Oct. 16, 2025
How 41 US States Are Deploying Energy Storage and Smart Grids?
#Ep313 Grid modernization is accelerating across America. In Q2 2025 alone, 48 states plus DC and Puerto Rico took 468 actions to modernize their grids through energy storage, microgrids, and virtual power plants. This shift is reshaping how utilities deliver reliable, resilient power. Today on the Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague speaks with Vincent Potter, Policy Project Manager at NC State Clean Energy Technology Center, about the latest 50 States of Grid Modernization report. Potter tracks...
#Ep313
Grid modernization is accelerating across America. In Q2 2025 alone, 48 states plus DC and Puerto Rico took 468 actions to modernize their grids through energy storage, microgrids, and virtual power plants. This shift is reshaping how utilities deliver reliable, resilient power.
Today on the Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague speaks with Vincent Potter, Policy Project Manager at NC State Clean Energy Technology Center, about the latest 50 States of Grid Modernization report. Potter tracks policy developments across all 50 states every quarter, providing unmatched insight into how states are transforming their grids from centralized, one-way systems into decentralized, interactive networks that integrate distributed energy resources.
Key Highlights:
- 41 states took action on energy storage in Q2 2025, making battery deployment a nationwide priority
- Self-healing grid technology is now deployed in major population centers, allowing utilities to reroute power around failed transformers
- Virtual power plants are emerging as non-wires alternatives that reduce utility capital investments
- Performance-based regulation is shifting utilities from guaranteed returns to outcome-driven compensation
- Microgrids are moving from niche pilots to mainstream resilience tools in Hawaii, Oregon, Texas, and West Virginia
- Time-of-use rates and advanced metering infrastructure are enabling smarter energy consumption patterns
- Equity and environmental justice are being incorporated into resilience planning in states like Maryland, New York and Illinois
The grid is evolving faster than most people realize. To stay informed about clean energy policy and technology, subscribe to the Clean Power Hour and visit cleanpowerhour.com for more resources.
Connect with Vincent Potter
Vincent Potter
NC State Clean Energy Technology Center
Connect with Tim
Clean Power Hour
Clean Power Hour on YouTube
Tim on Twitter
Tim on LinkedIn
Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com
Review Clean Power Hour on Apple Podcasts
The Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.com
Corporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/
The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America’s number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
The Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Please subscribe on your favorite audio platform and on Youtube: bit.ly/cph-sub | www.CleanPowerHour.com | contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.com | Speeding the energy transition!
WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:44.920
I think that looking at grid modernization and how the grid evolves, as you said, it used to be kind of one directional and it was very much generation. Station goes through transmission, goes through distribution and gets to the households. And now with increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, as well as more kind of usage intensive devices, whether they be home, located, energy storage, public EV charging, induction stoves or other kind of beneficial electrification applications, we're seeing a lot more demands on the grid, so some of it is advanced metering and two way flow of information up to two way flow of electrons themselves.
00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:59.679
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.
00:00:55.539 --> 00:01:09.780
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
00:01:11.700 --> 00:01:32.060
today on the Clean Power Hour grid modernization, meaning a smart grid, meaning micro grids, things that are good for resilience. The grid is changing. It used to be, it just kept the lights on, and now it needs to do a whole lot more. My guest today is Vincent Potter.
00:01:28.099 --> 00:02:00.420
He is a Policy Project Manager at NC State. He is part of the North Carolina clean energy technology center. They also run desire, which you solar professionals are very familiar with. They track all of the policies going on relevant to ders and clean energy. And we're going to be geeking out on their recent report, 50 states of grid modernization. Q2, 2025, welcome to the show Vincent,
00:02:00.420 --> 00:02:04.019
and thanks so much for having me looking forward to our conversation.
00:02:04.319 --> 00:02:57.280
Yeah, I'm totally pumped to have such a storied professional and organization on the show. So this is a very long report. It's like 140 pages. It is a subscription service that you guys offer so you can't access the full report without buying it, but you you can get an executive summary at their website. And so let's just set the stage a little bit Vincent your team tracks grid modernization across all 50 states, every quarter. And from your vantage point, how would you define grid modernization in 2025 and why is it such a critical lens for policy makers and practitioners today?
