt Jordan: There is no spark plug. There is no flame. There are no pistons hitting anything. They run.
• 9:57
  Walt Jordan: There's no lubricant in them.
• 10:00
  Walt Jordan: There's no oil. They run on an air barrier system, and there's two oscillating pistons, and they compress the gas and they pull apart. And when they pull apart, that's what makes the power. And they hit it about 13 beats a second, and they are-they're just. I mean, I love-I love using the term.
• 10:19
  Walt Jordan: They're as cool as the other side of the pillow, and quite literally, I mean, the exhaust on them is that of a hair dryer on low. The EPA doesn't have a measurable test for emissions on them, and and they don't make a lot of noise. I mean, they spin cycle on your washing machine is about as loud as they get, and so they can be grid forming.
• 10:38
  Walt Jordan: They can be grid following. We can use them in a utility scale.
• 10:45
  Walt Jordan: We can use them behind the meter. They they serve a great.
• 10:48
  Walt Jordan: Where their drawback is is it takes them about 30 seconds if you're going to fire them up, so you can't. They're not used in a backup position. That's where a lot of people get confused. They don't meet the tier three and tier four upstart mandates that those things are supposed to have. But they blow tier four final out of the water. They blow the UL 2200 ratings out of the water from a from a just a power generation perspective. I mean they're they're clean, they're efficient, they're quiet, and they save you a ton of money if you've got you know a project that's call it a million 2,000,003 kilo you know, kilowatt hours a year. That's that's that's right in the in the in the starting spot for these things. So they're great solution.
• 11:42
  Tim Montague: So I did I did some homework on linear generators, and they I would encourage people to go to Main Springs website. That is the main company that makes linear generators. It's a company out of California, and it looks a little bit like a jet engine from a distance. But they come in 250 kW units. They have a small footprint relative to solar, not necessarily battery.
• 12:06
  Tim Montague: So you can think of it as having a similar footprint to a battery, I think, but and they are using fuel, and it is a form of combustion. It's low temperature combustion, so the emissions are quite different and less toxic than a traditional fossil fuel generator. But they do have carbon emissions, unless you're burning hydrogen, unless they're fueled by hydrogen, in which in which case water is the emission. But but it does consume fuel. So the carbon,
• 12:44
  Walt Jordan: you're right, it does consume fuel. But I want to I want to I want to make this clear: the NOX level on these is it passes all 12 of California's emission tests, the EPA doesn't have a measurable test for
• 12:55
  Tim Montague: it.
• 12:56
  Walt Jordan: Yeah, you're going to make more emissions in your kitchen burning a gas cooktop stove.
• 13:00
  Tim Montague: Yeah, but if you're feeding methane into a linear generator, it is producing CO two.
• 13:06
  Walt Jordan: Correct. It is
• 13:07
  Tim Montague: producing CO two, albeit less than a diesel generator or a natural gas, just a traditional fossil generator.
• 13:15
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• 13:59
  Tim Montague: Quick context on the numbers here because I want to be precise. The air quality advantage of the linear generator is real, near net zero NOx, no particulate matter. It passes California's air district permitting out of the box.
• 14:20
  Tim Montague: That's its genuine edge over engines and turbines. On carbon, it depends entirely on the fuel.
• 14:29
  Tim Montague: Running on pipeline natural gas at roughly 46% net efficiency, you're looking at around four tenths of a ton of CO2 per megawatt hour, which is roughly grid gas equivalent. Run it on dairy biogas, where you're destroying methane that would otherwise vent, and the project can actually go net negative. So air quality is the headline.
• 14:48
  Tim Montague: Carbon is a fuel question, the but the bottom dollar here, Walt Walt is saving money, reducing your spend on energy, and so let's talk about that. If you have a customer, a big flat roof owner in California, where they're paying 35 or you know some exorbitant rate for energy,
• 15:11
  Walt Jordan: 35
• 15:12
  Tim Montague: 30-five, and they're looking at rooftop solar batteries and other solutions.
• 15:16
  Tim Montague: And I guess I'm curious if you got into the fuel cell business at all, because a fuel cell is is also an option. But how do you approach these these large CNI customers with energy savings, and let's say that there's an opportunity for a mix of technologies. How do you rank the the technologies in terms of cost per unit of of ROI?
• 15:48
  Walt Jordan: Yeah. So good question, and and. And no matter what the product is, right?
• 15:51
  Walt Jordan: Whether it's batteries, whether it's a backup generator, whether it's prime generator, you know, geothermal, solar, whatever, right? They they they all have their shortfalls, right?
• 16:03
  Walt Jordan: Everybody everybody has those, right? It's and it's being able to understand what those look like. And so at the end of the day, solar is still going to be your cheapest power, you know, power producing product that you can put on somebody's facility.
