Latest / Clean Power Hour / Why Alaska Is Crushing the Microgrid Game (And What We Learn)

Transcript

Why Alaska Is Crushing the Microgrid Game (And What We Learn) · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Peter Asmus: My vision of the future is that the grid would be comprised of micro grids and VPPs tying them together. So if we have to start the grid all over, like people say, if we start all over, they would DC, like Thomas Edison started with, I don't see us going DC, direct current, but I see more DC. I see more diversity. So I think, you know, we're gonna we have a little bit of a rough stretch.
• 1:14
  Peter Asmus: But I've also heard people say the lack of subsidies, or some of the grant funds that have been taken away could be good for the industry, just to not be so focused on chasing subsidies, but more just making those economic arguments you mentioned, and they can be made.
• 1:31
  Peter Asmus: And you know, this is a global market.
• 1:34
  intro: So 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.
• 1:45
  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
• 2:02
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, we continue the journey into micro grids. My guest today is Peter Asmus. He is an expert in micro grids. He is the author of the upcoming book Alaska micro grid innovators, and the author of four other books on energy. So welcome to the show, Peter.
• 2:20
  Tim Montague: Thanks for having me. It's really great to meet you, and I'm looking forward to bringing this content to my guests on the show, and so my listeners know I'm doing a series on batteries and micro grids for a book I'm writing called Wired for resilience, the battery and micro grid playbook. So if you know a micro grid or battery expert that I should talk to, please send them my way. You can connect with me at cleanpowerhour.com, or on LinkedIn. I'm very easy to find.
• 2:51
  Tim Montague: So Peter, give us a little background on yourself. How did you get interested in the energy industry? And then let's fast forward to the last couple of years. What you've been up to in this space? Sure.
• 3:05
  Peter Asmus: Well, I am not an engineer. I'm just was trained as a journalist and moved from topic to topic, actually, when I first moved to California, way back in like 1981 I was actually a political reporter in Sacramento, and then kind of became an environmental reporter, and then just randomly started working for some electricity trade journals, and then from there, I wrote a couple books. You mentioned a few. The first one, well, there was the first one was a Simon and Schuster book. The second one, which was more generally environmental. The second one focused on SMUD Sacramento, municipal, Municipal Utility District which closed a nuclear reactor by citizen vote ballot initiative, first time that ever happened, and then replaced it with what we know called distributed energy resources.
• 3:58
  Peter Asmus: Then wrote a book about wind power, then wrote a book about the history of energy in California, kind of a broad swap of just what all California's done. And then I started working for Navigant guide house, leading up their micro grid research. With that, I had a global perspective on micro grids. I had to forecast the future, which we always, as an analyst, I shouldn't say hate it, but, you know, it's kind of like, how can you predict the future? But someone wants somebody to do that, and then now, most recently, I was working in Alaska, and hence that book.
• 4:41
  Tim Montague: So yeah, let's talk about your elastic Alaska experience. You commented that everyone in Alaska is on a micro grid, and I think my listeners understand that there are different scales we call, you know, individual home, micro grids, a nano grid, or a small, you know, commercial facility would be a nano grid. And then you have campuses, and then you have communities that can be a micro grid. It could be a village, it could be a small city, it could be a neighborhood in a bigger city. But tell us about your experience in Alaska, and why is everyone living on a micro grid in Alaska?
• 5:22
  Peter Asmus: Well, Alaska's micro grid market is very different than the rest of the US. So first of all, there are 100 utilities in Alaska serving, let's say, less than three quarters of a million people. So in the lower 48 one utility like a Duke Energy would be serving way more than that amount of customers. So the market in Alaska is very decentralized, and all those micro grids in Alaska are. Run by utilities, which is very different than the lower 48 where, when I first started covering micro grids in 2009 most utilities were pretty hostile. And although that's changed, there are now utilities in the lower 48 deploying micro grids in Alaska. Those micro grids I'm referring to are all the most part community utility run micro grids, mostly by cooperatives, which is also another kind of unique feature.