00:02:58.419 --> 00:03:11.520
It's a really interesting question. I think that looking at grid modernization and how the grid evolves, as you said, it used to be kind of one directional and it was very much generation.
00:03:08.400 --> 00:03:54.400
Station goes through transmission, goes through distribution, gets to the households, and now with increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, as well as more kind of usage intensive devices, whether they be home, located, energy storage, public EV charging, induction stoves or other kind of beneficial electrification applications, we're seeing a lot more demands on the grid, so some of it is advanced metering and two way flow of information up to two way flow of electrons themselves. So a lot of new things that we're figuring out how to make the grid do and trying to do it with less as well.
00:03:56.439 --> 00:03:59.740
When you say we're trying to do it with less, what are you referring to?
00:04:00.699 --> 00:05:01.319
Well, if you look at some of the technologies that we use to advance or that utilities use to advance the grid right to make it smarter, as it were, some of it is looking moment to moment at what your transmission lines are doing or your distribution lines are doing to see if you can actually put more electrons through that. So if the weather conditions or if the loads are conducive to not having to invest that the Center Research is a lot of what are called non wires, alternatives to infrastructure development. So it's ways for utilities, transmission operators, distribution operators, to reduce their capital investments by using software solutions, strategically located storage or other ders to make the power flow more seamless and do it kind of behind the scenes as a.
00:04:57.699 --> 00:05:02.100
Opposed to building more and more transmission.
00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:20.720
So we're seeing the grid evolve from being a one way centralized system to a more decentralized, interactive network. Where are we in that transition, and what are the largest drivers of urgency for that transition?
00:05:22.100 --> 00:07:07.980
So we're in the thick of it. So in the what Obama administration, with the American rescue and recovery act, I believe we started a lot of advanced meter infrastructure deployment. Now advanced metering is smart meters deployed at, you know, kind of people's homes and places of business, and that's the that's the groundwork of the smart grid, knowing what is happening at every point in your grid, as opposed to just measuring it at the substation or measuring it at your generator. So we are, we are beyond that part. In most parts of the country, most utilities are on their kind of AMI, advanced metering infrastructure, 2.0 or sometimes even 3.0 getting those meters smarter and smarter so that they can get the information necessary to make these kind of more advanced decisions. We see some advancement from the regulatory perspective coming in for distribution system planning or resource planning processes that require implementation of some of these technologies. Some of the stuff we're talking about is fault location, isolation and then service restoration. So you'll have a whole bunch of nodes that are reading so you can actually find ways to reroute power past a transformer that has failed in many parts of the country, you will see new labeling on the transformers. If you're an energy dork like me and my children, we go and we look at the labels that are on the boxes as we take our walks, and we'll see like self healing grid or self restoring grid in several like large yellow letters on these service boxes.
00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:40.100
And so this is one of those upgrades, right? So if this pole goes down, the electricity can actually be rerouted around it to maintain service. So we see some of that, and then we see the continuing application of energy storage and other hardware solutions, so advanced relays and that kind of stuff within the substations to get past congestion. So you'll have kind of ways to pool energy at a point where you know you're going to need it a lot, in the mid afternoon, late afternoon and summer times, for example.
00:07:42.079 --> 00:07:56.259
Thank you. So the q2 report catalogs 468 actions, I believe, across 48 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico, which trends stood out to you the most this
00:07:56.259 --> 00:09:12.240
quarter. So a lot of it, a lot of the regulation, is moving more towards performance based so so utilities being required to have certain performance thresholds or offer programs that compensate compensate various entities for their performance within so if we're talking about a demand response program or a load reduction program, you would find compensation for the amount of demand you deferred or the amount of load you could shed. We're seeing a lot of movements in the energy storage space. Currently, New Jersey has a new energy storage incentive program that they've put out for straw proposal through the last year and a half, and seems to it's finalized. Now they're kind of moving out the procurement window. I think they've pushed it out a month, a month and a half, to kind of feel, feel out what the federal situation is going to settle out in. And then virtual power plants have been a big thing, and then trying to figure out what to do with data centers and how to make sure that reliable power can be provided to large load customers without adversely impacting other customers.
00:09:13.379 --> 00:09:59.500
So I was able to identify three trends, two of which you mentioned explicitly, energy storage. 41 States took action in this quarter. Are you seeing states converge on common approaches like mandates, incentives, interconnection, reforms? Let me finish my thoughts. So I found three trends, energy storage, micro grids and virtual power plants, which two of the three you mentioned, but this energy storage trend, it's no longer just California and Texas and Hawaii like there's a lot of states doing a lot of different things. Are they all just dog piling on to what California has done?
00:10:01.019 --> 00:10:09.539
I'm not entirely a lot of regulators and legislators are recognizing the value of energy storage.
00:10:10.139 --> 00:10:13.559
Sometimes it's as a complement to existing renewable resources.
00:10:13.559 --> 00:11:17.519
Other times it is a non wire solution. So looking at what we would call front of meter energy storage, so stuff that's on the utility transmission or distribution grid, but still located near large loads, so substation, energy storage and that kind of thing. We're seeing some you mentioned interconnection reform, and we're seeing some modifications in proposed interconnection rules that would allow Co Location of like battery, energy storage with wind or solar in some states, as long as you without requiring a new interconnection review, as long as you don't inject to the grid more than your nameplate capacity. So that would allow some arbitrage in that so if you've got a wind power producer that's producing a lot overnight, you could then store some of that energy to discharge to help allay peak demands. Same thing with solar, you know, you could, you could location, or you could kind of temporally shift that to the morning to meet winter loads or something.
00:11:19.200 --> 00:12:02.220
You mentioned New Jersey, but you know, storage incentives are now in many places, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois. How do you perceive that states and I guess ISOs are really getting wind of these phenomena and deciding to take action at the state level. It seems somewhat random to me, but I'm just, yeah, I'm just curious, like, how do you see this percolating throughout the country, yeah.
00:12:02.279 --> 00:13:47.799
So it's, it's interesting to watch as it kind of starts to bubble up. So it seems like it will almost proliferate through a through an ISO, right? So you've got something that's happening in New Jersey, and it will go through the PJM interconnection, or something in Maryland. So Maryland, studying energy storage as well. Pennsylvania is looking at energy storage. And then you'll, you'll see various bills introduced. So we, a large part of the addendum to our report is actually the our tracking notes on each like regulatory action and Bill, right? So the the write up itself is a svelte, maybe 4050, pages. The rest of it is kind of in depth, Bill and regulatory detail, but it's really interesting to watch storage policies kind of evolve from a state by state perspective. So we'll see things come up in Illinois, and it it will change slightly when it gets to Wisconsin or Minnesota, but these actions are still kind of similar, right? And so what it's doing is it's looking for ways to supplement the grid, and because there are the grid needs reliable energy. It needs ways to either meet demand or offload excess demand at a reasonable price. So we see a lot of the same policies popping up. It's almost like convergent evolution, right? Where, even if I don't think they're necessarily copying the policies, I think they're having similar problems or identifying similar issues that they see that energy storage can solve.
00:13:49.360 --> 00:14:12.840
I found some of these charts to be, frankly, very encouraging. There's a lot of action happening in a lot of places. This figure two on screen is action on grid modernization by number of actions. And the dark blue are 10 or more actions. The lighter blue are six to nine actions.
00:14:12.899 --> 00:14:35.360
The lighter blue is three to five actions. And there was only one state with no actions so and places like Texas and Louisiana would not be my first, you know, anticipated answer to grid modernization, or places where I thought that was going to happen, you know, early, so to speak.
00:14:36.019 --> 00:15:10.200
Yeah, when you look at the most active states, of course, Texas is the largest, followed by California. But also you see Colorados up there, Michigan, Maine and Missouri, Oregon, Illinois, Hawaii. So where Louisiana makes it in the top half, I believe, of the of the nation, speaking of them, as well as a. Arizona, yeah. So even some of these more historically, let's call them unfriendly to renewable generation,
00:15:10.259 --> 00:15:36.679
yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a certain overlay, red state, blue state here going on right like the Northeast is a hot spot, and that's very blue California and and Oregon, but yeah, Texas, Louisiana, red, states going, going for it, so to speak, with grid modernization. What was sorry? Go ahead.
00:15:37.220 --> 00:15:59.860
Well, I will say that I don't think that I distribution and transmission difficulties. Care about politics, right? So it's, it's one of those things that you're going to have problems that could be at least attenuated by energy storage, irrespective of what your grid looks like
00:16:01.179 --> 00:16:14.759
on on micro grids, Hawaii, Oregon, Texas and West Virginia, all advanced rules or programs. What's motivating these states? And do you see micro grids becoming mainstream resilience tools, rather than niche pilots?