• 16:15
  Walt Jordan: But then, you know, you're in the winter time and you're in Minnesota. You're limited, right? You're not going to make as much power as you would like to. Other parts of the country, you know, you get out in the desert and you know, like Denver is like the perfect climate because it's 300 days of sunshine, got a little altitude.
• 16:35
  Walt Jordan: It's not as hot. Electricity flows better. You know, those those things work. But the the cool thing about the linear generator piece of it is, is it doesn't have to be natural gas all the time. So it can it can flow. So if we've got you know methane that's being produced and we can use the methane as the source, we can and we don't have enough methane to keep the generator running at full time.
• 17:00
  Walt Jordan: It can flip over to natural gas as the backup for it. Whether that's a you know 4060 split or a 5050 split or 7525 whatever the case may be, we we can we can adjust on the fly.
• 17:13
  Walt Jordan: Literally, no retooling, no changing anything. It can just move over from one source to the other. Whereas when you get into some of these fuel cell products that are out there, whatever it's designed for from a fuel cell standpoint, that's that's it. It it's it that's its fuel source, and so this this gives flexibility to the customer where, you know, hey, let's let's use an example. I've got a product that's or a project potentially going to take shape in New York, and they're not going to have natural gas on the site for two years, and so we're going to truck in propane, run the generators on the propane, and then when natural gas comes in, we're just going to flip them over, and it's just a matter of connecting a different hose at the end of the day for how you're going to fuel that source. And so that gives them, you know, all of the flexibility to make those decisions, and you know, have to spend a little bit more in the first two years, we're waiting on you know local utility to get them what they need. But the reality is, is long term it gives them more flexibility in in in the grand scheme of things over the course of the next 20 years.
• 18:22
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I would love to. I would love to see a cash flow for a linear generator. I never have seen that. Are there any other significant considerations for linear generators are they generally available if you want to buy a couple of megawatts of generators? What's the what's the lead time?
• 18:42
  Walt Jordan: So we call it speed to power, right? The project I was talking about up in New York, where you know they're not going to get natural gas brought in. Nice egg told them when they started construction of their expansion, where they needed 25 megawatts, that they were good to go. So they're halfway through construction of this big expansion project, and Niceig has since then told them,"Sorry, we can't bring this. We can't. We can't afford to give you this extra power that you're going to need to run this facility. We're not going to be able to get you a second meter and get you turned on, you know, unless you you have to bring in your own power source. Well, they're scheduled to be finished with construction around Christmas, so we're in a position where we can deliver what they need in somewhere around six months. So the the worst case scenario, our speed to power is going to be 12 months. Best case scenario, you know, could be four or five months. Some of there there's some other compensating factors that can fall into that that are out of our control. But reality is, we can get the product and get it on the ground quickly compared to a lot of different things that are out there, and and you know getting them permitted through the AHJ is is not real complicated either, and in most scenarios, utilities just approve them. So, really happy with the product.
• 21:06
  Tim Montague: Very cool. So there's going to be a linear generator and solar microgrid, or just a linear generator microgrid.
• 21:16
  Walt Jordan: So linear generator can be its own, can be the own thing, right? Do do we have applications where we've we've put solar to go with it and let them work with each other, absolutely, no problem. That that is that is very very achievable. Have we, you know, added batteries to the linear generator? Absolutely, no doubt.
• 21:34
  Walt Jordan: You know, do we have linear generators with backup diesel generators on them as a result?
• 21:42
  Walt Jordan: In backup, yes. Do we have it with solar, the linear generator, battery, and a diesel backup? Again, the answer is yes. So it's very versatile in how the application of the linear generator can be applied.
• 21:58
  Tim Montague: And are there any gotchas regarding other equipment, balance of system, inverters? Just paint us a picture.
• 22:07
  Walt Jordan: None that I have found yet. I I feel like you know the way that this product sets up with the performance guarantees on it. It really really is is what I believe is the is a sure thing, right?
• 22:22
  Walt Jordan: Because there's guys out there that talk about, you know, customers will say, "Yeah, I put solar on my building 10 years ago. I didn't see any difference. I spent a million dollars, and you know, it's not working right. And you know, this is you know, this, that, and the other. And there's a lot of different excuses. So, so you know, there's that. But the the the catch to it is, is that these machines do have to be maintenance once a month.
• 22:49
  Walt Jordan: They've got some graphite rings in them that are designed intentionally to fail in the process, so they they they degrade over about a 30 day period, and they've got to be swapped out. And so as long as the machine is being maintained, and and proper maintenance is being done, then that's a that's a beautiful thing for where these where these products are going to go as far as longevity and and the real return on an investment and get you the the real impact that you're looking for, take out peak demand, you know, take out your standby charges, all that stuff. You know, you can be your own thing with just these generators.