• 6:19
  Peter Asmus: So in Alaska, you have remote communities. Most of Alaska is not connected to any grid. So these are what I used to call remote micro grids, and then you have the rail belt grid, which is the only transmission system.
• 6:36
  Peter Asmus: And those are micro grids that just touch each other. So it's like a series of stacked micro grids on top of each other. So it's true, every single person in Alaska does get their electricity from a micro grid.
• 6:47
  Peter Asmus: Yeah, and
• 6:51
  Tim Montague: you know, I'm guessing that the majority of those micro grids are fossil fuel powered. Is that not accurate?
• 6:58
  Peter Asmus: That is not true.
• 6:58
  Peter Asmus: The irony, and again, this is counter intuitive, is that the ones micro grids connected to the rail belt grid, are pretty heavily dependent on natural gas as a fuel. The remote system started out as pure diesel systems. For the most part, some started out 100% renewable, like the Cordova is one example, started out 100% hydro, then went 100% diesel, and now is a hybrid hydro battery, diesel, 75% of its power coming from renewable energy. The most extreme example of 100% renewable energy is Kodiak Island, second largest island in the US. 28 megawatt peak load.
• 7:47
  Peter Asmus: It is basically 99.5% renewable with a combination of wind, hydro, fly wheels and lithium ion batteries.
• 7:57
  Tim Montague: Oh, cool. I guess fossil fuels would would measure large, just because Alaska is rich in fossil fuels, and so they have ready access to fossil fuels. But of course, you have ready access to lots of wind, not so much solar, but, but, yeah, tell us a little more about the penetration of wind, solar and batteries in the Alaska market. Well,
• 8:24
  Peter Asmus: you know, it's interesting you mentioned solar, because it's true that people used to just assume, you know, well, how would you do solar in Alaska, you're at the top of the world. You know, everyone hears about parts of the year where there's no sun, which is true, but that also means there's parts of the year where the sun never sets. So solar is actually kind of really come alive over the last few years, because batteries have become more affordable, and you know all about that, and that's why, when I started writing about micro it's 2009 was lead acid batteries was the default, and there were many micro grids that didn't have any batteries at all. So Alaska has even a geothermal micro grid. I think it's the only one in the world.
• 9:06
  Peter Asmus: So in Alaska, because of these remote areas, the most diverse renewables are actually in microarrays that tend to be remote globally, because that's where you might have wind. It's hard to do wind in most urban areas, generally speaking. So you have a little bit of everything in Alaska, but the renewables. There's no renewable portfolio standards. So these micro grids in Alaska go renewable to save money, because diesel is so expensive in remote areas that might show up only twice a year on a barge or by airplane. A lot of these communities don't even have roads interconnected to them, so the renewables are deployed, not necessarily for environmental reasons, but often economic and just sort of resiliency diversity. You know, you don't want to put all your eggs in the diesel basket, so to speak.
• 10:03
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and money talks. You know, when it comes to the built environment, whatever is most economical is usually what happens and and then there's this thing you know, this, this value stack, earn, save, protect. You can earn money with grid services.
• 10:22
  Tim Montague: You can save money by attacking demand and capacity charges with like batteries, and you can protect yourself from grid outages. Now in in the Alaska market, as you're pointing out, there is no real grid. So it's, it's, it's more operating on a micro grid is the norm, and you may have outages because the generator goes down or what have you. But. But back to my question, though, about the penetration of wind, batteries and solar. If you had to guess about the mix when it comes to how consumers and business owners are consuming electricity, what are the relative, you know, sizes of those couple of buckets.
• 11:10
  Peter Asmus: You know, I did a white paper in 2018 that looked at that. And I don't have the numbers right off the top of my head, but it's actually, you know, if most people are on the rail belt grid, which is the part of the system most dependent on natural gas. Now, there are now seeking decarbonization scenarios. In fact, my book talks about the research. You know, how can they do more renewables, unfortunately, for the fourth year in a row, or an RPS and renewable portfolio standard fail? So, you know, I would say more, maybe like 25% of electricity. And all of Alaska comes probably from renewables.
• 11:53
  Peter Asmus: And some of that is from some large hydro, which is also unusual for micro grids. The one in Cordova is to run of the river hydro, which is also fairly unusual for micro grids.
• 12:05
  Peter Asmus: So, and they have done a lot, you know, diesel, I like to beat up on diesel, but in Alaska, they have done a lot of innovation with diesel generators. First of all, dealing with cold weather, even batteries. A lot of batteries fail in Alaska because it's so cold. So a lot of the Alaska story is things that work in other places don't work there.
• 12:28
  Peter Asmus: The other thing I like to say is Alaska looks more like the rest of the world and the rest of the US. If you look globally, most micro grids are remote systems in place like Africa. You know, the Asia Australia is another one. Australia and Hawaii tend to collaborate a lot on with Alaska, because, even though their environments are different, you know, Hawaii is a series of islands, Western Australia. It's got the largest utility service territory in the world, the fewest amount of people, and that's also served primarily by sort of what we might call remote, micro, cool.
• 13:10
  Tim Montague: So let's let's step back to the national landscape, and we can continue to maybe give some examples from the Alaska market. But you know, you've obviously been following the evolution of micro grids, and they the, as you mentioned.
• 13:34
  Tim Montague: You know, historically, utilities were not necessarily fond of micro grids, because maybe they're thinking of customers defecting from the grid. But as it turns out, right when it comes to their mandate to provide resiliency, for example, right? Their their mandate is to provide 99.999% uptime with their resources to consumers, right? And they do a very good job. We have in in the in the greater scheme of things, we have an amazingly stable, resilient grid in the United States, we don't often have outages, but we do have outages.
• 15:07
  Tim Montague: I was just looking yesterday, and in 2024 there were at least half a dozen outages across the US that impacted hundreds of 1000s of people. Some of them were caused by storms. Well, the majority of them were caused by storms, either hurricanes or other other storms. Some were caused by fires also, but this, you know, when you so. So there's how the utilities are viewing things, there's what's going on in the environment, and let's just get on the table that okay, the weather's changing.
• 15:43
  Tim Montague: Storms are big. Storm events are more frequent now, there's no debating that that's just a fact of life. Grid demand is going up. This is partially because of the AI revolution and the explosion of AI data centers, but also because of electrification and just economic growth and then, you know, there is, depending on the year, a mandate to decarbonize the grid and and this is now very varied from geography to geography, how important that mandate is, and it's not a priority for our current administration, but that just is a four year long ride, right?
• 16:24
  Tim Montague: And it goes up and down as different administrations come and go, but consumers generally want a cleaner environment. I read today that 90,000 people in America die every year from air pollution related causes. Mostly from fossil fuels, right? So we do acknowledge in the public health sector that fossil fuels are not good for human health.
• 16:50
  Tim Montague: They have a consequences, and then, and then, of course, they are also putting carbon in the atmosphere, which is causing climate change, which is a long term consequence for humanity, it's not so much a factor for individual lifetimes, but more generations. And I, I, you know, often, have often said on the show, I want to create a safer, healthier future for humanity, for future generations, and cleaning the grid is just one small piece of that. But Peter from where you sit. How has the landscape nationally been changing, good, bad or ugly?
• 17:30
  Peter Asmus: Well, I would say, when I started looking at micro grids, as I said, and you know, most utilities were opposed. I mean, the first large scale utility micro grid actually was put in near where you said you I don't know if you currently live near San Diego, a San Diego Gas and Electric did the Borrego Springs project, where that was an R and D project, but it was also kind of a utility rate case where the community was so kind of up in the high desert, I understand, and the cost of Building or reinforcing a transmission line was so high that it actually made more economic sense to just create a micro grid. And that micro grid grew over time. It incorporated a solar farm. But I would say, when I first started, you know, it was lead acid batteries, most people assumed a micro grid would still include a diesel generator. As you know, the diesel generator has always been viewed as sort of backup power.
• 18:27
  Peter Asmus: And there's still a debate, you know, is backup power really a micro grid? There are many people saying no, but I would say is that diesel generators generally are still in a lot of micro grids, because they're already there. So the other thing about micro grids is almost all micro grids are not greenfield projects. Now that's starting to change, but historically, there was usually something there. Now it could even be solar's already there, and you want to add a battery, and then maybe you want to add some other resources. So that's one change the commercial and industrial segment. When I first started doing my market forecast. I divided it by geography and then by sort of market segments, the CNI segment, so to speak, sort of the smallest segment, because, first of all, they're most concerned with cost. And back then, you know, solar was maybe still viewed as cost more batteries maybe cost more than diesel generators, etc. But what's changed is the cost of all those ders, until recently, kept going down and down and down. Now, I just did a blog recently that shows that prices have started increasing since covid Actually the tariff uncertainty and all this stuff, you know. So we're in a sort of now with the Trump canceling all these President Trump canceling all these contracts, we're kind of in a an odd space. But I'd say now the CNI segment is actually the fastest growing segment, and the reason why is, you kind of hinted at that is with power outages right now, the main value a micro grid provides is resiliency, but the regulatory system doesn't put a monetary value on resiliency.
• 20:11
  Peter Asmus: That's difficult to do. That could take years if you get a bunch of academics trying to figure out, well, how much is that worth? But businesses know how much they lost during a power outage, and that's what's made, sort of the CNI segment, one of the fastest growing the other one that's growing more are utility deployed micro grids. I think one reason for this shift in utility viewpoints, and these examples are from California, is there a couple of times there was a wildfire in San Diego again, where the UC San Diego micro grid saved the whole grid from collapsing, just by islanding and I my what I heard was just four megawatts. We were four megawatts away from the San Diego gas and electric grid going down. There was a similar example with a Miramar micro grid, which I'm not sure if that's an Edison or San Diego gas and electric service territory, but it was a similar thing where the utility asked the micro grid to go into Island mode, taking that load off the system, thereby stretching the remaining resources. So I think that's what's changed, is micro grids provide value during emergencies. But the other thing has changed is the regulations on grid services, and you mentioned that have evolved. So a micro grid, when you think about it, it's the best demand response resource you could have. You know, when it islands, all of that load is off the system, versus, you know, consumers who might in the middle of at the end of summer.
• 21:40
  Peter Asmus: Tired of participating in programs, and the sort of participation rates generally decline over time, over the calendar year. So those are the some of the changes, I'd say. I guess one other change is some people still believe you need a fossil fuel generator and a micro grid. You need a prime mover, but now the inverter technology is involved to sort of evolve, to create what some people call virtual inertia.
• 22:11
  Peter Asmus: There are ways to have micro grids that don't require fossil fuel. And then I guess here I'm done. My list keeps going on.
• 22:19
  Peter Asmus: The other trend I see is fuel flexible generators. So you you know, might have a generator that can burn natural gas, but over time, could shift to bio gas and hydrogen, all those things, kind of showing that micro grids can evolve.
• 22:37
  Tim Montague: 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 8555848, 555847168, to find out more. Well, I'm very I'm very interested in the C&I and community scale micro grid, and, in general, distributed energy resources. I'm a big fan of Craig Lewis's at the clean coalition that is has made a mark developing some community scale micro grids in California and in Michigan. So, you know, it seems to me like we now have the technology, right? The lithium iron phosphate, the cost of lithium iron phosphate is now low enough that we're deploying Lithium Iron Phosphate at scale.
• 24:05
  Tim Montague: We have very sophisticated electronics, whether that's the the power control systems for battery inverters or the virtual power plant controller, right?
• 24:21
  Tim Montague: So you can have a bunch of smaller batteries. I had a conversation with AJ Perkins about his work in southern both in Southern California and in Hawaii, where they're installing fairly large residential batteries in whole communities, though, where every home, say 3000 homes are getting a 40 kilowatt hour battery. And you know, the agglomerate battery, the VPP is like 20 megawatts, and that becomes a real node resource for the utility to, you know, help balance its load elsewhere. So what is your what are your thoughts about community micro grids? And do you have any good examples for us?
• 25:11
  Peter Asmus: Well, I would say you mentioned my other topic.
• 25:13
  Peter Asmus: I'm also an expert on VPPs. In fact, I'm, I guess, quoted in Wikipedia, but that was a definition I came up with. 2011 I did my first VPP report when no one really knew what a VPP was, and I think that's why we did a report. You know, when you're in the report business, it's great to be the first one to kind of try to define something, and by trying to size the VPP market, micro grids was hard enough, and it still is hard, because there's no public reporting requirement for a lot of micro grids and VPPs, it's more of a definitional issue.
• 25:49
  Peter Asmus: And before I answer your question, I'm actually have my own, I guess I would call it a nano grid, of a solar battery system, but I'm also part of a VPP and continuing on my last thing, the other thing that's changed in the micro grid market is the merging of micro grids and VPPs. When I was an analyst, I always tried to separate those because we were forecasting for separate reports. But I think that the lines between micro grids, VPPs and germs, yet another concept, distributed energy resource management systems are blurring, and you know that's just partially, as you mentioned, there's more batteries being being deployed and sort of communities now, the thing about a community micro grid is, though, it's very difficult to develop. A community micro grid, unless the utility is involved, the utility is not involved. It's difficult.
• 26:48
  Peter Asmus: Although you mentioned Michigan, there is a project with my friend Steve pullens is doing in Michigan that's a believe a community, I think it's an apartment building, but it's off grid. That's the only way they could do it without the utility.
• 27:02
  Peter Asmus: Is it had to be, even though it's in a area that has grid access, had to go off grid. So community, Mike, when you talk to the General citizen out there, you know that's how I got into it. Someone said, Well, why can't we just build our own power system? And that's back.
• 27:17
  Peter Asmus: This is again, back in 2008 when you start looking into the rules where, well, you can't send power in most states over a public right of way. You can't send power to your neighbor because of legacy monopoly regulations. And so those things are being chipped away over time, but in large part, a lot of that still exists. So you know, there's a lot of interest in community micro grids. I did for a while a work, and I forgot that they used to be called a mirror, I think then they became block energy, which was sort of the idea of a utility deployed DC micro grid, which would have individual assets at the homes.
• 28:00
  Peter Asmus: But you mentioned, like a shared community battery. And I remember I did a white paper for them years ago. So there are, you know, there's a lot of innovation with community micro grids, whether most of them still AC. I know there was one project abandoned in Berkeley that was going to be a DC micro grid. And again, it was the utility monopoly regulations that cause them to change way.
• 28:26
  Peter Asmus: But it's this merging of VPPs and micro grids that I think is helping the concept of a community micro grid, or at least a community distributed energy resource based system.
• 28:40
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I think the project I'm referring to is Ann arbor's seu
• 28:46
  Peter Asmus: Yeah, I think that's the Steve pollins prize
• 28:50
  Tim Montague: sustainable energy utility, and it's an opt in supplemental community owned energy utility that provides 100% renewable energy from local solar and battery storage systems installed at participating homes and businesses now authorize the detail, final planning and design work to officially launch the SEO can begin in earnest.
• 29:11
  Tim Montague: Blah, blah, blah. So anyway, that was, yeah, it's, I think it's like really unfolding now in 2025
• 29:21
  Peter Asmus: but yeah, I might be mixing that up, because the project I'm thinking, I thought, was in Ann Arbor too, so I'm not sure if it's the exact same project, but, well,
• 29:29
  Tim Montague: yeah, I'm sure there's many projects in Ann Arbor. It is, you know, it is kind of at the fore of the clean energy transition as far as Midwestern communities go.
• 29:39
  Peter Asmus: Well, I wanted to follow up. You mentioned the clean coalition. So there's actually two proposed micro grids near where I live, one of which the clean coalition is involved with, I think the other one, they are part of a new utility community micro grid program. Now I've heard good things about the program. Then I've heard developers say, well, actually, the programs are very bureaucratic, and you know, it takes like, four years for those projects to come through, and that the utility actually only provides the switch to go off grid or stay connected and controls that. And so, you know, people who think they want their own community micro grid will probably be disappointed with some of those systems. But what what clean coalition is focusing on is what we call front of the mirror micro grids. We haven't made that distinction. Most micro grids are behind the meter, historically, as they're not utility projects, and so front of the meter is kind of a different animal, and that's the other area where more attention has been paid to because only a utility can do that. And that's where kind of have different issues. And then you also start kind of overlapping with VPPs.
• 30:54
  Peter Asmus: Like most VPPs also use behind meter assets, but now VPPs are also using front of the meter set. So again, all these sort of distinctions and lines are are being blurred here as the whole market evolves.
• 31:12
  Tim Montague: Yeah, yeah. So what I what I love about the clean coalition's approach is to get utilities on board by saying to them, Look, we want you to install infrastructure, which is what they want to do, because they have a cost plus model.
• 31:30
  Tim Montague: Traditionally, that's T and D transmission and distribution, but you can install solar, wind and batteries and micro grid hardware at the community scale.
• 31:39
  Tim Montague: And own it own and operate those assets, right? So you're getting to build infrastructure, but then giving the community the possibility of micro griding from the greater grid in the event of a wide area outage.
• 32:00
  Peter Asmus: Yes, no, it's a great way to get utilities on board with the micro grid concept. And, you know, perhaps eventually use different kinds of models. I mean, I think that's the beauty of a micro grid, is it's such a diverse platform. I mean, you can have all different kinds of resources, all different kinds of sizes of these systems. And I used to call, like my home, a nano grid. Some people would still call it micro grid. That's yet another term out there. I mean, in some ways it doesn't matter what you call it, but no, there are, you know, utilities are innovating. They're also so when i The other thing, I guess, you know a couple of things that come into mind. When I first started with micro grids, there was no state programs for micro grids at all. The first one I under believe, was in Connecticut, 2011 and that was in response to hurricanes. So it's true that the weather, it started with hurricanes, then there were wildfires in the West Coast, and we had free unusual freezing things happening in Texas, and so all of these sort of things have stimulated programs. I just heard that both Colorado and Oregon have passed new programs, which people were saying were some of the best in the country. I'm actually thinking of trying to write a white paper looking at all the state programs out there and sort of culling and maybe coming up with an ideal, you know, menu of policies. That's something I've talked to some people about doing so,
• 33:35
  Tim Montague: so, you know, I think there's, there's somewhat of a layer cake here, right?
• 33:39
  Tim Montague: There's federal policy, there's state policy, and then there's individual utilities and their willingness to embrace, or not the energy transition, which they usually are doing on a fiscal basis. Right? You know, when you look at the landscape of what large utilities these are, I'm thinking of the the owners of of generation facilities, of what historically was coal, natural gas and nuclear fleets, right? They're transitioning their fleets to wind, solar and batteries, and now there's, you know, a bit of a resurgence. They're they're holding off on decommissioning, or they're recommissioning some things, including gas, maybe coal and nuclear plants, because of what's going on federally.
• 34:34
  Tim Montague: But anyway, there are these levers right that society is pulling. And, you know, for example, then there's things that happen in certain places like Storm URI. That was a wake up call for ERCOT for Texas, right? Hundreds of 1000s of people were without power for several days, and it was very close to being a much bigger catastrophe. It was. It was within minutes of becoming a weeks long outage, apparently.
• 35:04
  Tim Montague: But now, for example, I think in Texas, they've rolled out like$1.2 billion of funding for resilience, for, you know, critical infrastructure, you know, community centers, first responders, hospitals, places that really are vital for the running of society. When the grid goes down right and providing refuge for consumers.
• 35:25
  Tim Montague: So when you think about this, you know these different levers, where, where are the shining stars? In your opinion?
• 35:40
  Peter Asmus: Well, you know one thing about micro grids is it's still, it's state regulations that's more important than federal because federal regulation FERC is more generally speaking, the transmission system, whereas the distribution level systems, you know, are more state regulated.
• 35:57
  Peter Asmus: And one thing you did mention, then there's the ISO RTOS, which you know are another layer, and that's more with the grid services, the connection the distribution system and the transmission system, which used to be operated separately, but all these ders and now sort of organized through micro grids, enables more shifting back and forth between the two. But in terms of shining stars, you know, actually, you know, I'd say one of the biggest I'm disappointed in California regulation myself. When it comes to micro grids, people always say, Oh, you're in California.
• 36:36
  Peter Asmus: You know, California is doing so many good things we are. But when it comes to micro grids, and. Ders in general, actually, I don't think California's doing such a good job. But since you mentioned Texas, you know, one of the companies, the innovators, and I just am finishing a white paper for that company, coming out shortly, is Enchanted Rock, which does micro grids based on natural gas. They had a fleet in in Texas, and now they're expanding, but those micro grids balance wholesale wind power, so it's an interesting business model they're now applying to data centers. In the future is this idea that these micro grids don't operate that much they're natural gas, so they're cleaner than diesel generation. And in Texas, when the wind dies, you know, you need something to respond quickly to fill in those gaps, while the other resources can kind of fill it up. And that's what the Enchanted Rock business model is now for data centers, they're arguing, you know, data centers can't find power. The utilities move too slow. There's now new policies that are one is in Texas. It's being implemented California and your I believe it's New York. I don't quote me on that. Sort of flexible interconnects, temporary interconnects for resources that can kind of come online quickly, while the utility kind of brings online other renewables. So the enchanted this Enchanted Rock offer is you can deploy their systems quickly. They can actually they're not in conflict with renewables. They're sort of spot deployments that help data centers who want to come on quickly have power, and while the renewables come online later, they don't displace renewables like big natural gas combined cycle plants would which would then sit there for 2030, years and would basically take up the room that renewables could have filled. So that's, you know, more of the private sector innovation. But Texas, you know, California, Texas tend to battle each other. But, you know, Texas surpassed California in a renewable energy sort of surprising to some folks, mainly because it's a little more deregulatory environment. I am an environmentalist, but, you know, I also understand that you got to have workable sort of regulations, and that's often a moving target.
• 39:16
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I didn't know about Enchanted Rock, so I appreciate that reference, and that URL is just enchantedrock.com but they provide what they call resiliency as a service. So I assume that they're, they're in the business of installing micro grids and then owning the asset.
• 39:38
  Peter Asmus: Yes, they're more for commercial facilities in Texas, they serve a lot. Well, they started more like these huge gas stations in Texas, I think they're called buckies and some other customers. And now, now they're doing 100 mega megawatt Data Center in California. But how they, you know, California is not very wild about natural gas. In fact, they're trying to eliminate it even from, you know, residential homes and all that, all that stuff, but they have offset all of the natural gas emissions with renewable natural gas offsets that they then inject into the grid. So in that sense, they're using sort of offsets to to reach the California market.
• 40:22
  Peter Asmus: So that's a project that is under development right now.
• 40:28
  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. 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.
• 41:22
  Tim Montague: Cool. Well, what else should our listeners know when it comes to micro grids? It's, it's a big topic. There are many flavors of micro grids, from the scale to the combination of resources involved. But I'm, I'm fascinated by this. Concept, honestly, of resiliency as a service it is. It doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but it makes a lot of sense. And I just think that today, of a minority of communities have community scale resiliency. Certainly, wealthy individuals are installing generators, backup generators, and now backup batteries, or solar and batteries, right? And and that's great for those nano grids, but we want to provide this level of resiliency for 10s of 1000s of people or hundreds of 1000s of people, and so I'm very keen to see this community scale, micro grid grow in implementation.
• 42:26
  Tim Montague: What do you what do you think are the barriers that we need to overcome in the United States to see this happen on a wider scale?
• 42:38
  Peter Asmus: Well, first of all, I mentioned and regulations are generally at the state level and utility level, moving in a direction that will, and you know, will allow for more micro grid growth the data center.
• 42:51
  Peter Asmus: When I went to the last micro grid conference, micro grid knowledge Conference, which is the biggest one, everyone was talking about data centers. So the micro grid industry, because utilities can't provide that power quick enough, and so data centers, which historically had armies of diesel generators, just sat there, hardly ever used if they had cleaner assets on site. They could use them also when the grid wasn't down, and they could provide grid services. Data centers, historically never wanted to tinker with anything, because they're so concerned about reliability, they didn't want to do demand response. Didn't want to do that. Think that's changing. But in terms of communities, you know, you mentioned resiliency as a service, there's also energy as a service, which is a buzzword.
• 43:43
  Peter Asmus: I used energy as a service. I paid nothing for my solar and battery system up front. I'm just paying for it through like a mortgage, and I got my utility bill for the year was less than$10 because the utility costs have gone up so much in California, I saw some statistic that utility cost in the US have gone up 30% over the last three years. Now I mentioned PPA prices are also going up, and that's probably one reason. So, you know, I think one for community micro grids. You know, let's let lots of different models experiment. I don't think they'll ever be like, just one model, or like one company is the other one. You know, a lot of people think, Oh well, the GES of the world, the Siemens of the world, the Tachi nitor electrics, you know, one of them will come in and just have the best thing and sliced bread, and everyone will migrate to that. I don't see that happening, but, you know, it raises the issue that open standards and agnostic. You know, when I first started covering micro grids, most large vendors wanted to lock you in, like an Apple iPhone. You know, all you can do. And so now I think people are realizing the market is better served by you bring your own device, which is, you know, BYOD for like, demand response and the micro grid controllers.
• 45:11
  Peter Asmus: This is the other thing we haven't touched. Have improved so much that, you know, the best micro grid controllers can interact with all different kinds of manufacturers, and that's what's happened also with BPP. So the use of AI better controls is the technology that's the most important technology change. The der assets are commercial. Their costs have come down. There's a temporary little you know, sort of some opposition to that in the US, globally, though, all this stuff is taking off. So community micro grids, I think you have to, you know, for now, keep the utility involved, maybe always have the utility involved. Like in Alaska, they are utility cooperatives, and we just need to keep experimenting.
• 45:58
  Peter Asmus: But the good news is, technology keeps getting better, and, you know, there won't be a vendor lock in issue. I think with micro grids, you won't have, like, Apple versus whatever, you know, you're just going to have more diversity. And that can work if you have controls that are more open standards, open source, etc.
• 46:23
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I totally agree that the technology landscape is going to continue to evolve, but we've arrived at a moment when we have very good technology, both on the software and hardware side of things, and there's just no reason why we can't. Can't deploy micro grids at scale. Got to make a good economic case for them, obviously, and a lot of it depends on the value of resilience, honestly, because that is very amorphous. Now, clean coalition has developed a paradigm called, I think it's called War 123, or something like that, which I'll be talking about at at the Tennessee conference. But anyway, all right, well, Peter, I don't have any other questions, unless there's something else you want our listeners to know. I'm happy to wrap this up.
• 47:25
  Peter Asmus: Yeah, I would just say, you know, I think micro grids. I mean, my vision of the future is that the grid would be comprised of micro grids and VPPs tying them together. So if we have to start the grid all over, like people said, we start all over, they would be DC, like Thomas Edison started with these micro grids. I don't see us going DC Direct current, but I see more DC. I see more diversity. So I think, you know, we're gonna we have a little bit of a rough stretch. But I've also heard people say the lack of subsidies, or some of the grant funds that have been taken away, could be good for the industry just to not be so focused on chasing subsidies, but more just making those economic arguments you mentioned, and they can be made.
• 48:09
  Peter Asmus: And you know, this is a global market, so if the US has a few issues in the next coming years, you know the rest of the world will be moving forward. And climate change is a global problem, so micro grids are definitely a key part of the solution.
• 48:28
  Tim Montague: All right, well, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please tell a friend about the show. Give us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Follow us on YouTube and reach out to me on LinkedIn.
• 48:40
  Tim Montague: I love hearing from my listeners. Peter, how can our listeners find you?
• 48:49
  Peter Asmus: Well, I have my own website. It's just my name, Peterasmus.com you can find all kinds of blogs, articles, white papers, podcast, podcast. I'll probably put this one on my if I can put this one on my website as well. So just Google. Peter Asmus, A, S, M, U, s.com,
• 49:09
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague.
• 49:09
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage.
• 49:11
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you.