00:16:15.960 --> 00:16:19.320
In some cases?
00:16:15.960 --> 00:17:00.159
Yeah, West Virginia is very interesting looking at micro grid districts, right? So kind of looking at large load centers, industrial facilities or even commercial facilities that would want to locate, share a load and have their own or a secondary generator to serve their demands in parallel to the electric grid. There it's, it's fascinating watching it kind of develop, as you know, we see a lot, or at least when we look at the generation mix of West Virginia, it's largely, you know, coal fired power plants.
00:17:00.700 --> 00:17:55.960
But when we have the developments that would allow businesses and industries to have a little bit more leeway in what they get to power their their processes with, it's it's quite fascinating. In Hawaii, we're seeing a lot of development and changes in how they achieve reliability. They recently started reducing the amount of oil they consume. So looking at how renewables and maybe some liquefied natural gas or something like that, fits into their energy mix. And so some of it looking at, you know, Hawaii, looking at Puerto Rico, there's a lot of kind of seeing micro grids as a large portion, or at least a significant part of the grid itself.
00:17:57.880 --> 00:18:25.759
And you know, in my mind, there certainly is a resilience undertone here. You had the storms, you know, the storm Yuri a couple of years ago in Texas, which was a real wake up call for the Texas grid. It impacted all kinds of assets, fossil and renewable energy, and nearly was a major disaster.
00:18:26.240 --> 00:18:41.380
They they averted a much longer outage by a by the hair on their chinny chin, chin. But is there?
00:18:31.400 --> 00:18:43.599
Is this a theme that a lot of states are really looking into.
00:18:44.980 --> 00:20:27.440
We've worked with a number of states so adjacent to the the 50 states reporting, we've we've worked with a number of states and their emergency management agencies to look at what resiliency, energy resiliency, actually looks like, particularly on the eastern seaboard of the US. So that's looking at not necessarily electric sector reliability, right? Because our reliability in the United States is very, very good, right? But looking at what happens when the grid goes down, and what happens over that next 612, 4872, hours. So some of it has been grant related work that we've done, and some of it has been kind of consulting partnerships between emergency management agencies at the at the state or regional level to develop more robust resiliency plans. We are seeing a lot of legislators that are very cognizant of the potential that micro grids can offer, especially when we talk about this kind of critical infrastructure facilities, right? So when we when we look at hospitals or emergency centers or. Or, you know, just your municipal complex, right, that has a fire station, a police headquarters and maybe some government offices, providing them with the leeway to either self generate or be part of a micro grid, so that if the larger grid goes down, they can at least maintain some level of services. A lot of the advancement we've seen has been legislatively driven and then implemented by regulators.
00:20:29.539 --> 00:21:37.220
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 Chint Power Systems com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more, Virginia mandated dominion to launch a 450 megawatt virtual power plant pilot. How significant is this shift towards VPPs and what role do you see aggregated durs playing in a resilience in resilience markets?
00:21:38.180 --> 00:21:57.220
Ah, wow. Those are, those are two really fascinating questions, right? So looking at harnessing all of these ders that are on the grid as as an asset is is a really strong way to, like increase their value proposition, right?
00:21:57.220 --> 00:22:13.440
So, so not just are you delivering electrons to somebody's home or somebody's business, but you could also, on aggregate, be shaping the generation profile, right if you can be accurately dispatched.
00:22:09.599 --> 00:22:51.819
We've seen a lot of back and forth within the PJM interconnection, of which Virginia is a part in its implementation of for order 2222 which requires der aggregation, or aggregated ders, same thing as a VPP, really. And so some of this is just executing, right those, those kind of Federal Energy Regulatory orders, and some of it is allowing dominion and other large utilities to harness the power that this distributed energy network has.
00:22:54.880 --> 00:23:18.480
Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's not pushing the the landscape right? We're not at the phase of VPPs where we can say, Okay, well, we don't need to build a new natural gas plant or something like that, because we have all of these ders, but we are strongly in the in the non wire solution space with VPP so far,
00:23:19.079 --> 00:23:45.400
I know that California and Kaiso have been in the news lately, also, right, because of the amount of battery storage in that market and how the VPPs are really becoming substantial players for attacking The cost of power and attacking the duck curve, right?
00:23:41.380 --> 00:24:29.240
The duck curve is you get this big belly in the middle of the day because there's so much sunshine and the solar is cranking well. Now in the afternoon, you can attack the head of the dock with the virtual power plant of batteries and other resources, other peaker resources, but is, do you have anything else? I mean, I guess that's also a lingering question for me. Is because California is so much further along. You know, they're, they might be 10 years ahead of most other states in the country, both legislatively and practically speaking, does it not loom so large for you guys when you're looking at the emerging phenomena?
00:24:31.460 --> 00:24:42.099
I would say yes, it does. Looking at looking at the development in California.
00:24:35.720 --> 00:25:42.759
What's interesting about, you know, seeing these VPP proposals is they pair a lot with changes we see to other der policies, right? So, like, we have a lot of changes that we flagged with net metering successor tariffs and whatnot. So changing the value of electrons, you. Deliver to the grid. We're, in fact, seeing some support in so we track what's going on with utility business models. And as I said, some of it, some of what we track is performance based policy options. And so looking at new utility programs that don't pay for exports during certain hours to really incentivize that battery storage, right? So, like years ago, and still, now we're looking at the development of time of use rates, right? That kind of time varied. You pay more during peak times. You pay less during the overnight hours when not as many people need it.
00:25:39.799 --> 00:26:46.119
And now we're seeing compensation for kind of exports to the grid, whether they be from batteries, from solar, what have you on site, generation of some description, to match that, to really enhance those grid services. So some VPP policies that we're seeing, some VPP proposals would pay more based on you know, what the charge would be for those and that makes it really advantageous and maximizes the grid services that you get from ders, California has got some really interesting strategies. Kaiso has a state of charge based compensation structure for batteries, and California itself just moves a lot of the renewable electrons, but they they have also a net metering program that strongly, strongly incentivizes energy storage along with self generation for all users,
00:26:47.079 --> 00:27:35.599
I have figure four on screen now, and I'll just zoom in a little bit. You see that the most active states in q2 were Texas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Maine. And I would say half of those, you know, are no surprise to me, and half are somewhat of a surprise, but and then I'll just, I'll just describe the different categories that are that are laid out here, studies and investigations, utility, business model and rate reform, incentives, planning and market access, policies and deployment.
00:27:29.900 --> 00:27:36.920
Anything else noteworthy about this before we move on?
00:27:37.460 --> 00:28:13.019
So, yeah, I think so, if you look at so the orange is studies, right? So that's either the legislature or the governor or the Utilities Commission has ordered some investigation into new grid modernizing technologies, or how it might fit some of this is research into VPPs battery storage development incentive programs. What we what I personally find most interesting is that light blue section, right? And that is utility business model and rate reform.
00:28:13.019 --> 00:28:48.640
So that's when we're looking at compensation or cost for consumption during certain hours or production during certain hours, and so changes to the way that utilities get made whole based on the peak. So giving customers better price signals for when they can choose to consume or not to consume. Or in the der space, right in this VPP space, giving them better price signals for when it's the best time to generate beyond what they need so they can provide more grid services.
00:28:51.700 --> 00:29:00.539
Fascinating. All right, let's move on to utility business models and regulation.
00:28:55.779 --> 00:29:16.799
Several states studied or enacted performance based regulation. This includes Maine, Virginia, Oregon, in your view, can can performance based regulation meaningfully, meaningfully accelerate the integration of durs and resilience technologies?
00:29:18.720 --> 00:30:55.000
Well, yes, it can when it's designed thoughtfully. So if you tell a utility that they need performance, that they need to implement a performance based program, having kind of an idea of the type of performance that is reasonable to ask for and achievable within the grid, which is why we see so much action of the study space is is key. So if you have, let's say, for example, a winter peaking utility whose highest peaks of the year are January and February mornings from five to 7am THE. The ways to get them to deal with that during using ders would be largely through storage, possibly through wind energy. But the only way you can get that kind of controlled dispatch during those peak periods are going to be with with energy storage if conversely, your utility and your state deals mostly with congestion and throughput on your transmission lines. Then maybe something that involves some of these grid modernizing technologies, the fault location or various advanced distribution management systems or distributed energy resource management systems that could be a better implementation for that, and so it would be performance of those particular systems as opposed to storage deployment. So yes, it certainly can. But like all policies, it has to be thoughtfully designed and implemented.