• 23:32
  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.
• 24:08
  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. All right. right. So, if you were an EPC doing large rooftop solar and battery, you would absolutely recommend checking out linear generators. It sounds like,
• 24:39
  Walt Jordan: yeah, you know, and I would. And here's the thing about the linear generator, and and I want to be clear about this too. We we haven't dismissed solar and said you know we're going to throw solar in the trash and we're never doing solar again. We're still continuing to navigate you know the solar landscape that that we have now, and the solar coaster, as I've been taught to call it, because there's ups and downs in this business, just like any business, right? And and the linear generator doesn't always fit in the applications that that we're presented with, and so you know we're we're still looking for solutions and finding things that work.
• 25:18
  Walt Jordan: There's a lot of incentives in the Northeast to still go with solar, and where solar is going to continue to pencil, the ROIs aren't going to be as aggressive as they once were, but they still pencil and they still make a good investment for the clients. So we're we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to evolve our roofing business. We're going to continue to evolve in the battery space and and and find tangible benefits for our customer that that gives them a real impact towards the ROI.
• 25:44
  Walt Jordan: Well, you mentioned
• 25:49
  Tim Montague: you mentioned something we should touch on
• 25:51
  briefly: AHJs and fire service or fire chiefs. How do they respond to linear generators?
• 26:02
  Walt Jordan: So my personal first interaction with this was I met with a councilman for a county out of New York, and he first thing he did was like,"You need to go see the fire marshal about this. I'm not going to talk anything further on this until the fire marshal tells me he's good with it. And so I went and sat down with the fire marshal, and we started going through it, and you know, explaining the technology, and and and and showing him some different videos, and and really kind of getting into the nuts and the bolts of it. And frankly, his questions, some of them were way over my head. It was a great educational moment for me, and then. Once he's going to be one of the ones that are joining us next week, and once you know, once he got comfortable with it, then the wheels started to turn really quickly. As far as the AHJs go, they recognize this as a as a generator, and since it's got a tier four final and a UL 2200 rating, as long as you got your paperwork in order, they seem to they seem to go through that that process relatively quickly, much faster than you know we're used to in the solar piece and how all that works and having to redo this design and redo that design and change the racking system and changing your attachment methods and you know all the things that they put us through we're not faced with a lot of that. They spend more time worrying about the concrete that you're going to put the doggone thing on than they do the actual generator from an install standpoint.
• 27:32
  Tim Montague: That's Walt Jordan, Chief Revenue Officer of DGen Energy Partners. Find Walt at DGenEnergy.com and on LinkedIn, where he posts field videos of these machines in action, I opportunistically went to Indiana to visit a linear generator site with Walt and some of his customers from the East Coast, and I have to say it was a very interesting thing. If you look carefully, you can see the the heat waves there. These are the exhaust chimneys, for lack of a better expression. The exhaust comes out the bottom of this chimney here, and you can hear the generators thumping away. Each of the 250 kW generators takes about a parking spot, so pretty reasonable for a megawatt of power. Just push them out pencils. The generators do make noise, though. It sounded roughly like a locomotive engine, and the generators were paired with a flow battery at this hospital complex that we visited in northern Indiana. There was four linear generators, so a megawatt. They're each 250 kW, so it was a megawatt of generators, and you could feel the exhaust, how warm it was. It generates heat. It is a combustion technology, albeit low temperature. And the exhaust was very clean, though you didn't feel like you were breathing pollution. Although you are, it is emitting carbon dioxide if it's burning natural gas or methane, so you have to be careful. And but overall, I was favorably impressed. You know, it's humming along, making electricity presumably cheaper than grid energy, and that's the
• 29:38
  key: is finding the opportunity where you can make electricity with the linear generator cheaper than you can make electricity with grid power or buy electricity from the grid, so that's the kicker. But that's true of any alternative source of energy, whether that's solar, batteries, wind, etc. I do think that where your real estate constrained, like if you don't have a big enough roof or enough real estate around the facility, and you have a large load that you're trying to offset. I think there's definitely a play. I definitely think there's a play with biogas. So if you're operating a cattle facility, a dairy, something like that, and you can burn, so to speak, the the methane coming off of the operation, the dairy operation, then there's an opportunity to really see a win-win with linear generators. Only time will tell.
• 30:34
  key: My takeaway: whether or not linear generators become the bridge technology, Walt believes they are. The story underneath this episode is the interconnection wall. When a utility tells a customer mid-construction that the power isn't coming, behind-the-meter firm generation stops being exotic and starts being the only path to speed to power. That's the constraint reshaping distributed energy right now.
• 31:00
  key: Check out all of our content at CleanPowerHour.com. Tell a friend about the show, and if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, a rating or a review goes a long way. I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage.