April 2, 2026

Community Microgrids Are Proven. So Why Aren’t They Everywhere?

Show Notes
Transcript

Billion-dollar weather emergencies hit the United States every 19 days. In the 1980s, they came every 90 days. The grid is still running, but communities are paying the price when it fails. Elisa Wood, founder of Energy Changemakers and host of the Energy Changemakers podcast, joins Tim Montague on The Clean Power Hour to explain why community microgrids are the missing layer in grid resilience, where they are actually working, and what is stopping most communities from building them.

In this Episode:

You will learn exactly how a community microgrid differs from standard solar and storage, specifically the islanding capability that keeps critical services running when the main grid fails.
You will understand why the "over the fence" rule blocks most community microgrid projects and how California is beginning to create exceptions that other states could follow.
You will learn why resilience has no assigned dollar value in today's grid market, and why that missing valuation is the root cause of the community microgrid funding problem.
You will hear which states are leading on community microgrid development right now and why federal funding cuts have made state and local action the only real path forward.
You will learn why utilities have a structural reason to resist community microgrids and what financial incentive changes could shift that dynamic.
You will take away a community engagement lesson from Cascadia Renewables in Washington State, showing that talking to residents before doing engineering studies is what determines whether a project wins local support or stalls.

With federal support retreating and extreme weather intensifying, the window for state-level action on community microgrids is narrow. The case studies in this episode show that community microgrids save lives, reduce economic losses from outages, and create local energy wealth. Clean energy professionals who want to move these projects forward need to understand the regulatory barriers, the funding gaps, and the community engagement strategies that separate successful projects from stalled ones.

Connect with Elisa Wood

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisawood/

Website: https://energychangemakers.com/

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00:00:50.780 --> 00:01:16.960
One thing I think we've neglected as an industry is to talk more to the planners and spend more time with them so they can understand what's going on. They often just have a very vague idea about what a micro grid is, if they have any idea at all, you know. So I think a lot of education on that side of things would really help tremendously. I recently did a podcast about Washington state.

00:01:11.980 --> 00:01:34.020
There's a company, Cascadia renewables. You're probably familiar with them. They've done a lot of community micro grid Building in Washington State, and what they say is that what's really needed is to go in and talk to a community and understand what it needs to win community support, because it really starts there, right?

00:01:34.980 --> 00:01:54.379
The clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger, the technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar storage and micro grid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all.

00:01:50.400 --> 00:02:07.579
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,

00:02:09.079 --> 00:02:53.360
today on the Clean Power Hour, my guest is Elisa wood. She is an award winning writer, editor and podcast host with more than 30 years covering power markets, grid innovation and the energy transition. She is the founder of energychangemakers.com Previously, she co founded micro grid knowledge and realenergywriters.com establishing herself as a leading voice in micro grids, distributed energy resources and grid modernization. She hosts the energy change makers podcast, a semi weekly show featuring in depth conversations with industry leaders on ders virtual power plants and micro grids and the path to a decentralized grid. Welcome to the show.

00:02:53.360 --> 00:02:55.819
Elisa, thank you so much. Tim, it's great

00:02:55.819 --> 00:03:37.500
to be here. I really am honored to have you on the show, and I'm so excited to geek out on what I think is the most important aspect of the energy transition, to be quite frank, and that is community energy, or community micro grids. So it's really great to have you. You are the closest to this kind of an expert, I think, as I've come so far on this journey. So before we get into the topic du jour, give our listeners a little taste though, of what was it? What was the spark for you that got you so interested in renewable energy and micro grids back in the day?

00:03:38.280 --> 00:05:19.539
Yeah, so I've been writing about energy for over 30 years. You know, I kind of covered all the early wars between utilities and independent power plants and in the road towards competition and early on, when the states were beginning to restructure and allow a certain amount of competition to utilities, I noticed that there was a green energy advocate very involved in some of the proceedings before the state, for the state of Massachusetts in particular. And I said, you know, why are you here? The others are like these, you know, these companies that are building gas fired power plants and stuff. And you're, you're an environmentalist. Why are you here? And he said, because when we start to open these markets, we're going to start to open the way to innovation, and then, and then we're going to start to see an explosion of solar and other renewables and other other innovations. So, you know this, this was quite a while ago, you know, probably around early, 2000s and I think what he said has come to bear. I think, I think at least in part, we're seeing so much innovation. Have seen so much innovation in the last, you know, 1015, years, because of those early moves to open up some competition to the utilities. What happened next for me. One of my big changes was Superstorm Sandy. I was covering that. I was, you know, I was working at that time for a couple of different publications, s, p, global and renewable energy world. I was in Washington, DC, and a lot of those writers were in New England and New York. So the publications were desperate for copy. And I was like, getting up at 6am and working until midnight, writing stories for them at that time, because the other, other, you know, writers couldn't, couldn't get online.

00:05:17.139 --> 00:05:25.480
Everybody was knocked off power from superstorm Sandy, and that's when I first started hearing about micro grids.

00:05:22.659 --> 00:05:33.179
Because, you know, I remember being in on these press conferences with officials from from New York City, and some people were getting on and saying, hey, you know what?

00:05:30.580 --> 00:05:44.340
There's some buildings that have power. What's going on? How come that building has power? You know? How come that hospital, that school, has power and we don't, and they were the early micro grids, and that's kind of where the conversation started.

00:05:40.860 --> 00:05:44.340
Is where my interest began.

00:05:46.559 --> 00:06:09.019
Well, that's, that is a great story. You know, the statistic that. I love to bring to my listeners is that billion dollar emergencies, mostly weather related in the United States, used to be once every 90 days back in the 1980s and today they're happening every 19 days.

00:06:05.179 --> 00:06:27.940
So the weather is definitely changing. And even here in the spring, where I live in Illinois, we see warmer weather earlier, and we see warmer weather later. And in general, the winters are milder, and we still have this seesaw yesterday, the day before yesterday, it was 80 degrees, and then today it's 40 degrees.

00:06:28.240 --> 00:06:48.960
It was 30 degrees when I was playing pickleball this morning, crazy swings, but generally it's getting warmer. Armadillos are migrating into southern Illinois. They used to only exist in the far south, and now we have armadillos in Southern Illinois, literally. And nature doesn't lie like there's a reason they like warm weather.

00:06:49.139 --> 00:07:01.460
So anyway, I was at my Farmers Market a couple of weeks ago, and it was like 80 degrees. People were in shorts, but there was still piles of snow on the ground, because we had a snowstorm, and then it turned 80 it was like, bizarre, you know,

00:07:01.759 --> 00:07:09.379
yeah, weather is weird. All right, so we have this thing called the grid, which is an amazing machine.

00:07:09.379 --> 00:10:26.730
Some people say it's the most complicated machine that humanity has ever built. I'm not sure if that's exactly true, but it's an amazing machine, and I'm super grateful for the grid that we have in the US. It's very reliable. It is still relatively dirty, run on a lot of fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, now not so much coal, but, but we're, you know, we're in the transition from coal and gas and nuclear to solar, wind and batteries. We've achieved in solar, wind and batteries. What around 10% of our grid is is clean power, and we're going to go to an 80% or a 90% solar and wind powered grid sometime around 2050, give or take, a decade. And you know, that's just because of the economics, right? If you're a grid operator, you want to make investments in infrastructure that makes good financial sense to your investors. And wind, solar and batteries are that technology today, but there is a problem. When the grid goes down, we don't generally have a system of self repair or micro griding at scale. Sure, some campuses, hospitals, community centers, do have micro grid infrastructure to isolate from the grid when the greater grid goes down. And you were referring to some of those organizations in the in your introduction. But what's possible is for communities, 10s of 1000s of people, to be on a micro grid that can micro grid from the greater grid. When the greater grid grows, goes down, and Craig Lewis is the person who really planted this seed for me at the clean coalition. I know you know Craig, but I find that when I talk with my energy colleagues about community scale micro grids, I often get a bit of a blank stare. It's as if they really just haven't thought too much about it. We're used to thinking really about nano grids, building scale micro grids, or campus scale micro grids, but not community scale, where I could have the whole city of Champaign, for example, on a micro grid. If there was a regional outage, which there was about 20 years ago, we had a five, five day outage. It predates my residency here in the community I moved here 18 years ago. Tell us big picture.

00:10:26.730 --> 00:10:51.049
And then let's get into some examples of where this is working, because this is vital for energy professionals to understand is that there are some great case studies now across the United States, both West Coast and East Coast and Midwest. What are you What is your big picture? Take on this phenomenon. I'm going to continue to call it community scale micro grids. You call it community power, I think set the table for us, if you would.

00:10:51.049 --> 00:11:43.970
Yeah, so, um, I sometimes use the word community energy, and that encompasses more than micro grids. You know, that would include, for instance, community solar, or other kinds of community energy that are that are used. But a micro grid is something very specific, a community micro grid, because what's different, and you alluded to this, is that it can island from the main grid during a power outage, so it senses the grid's about to go down. It islands, it kicks on its on site generators and your fire station, your grocery store, your whatever is hooked up to the micro grid keeps running while the rest of the grid is down, and then when the grid comes back, you can reattach again. So that's that's a true micro grid. And the toughest ones to build have been the community micro grids. We saw a lot of commercial and industrial micro grids built.

00:11:40.950 --> 00:12:18.490
Built because, you know, a manufacturer has a very clear sense of, if I lose power, I lose this much money because I can't put out this many widgets or whatever. But it's more it's more fuzzy, right with the community micro grid, because when you're trying to make an economic case, there's not commerce, there's not there's not a production line that you can point to. But of course, there's a whole lot of disruption and a whole lot of economic hardship when you have a power outage. But again, it's just it's more murky, harder to make the case. That's one of the reasons you don't see as many community micro grids as you see other kinds of micro grids.

00:12:15.849 --> 00:12:21.069
Again, commercial industrial facilities have put a lot in.

00:12:18.490 --> 00:12:46.789
Data centers are putting them in like crazy now, hospitals, universities, any kind of critical facility. You know, they look seriously at microgrids. So communities, it's a whole kind of different story, right? One problem is that, like I said, the economic trying to make the economic argument, not that it's not there. It's just difficult to make. The other thing is, communities don't really know how to do this. I've heard from so many communities over the years saying this is a great idea. How do I do it?

00:12:46.789 --> 00:12:53.329
Well, honestly, it's really hard to do. If you're a community on your own, you really got to go find somebody in the business.

00:12:53.329 --> 00:14:07.629
You've got to find someone who builds micro grids, you know, and work with them, because it's a whole different kind of energy that you're not used to. So that's kind of gotten in the way. But I've seen some really interesting trends recently that have increased the push towards community, micro grids. And one is always resilience, like you talked about, the weather's bad, wildfires, all these things make people look at micro grids. But another reason there's a push, and a lot of people on my media platform tend to talk about this, a push towards more energy democracy, meaning that more of the energy wealth stays with the community. So as opposed to, you know, buying your power from a big utility, or, you know, something along those lines, you are, you are keeping the generation local. You're keeping the jobs local. You've got control over it. So that's kind of a another impetus, I think, that that kind of desire to carve out and keep the energy local. Yeah, it's not, it's not been, there haven't been a massive, massive amounts of them, but there have been attempts by state governments to get them moving, which has been encouraging. Some have been successful to some degree, and some of the early ones weren't.

00:14:08.170 --> 00:14:14.529
We're seeing micro grids being being built in California as a result of California's program.

00:14:11.589 --> 00:14:34.049
There was an early attempt by New York called the New York prize to get micro grids going that wasn't very successful in and of itself, in terms of getting a lot of micro grids built, but it was kind of a sandbox for the rest of the community, rest of the micro grid industry throughout the United States, to learn more about this technology. It was one of the very early programs.

00:14:34.109 --> 00:14:53.089
And then the state of Massachusetts is a third one I point to, that has a very traditional kind of will give you a grant. You know, this will help this community build a micro grid. Will give you a grant to do it. And they've had, they've had some success with that as well, but it's been, it's honestly been slow moving, which is a shame, because you know, you know what it's like when you have a power outage.

00:14:53.089 --> 00:15:26.549
Most of these micro grids tend to start someplace, some sort of critical facility, like, you don't want to lose your water, right? You don't want to lose your fire department, you don't want to lose your police station. So that's where they tend to go. And there's a really interesting group of community micro grids in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the, I mean, they have really done some very interesting micro grid development there. I would say they're probably ahead of almost everybody else in the country right now, but I'll get into that a little later on, when we're talking about my favorite micro grids.

00:15:26.910 --> 00:16:19.869
So I need to reference Craig's work again, because he's done a couple of things that I think are very important. One, he created a framework called V, O, R, value of resiliency, which which just helps you prioritize and value resiliency, right? And and it breaks down kind of okay. Is this mission critical? Is this life saving technology or facilities like first responders? You want them to be valued at x, the standard everyday facility, and then there's 2x which is important, but less than life saving, say, a community center or something like that. And then there's everyone else. But he also makes the point that utilities actually can like this kind of infrastructure. They traditionally want to build transmission and distribution.

00:16:20.289 --> 00:16:26.910
They have a cost plus business model, so building infrastructure is in their DNA.

00:16:22.950 --> 00:17:57.710
They want to build stuff because that's what generates profit. So Craig flips it on the head and says that model on the on the head, and says, Look, we want you to build infrastructure. We want you to build solar batteries, or solar wind and batteries. And the switch gear to Mike. Grid, and thereby give the community resiliency and reduce the need for additional transmission and distribution, and they still get to build infrastructure. And then you get infrastructure, plus in what that's what I call it, infrastructure that has a level of resiliency which is above and beyond the ordinary grid, and this just makes a lot of sense to me. The other, I guess, the other backdrop for me is that we invented the grid and we empowered the utilities right to bring electricity to everybody in America, virtually right? We got rural electrification back in the 20s, and it was an amazing initiative, and it totally radically changed the quality of life for rural Americans. Imagine not having electricity and living in a rural place, right? And then having electricity. I mean, it's a total game changer. We're now beholden to the utilities in ways that are very uncomfortable. They have a model that is very stodgy. It does not change easily. And the world has changed. The technology has changed, and our expectations for the utilities has changed.

00:17:58.310 --> 00:18:36.390
And so somehow we need to reinvent that system that is there for us, but seemingly Americans are servants to the grid operators in so many places, and you see this butting of heads between energy transition professionals and grid operators in many, many markets, to the point where there is quite a bit of animosity, sometimes in markets like California, the person who is very vociferous about This is Barry cinnamon, for example, of cinnamon energy. And I love Barry. And check out the energy show. It's a fantastic podcast.

00:18:36.390 --> 00:19:13.630
And he's a great solar, you know, residential and commercial solar and battery installer, and an OG in the industry. And we stand on his shoulders. But So I'm curious in this conversation, Elisa, if we can kind of dig into some nooks and crannies that give us points of light to a better way of, you know, rebuilding this machine we have, we have the machine, and now we need to build a better version, 2.0 of the machine that embodies resilience at all scales, from the micro to the macro.

00:19:14.769 --> 00:20:27.089
Well, that's a you're getting to the heart of the problem here, right? It's that there's this push and pull between utilities and the new technologies, including micro grids, the utilities see them as competition. They have definitely, at times, tried to block their progress. It's been a funny relationship between the micro grid community and utilities. It's hard to define, you know, of course, there's what, 3000 utilities. So it's always hard to say the utilities are doing this, the utilities are doing that, because you have different utilities doing different utilities doing different things. But we've seen utilities that wanted to build micro grids, and regulators wouldn't let them in a restructured state. For example, they wouldn't let them. They said, No, no, this is this is something to keep with the competitive market. And then we see utilities that don't want anybody building micro grids, try to block them and various things in between. No easy answer here about how to solve this. I think that the competitive states, you know, the northeast California, have done a better job at being able to get micro grids built than the states where the utilities are vertically integrated. But yeah, how do you, how do you, how do you do that? I mean, do you give this? Is this, is this?

00:20:27.089 --> 00:21:09.430
Is the debate that goes on all the time, right? How do you give the utility an incentive to build the micro grids? Is that really a good idea? There's people who say it's a terrible idea. Because although, although they have built micro grids, we've noticed that they tend to be built very slowly. As you said earlier, they're not utilities. Aren't really it's not in their DNA to take on innovative projects. Things happen very, very slowly. While the private sector has been out there building micro grids like crazy. You know, you'll get one pilot project out of a utility, and you'll get dozens of, you know, independent projects going. So there's no easy answer to how to resolve this block. I wish I

00:21:09.430 --> 00:21:13.187
had it for sure.

00:21:09.430 --> 00:21:23.284
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00:21:59.210 --> 00:22:26.605
Well, let's talk about some examples, some case studies where communities have created breakthroughs. It takes a combination of stakeholders. The little that I know of this catalysts, you know, like micro grid developers or micro grid consulting firms, like clean coalition, and of course, there's community stakeholders.

00:22:21.909 --> 00:22:26.605
These are elected officials.

00:22:26.683 --> 00:22:45.860
There's the grid operators themselves, some of them more innovative than others, and then others in the industry, like you and I. There's all kinds of stakeholders. But what is the what is, what are some stories?

00:22:40.851 --> 00:22:50.870
And I guess if there's a pattern that you see a recipe, I would love to know what the recipe is.

00:22:51.710 --> 00:22:58.069
Let's say, if there, if there could be a recipe, it would be give the utilities some kind of financial stake in this.

00:22:58.250 --> 00:23:10.690
The problem. You know, we rail against the utilities a lot, but the truth be told, their business model prohibits them from liking something like a micro grid, right? Because they do not like you said before.

00:23:08.350 --> 00:23:10.690
They don't make profit on that.

00:23:10.690 --> 00:23:59.569
They make profit on building transmission and distribution and power generation. So we've set up this weird system where we're saying to the utilities, you know, you should like this, but we're not going to give you any reason to like it. It's not going to it's not going to help your business model. So, short of doing away with the whole utility monopoly, you know, business structure, I think that's where we have to look at it. We have to look at, you know, what kind of incentive can we give them to to like this, to want this, so that they're not getting in the way? But yeah, there have been a lot of also states that have tried to boost the industry in various ways, through grants and whatnot. You mentioned value of resilience, New York spent a lot of time working on valuing resilience as part of its reforming the energy vision program a few years back.

00:24:00.170 --> 00:24:13.690
And you know, that was meant to try to, you know, help boost these industries, which, which, here's the irony about a micro grid, right? It does this thing.

00:24:09.970 --> 00:24:22.269
It creates resilience. It's a true thing. It keeps the power on for a community, a hospital, a business, whatever. But it's not paid for that in any way.

00:24:22.990 --> 00:24:27.210
There's no value to that.

00:24:22.990 --> 00:25:01.190
There's no monetary value given to that service. It just does it, right? So that's one of the big kind of issues that the industry grapples with, that they've got this service, but nothing in the system values that that. So the states have tried to get around that by offering these different kinds of incentives. Started, like I said, with New York. They had a program called New York prize. I can't remember it was like, I want to say it was 90. I don't remember the exact figure or how much they gave out initially, but they gave out quite a bit of money for people to look at how to develop micro grids. A lot of them were community micro grids.

00:25:02.029 --> 00:25:12.970
It was very early, nobody had done it before. They ended up producing a lot of valuable work, but no micro grids. Their work is being used by the industry now, but nothing actually came out of it.

00:25:13.329 --> 00:25:18.430
I mean, has somebody made a good definition of what a community micro grid is?

00:25:19.450 --> 00:25:51.710
No, that's not really a good definition. It's typically a micro grid that in some way serves a community service. Like I said, it might be a fire station, it might be a hospital, it might be some houses that are around there. We haven't seen a lot of residential community micro grids. We've seen like some houses being included in these traditional community micro grids, but not a lot of some exceptions are, like neighborhoods in Florida and whatnot that have created micro grid, like systems to protect against hurricanes down there.

00:25:47.809 --> 00:26:37.410
But yeah, coming up with a true definition is a tough one. I mean, typically, it's like, looked upon as a micro grid that that serves a couple of different buildings or services within a community. So it's got a greater good, right? It's got a greater good than than the micro grid that is keeping the factory down the street going during a power outage. And the interesting thing too, is that we try, they try to cite these micro grids, these community micro grids, in places where they will help more than just the fire station, right? They'll try to find, like a community center where people can gather to charge their phones, or, you know, maybe there's a food distribution site there, that kind of thing. So that's kind of a traditional community micro grid, right? You've got some way of helping the community, and you're also, you're at some facility that's critical.

00:26:38.069 --> 00:26:45.170
There's also kind of variations on the theme. There's a really, you. Interesting organization called the footprint project.

00:26:45.170 --> 00:27:22.769
And if you've heard of them or not, Oh sure, yeah, yeah. So, so they, they do a kind of community micro grid, in the sense that they, they they drive during a disaster, right? They drive their, their micro grids into a community, and they hook up to, they might go to a church, they might go to a fire station, something where they can provide power so the so community members can come and get warm food or whatever they need, you know, during that time. So that's kind of a that's that's another variation on the theme of what a community micro grid might be. And then, like I said, you've got these neighborhoods in Florida where it's actually a residential neighborhood. It's a quasi micro grid, really. It's kind of solar storage. Sometimes it's solar storage just on the houses.

00:27:22.769 --> 00:28:45.829
Sometimes as a centralized battery that can, that can, you know, island from the grid, and so they keep the lights on when there's a storm. So that's another variation, variation on the theme of a community micro grid. And it's really fascinating. Things are going on that kind of take this concept out further. Ithaca, New York, just proposed a really fascinating. It's kind of like a community micro grid of micro grids. It's they basically want to take the whole city of Ithaca and island it from the main grid by building a series of micro grids within in the city. So, you know, there might be a micro grid at a university initially, and you know that will serve part of a community. And basically they're looking at different ways to hook these micro grids together. It's a very sort of complicated system, and I'm really, I'm really simplifying it. Here we have an article about it over an energy change makers. Just search on Ithaca. It recently won approval from the city council to go forward. So definitely one of the most innovative community microgrids I've ever seen. And then you have another variation on the theme. Is something like what Ann Arbor, Michigan is doing, where they've created the sustainable utility, and they are, you know, providing solar and storage for for homeowners through this utility, as opposed to a traditional utility, would provide electricity via centralized power plants.

00:28:42.569 --> 00:30:19.630
They're just they're providing solar and storage for households instead. So, so there's all these variations on what a community micro grid is, and it's evolving and changing as all these different models come up. But going back to you, asked me about what was happening in various states. So I started with New York. That was the big one. California, of course, is really interesting. And I'm sure Craig has talked to you a bit about what's happening there, but they give the utilities funding for community micro grids. It was like $200 million and there was mixed feelings about this, because, again, because utilities are slow to develop them, a lot of the private sector, private developers did not want utilities to be doing these projects. They wanted the money to be distributed more broadly, but the state kept him with the state, and they're using a community micro grid tariff approach. So one of the key things, and one of the key problems, which we haven't got into yet about about community micro grids, or any micro grids, is what's known as the over the fence rule, which is, you cannot. I'm sure a lot of your listeners know about this, but you can't. You can't send power over a right of way. So one building is on one side of the road and another building's on another side of the road. You cannot connect those two buildings into a micro grid. It has to be property. Has to be owned by one entity. So the California Community micro grid project is allowing a certain amount of that ability to go over the fence. And that was kind of a that was good. We'll see how much it actually happens.

00:30:19.629 --> 00:30:25.229
But it seems fundamental. If you're going to do community scale, you've got to get over the fence,

00:30:25.529 --> 00:30:29.730
yeah, and it's what stops a lot of community micro grids, is you cannot get over the fence.

00:30:29.730 --> 00:30:36.750
Yeah, yeah. But you mentioned some other states, Florida, Maryland. What is happening in Florida and Maryland?

00:30:37.289 --> 00:30:39.750
So Florida, it's not so much a government program.

00:30:39.750 --> 00:32:03.490
It's simply that these private real estate developers have figured out that it's to their advantage to build neighborhoods that can keep the power on during power outages. So there's some really interesting projects that have been built interesting neighborhoods. One of them we had on one of our video live streams, and it was, it's called Hunter's Point, and it's in Tampa. Some of these are more like virtual power plants than micro grids. I mean, again, everybody uses the term loosely, where they're they've got batteries. This has got 86 Net Zero homes. Every home has solar and storage. They're single family, and the houses were built to survive hurricane force winds, and they they have, they generate 35% more energy than they consume, and they're virtually tied together with software, so it's kind of a virtual power plant approach, sure, and then there's another one that's a bit more sophisticated in Lakeland, Florida that this one's under construction, and in this case, the homes have solar and storage, but there's also a centralized battery, and. And so it's kind of almost like an energy Park, and they can use that battery for load balancing and grid services. And then the third one, which I'm sure you've heard a lot about, because it was in the news a lot, was Babcock Ranch, which isn't really a micro grid, but a large solar field, but again, you know, they were able to provide a degree of resilience during during storms, is there? Is there a

00:32:03.490 --> 00:32:05.350
battery in Babcock? That's a

00:32:05.350 --> 00:32:09.610
good question, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I imagine there

00:32:09.610 --> 00:32:15.490
must be. I mean, solar is only so good, right, right in a grid outage event.

00:32:11.890 --> 00:32:15.490
So, yeah, it

00:32:15.490 --> 00:32:18.970
seems like they must be a battery. I don't know how else they achieve resilience.

00:32:18.970 --> 00:32:38.730
So in the Tampa case, though, you mentioned that the homes were designed to consume less energy than the solar and battery array for each home in the case of a grid outage. Do, Does, does that cluster of homes also then provide some electricity for a wider geography?

00:32:39.269 --> 00:32:49.069
No, they're just working within their own own neighborhood. Okay, yeah, and that's pretty common with most community micro grids at this point in time. There's not a lot going on with a wider geography.

00:32:49.549 --> 00:35:49.190
Yeah, I would refer our listeners to AJ Perkins work. He's doing something similar in Hawaii, you know, with residential solar and batteries and VPP, and in this, in his case, I think the majority of his work is around third party ownership of the of those assets, which I think makes a lot of sense when you're when you're trying to democratize access. Right? Low income people are not going to be able to afford solar and batteries on their homes. You need a leg up in the form of third party ownership. So in our last few minutes together, though, I guess I'd love to kind of paint a picture for an ideal world. And if there are some elements, you know, we've touched on a few projects, Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is a municipal utility, right, that has integrated resiliency into its model, with solar and batteries. I don't know what percentage of the community is truly resilient, and if you know that, I'd love to hear that. But so having municipal utilities is one certainly signal that I see, and it does make it relatively concrete, and then you have a major stakeholder, the city or the town, right, that can make a lot of decisions and muster resources and say, Okay, we are going to do this. We're on this journey that aside, though, if you're just, you know, say, a city in an investor owned utility in the Midwest, and you want to do this, you you have to bring some additional resources to bear to incentivize the scenario. And I guess that's one of my questions is, well, who is going to inject those resources, because money talks. What ends up getting built in the built environment has to pencil in some way shape or form, either for the government. In the case of things like the grid, when we, you know, we electrified rural America, there was an economic incentive for the government to do this and to jazz the economy. And that really worked, right? You're providing education and economic benefits, and it feeds back positively with resiliency. It's it's more you're preventing the fall of productivity. In the case of of a wide outage in a big storm, say, a big hurricane, right? Like Sandy, that that was a huge economic loss. You have to rebuild your offline. You don't have business continuity, you don't have services for the public, and it's a black eye, right? And it takes a while to come back from that, several years in the case of a storm like Sandy, right? That was a big, big storm, yeah, and I don't know, has New York gotten more resilient in a post Sandy world, in your opinion?

00:35:50.030 --> 00:36:17.890
Oh, yeah, there have been quite a few micro grids built in New York post Sandy. I mean, there are a lot of, like, I said, there are a lot of micro grids being built. It's just the community micro grids that are the tough ones to come by, because the it's not always clear. Sometimes it is clear, like sometimes you have, you've seen this happen, where you have a water facilities, but in particular, it's real clear that what's going to happen if you lose that water facility in the community. And so, you know, there is funding that comes forward for something like that.

00:36:15.310 --> 00:36:44.870
But, yeah, everything, everything has been hit very hard, you know, by the loss of federal funding. You know, there were quite a few community micro grid grants that got put on hold or are out searching for other funding now, because they thought they were going to get federal money. So that's put them on hold. California, again, has been, you know, a place where we've seen more micro grids built, because there is state money that comes through Maryland. Again, you know, you've got, you've got a. County there that's very supportive.

00:36:42.770 --> 00:36:58.250
You get a state that's very supportive. So there are states where you're seeing the support, and that's really all there is right now. There's not a whole lot of federal support for community micro grids. So it's a tough time. It's not impossible.

00:36:55.790 --> 00:37:01.070
It's happening. We've got some great, like I said this, great micro grid projects out there.

00:37:01.070 --> 00:37:47.870
One of them I didn't mention, just would love to give a shout out to is in California, which is the redwood Coast Airport micro grid of two of them actually in California, red coat Redwood Coast Airport micro grid in Humboldt County, and then the blue lake Rancheria, also in Humboldt County. I wrote an article once. What is it about Humboldt County? They seem to have a lot of micro grids in Humboldt County, California, but blue lake in particular, it is a casino, actually, and but they made it into a true community micro grid. And when they have had power outages, they just invite the community in. I mean, they have done medical care there. They published the newspaper there so people would still get, still get news during, during a power outage, they've actually saved lives. I mean, they were inviting people in who had medical equipment that they needed to survive, and they had no power to power it, and they brought them in there.

00:37:45.590 --> 00:37:50.090
So I don't mean to, I don't want to end on, oh my god. It's terrible. It's really hard.

00:37:50.090 --> 00:37:55.250
There have been quite a few built. They're good. They've gotten some kind of government support for the most part.

00:37:55.610 --> 00:38:28.050
Rarely do they happen if they don't. At this point in time, there's a weird contradiction we have, you know, in our kind of thinking about electricity, where we, the government, helped build the grid. It's a really a socialized system that supports our electricity. You know, production and distribution costs are socialized, but when we look at things like micro grids or even solar and storage, we have this attitude that no government shouldn't, shouldn't spend anything on that as though it's somehow a separate thing.

00:38:24.930 --> 00:38:35.430
It's still power. It's still something that's a vital service, and it's really a vital service when there's a big storm or a wildfire and you don't have it.

00:38:35.430 --> 00:38:46.310
Yeah, it seems like one of the things happening in the US is the growing importance of batteries. We have about five to eight states that have good battery incentives.

00:38:46.310 --> 00:39:38.190
Illinois is now one of them with surge, and they're they're not so focused on community micro grids. They're more focused on things like VPPs, and it's a step in the right direction. It is incentivizing front of the meter storage behind the meter storage, and those batteries are going to be super useful in a variety of ways, and some of them will end up being part of micro grids, just not necessarily at the scale that I'm thinking. I guess it's it's baby steps, right? First Solar, now batteries, and then maybe the next step, so maybe the next evolution of, you know, where the puck is going. And you've mentioned California repeatedly, it seems like California, of all the states, is is most on the bleeding edge of these things.

00:39:38.430 --> 00:40:28.830
And then quickly thereafter, New York is a, you know, a second runner, I would say it's and then markets where there are a lot of natural disasters, like the Gulf Coast, are stepping up their game, just out of sheer need, right? They're just getting black eye after black eye. And so they they see the writing that they can avoid that with micro grids, and that's a big motivator in our last few minutes. Elisa, do you want to make any other comments about, you know, state levers, I guess is a theme that I hear, and that's true for, you know, the energy transition writ large, right now, right the federal government is backing away. So lean into the states where there's state action, be active in your state organization, and you can get a lot done at the state level,

00:40:29.610 --> 00:41:01.310
yeah, and I think it's also treat me a lot done at the city level or the town level or the county level. I think that one thing I think we've neglected as an industry is to talk more to the planners and spend more time with them so they can understand what's going on. They often just have a very vague idea about what a micro grid is, if they have any idea at all, you know. So I think a lot of education on that side of things would really help tremendously. I recently did a podcast about Washington state.

00:40:56.390 --> 00:41:35.790
There's a company, Cascadia renewables. You're probably familiar with them. They've done a lot of community micro grid Building in Washington State, and what they say is that what's really needed is to go in and talk to a community and understand what it needs to win community support, because it really starts there. Right? If you have communities that are advocating for micro grids to their state officials or their federal officials, or their federal officials, you got a better chance of having this thing all happen and so. But what they found was that so often a developer will come in and say, oh, you know what, I've done, the engineering studies and a micro grid would work right over here, perfect, right?

00:41:32.730 --> 00:41:41.730
But they hadn't talked to the community and like, as he put it, they don't realize that it's not the, you know, I don't know, fire station that's important.

00:41:41.730 --> 00:42:20.650
It's the climate. Lamb shack, because that's where they get their food when there's powers out. So he goes in, they go in Cascadia renewals, and they actually talk to the community first and find out what their needs are. They talk to the the disaster relief folks in the community and find out exactly what goes on when there's a disaster here, and then they cite based on that, and they're just finding that that wins a lot of support from the bottom up. And I think that's what we need. Yes, we need federal funding. Yes, we need state funding. But I think we also have to need about, need to think about the bottom up, about talking to these communities, about talking to, you know, people who are influential in the community and educating them as well.

00:42:21.850 --> 00:42:45.465
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.

00:42:45.532 --> 00:42:53.046
I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you.

00:42:49.155 --> 00:43:13.374
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.

00:43:09.147 --> 00:43:29.476
I think we'll leave it there. I want to thank Elisa wood of energy change makers for coming on the show today. More to come on solar batteries and micro grids here on the Clean Power Hour. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com.

00:43:25.383 --> 00:43:36.990
Please tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. Elisa, how can our listeners find you?

00:43:37.710 --> 00:43:40.110
You can find me at energychangemakers.com.

00:43:42.510 --> 00:43:45.050
I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage.

00:43:45.050 --> 00:43:45.890
Thank you so much.

Community Microgrids Are Proven. So Why Aren’t They Everywhere?

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