00:30:56.079 --> 00:30:58.420
How new is performance based regulation?
00:30:58.420 --> 00:30:59.019
Period
00:31:00.460 --> 00:31:49.900
performance based regulation has been around for 2025, years. It started with what we originally what, what I believe was called in the late 90s, deregulation, and we prefer to call restructuring now. So electric, electric utilities that were traditionally natural monopolies would have been restructured into kind of spinning off generation and then having transmission and distribution handled by the utilities. So if you when you don't have that kind of monopolistic utility incentive to just build large generation assets and get a guaranteed rate of return. It all, it all becomes performance based, and so we're seeing kind of a continuation of this
00:31:51.579 --> 00:32:03.480
time of use and advanced rate design remain contentious. Hawaii, for instance, declined to expand time of use rates. What lessons should other states take from these mixed outcomes?
00:32:05.279 --> 00:33:20.220
You've got a time of use is one of those conceptual matters that works very, very well if everybody understands their energy use, right? So as an energy expert, as an electric sector expert, I understand, you know, this is the time where I should run my dryer. This is the time where, you know, it's best to charge my electric vehicle, if I have an electric vehicle, or to, you know, do what have you? Run the dishwasher, run your AC. But that is a level of detail that many customers just don't have the time right to deal with so part of time of use, rate design implementation really needs to be an education component, right? You need to get involved with the customers and help them understand how to shift their energy use, or whether they need to shift their energy use so it's, it's, you know, if everybody is the perfect market participant that we learned about in economics, 102, then it makes sense for everybody immediately. But sometimes there's an education effort that needs to happen to bring people up to speed.
00:33:20.640 --> 00:33:36.500
I think of time of use rates as facilitating the implementation of storage on the grid, frankly, and so, you know, I just kind of generically think of time of use as a public good.
00:33:37.519 --> 00:34:00.839
But if you're not implementing storage, and you have patchy usage that can come back to bite you right, like, if you have consistently high usage in the late afternoon, when energy is more expensive, but you don't have a battery, then maybe that is counterproductive. Is that
00:34:01.200 --> 00:35:02.760
true? Yeah, I would say so energy storage can kind of reduce the mental burden, right? Or the kind of onerous nature of having to remember not to turn this on, or to set your HVAC back, or something like that during these peak times or peak events, most retail energy storage that you would get at home, for instance, right? We work a lot with residential customers and and their advocates, and so there are ways that you would just program right your battery storage so that it knows when your peaks are right, so it can help kind of optimize its dispatch, or optimize your consumption, as it were, if you're not injecting to the grid. And we see a lot of.
00:34:52.780 --> 00:35:17.639
Pairing, right? So as as solar expands, we see a lot of pairing solar with storage. Both, you know, in California, where you you kind of have to to make it cost beneficial, but also in in other states as well, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia included.
00:35:20.219 --> 00:35:31.940
So how are utilities themselves responding to this wave of regulatory and policy change? Do you see genuine transformation of business models or more incremental compliance?
00:35:33.500 --> 00:37:02.340
Utilities tend to be conservative, right? They move slowly because they have a lot of things to manage. We see a lot of kind of fruitful conversations around energy storage deployment. Many of the utility folks that I've spoken to are genuinely excited about getting more storage on the grid, because that reduces the amount of kind of work that they would have to do, it lessens the likelihood that they'll encounter something like California's duck curve, which you mentioned before, and so both customer cited energy storage and grid. Energy storage is pretty well received. There are several utilities in the Midwest that are operating resiliency and energy storage as a service programs as a result of some of this push towards getting more storage on the grid, so they will have utility operated, customer cited energy storage, so during blue sky conditions, right, the utility would get to dispatch your storage a little bit to meet some grid demands, and then during an outage, if the grid were to go down, you would then get backup power out of it. So that's kind of happy medium between those two, where you can find common benefits for customers and utilities.
00:37:05.099 --> 00:37:18.659
Some states like Maryland are incorporating equity and environmental justice into resilience planning. How well are states doing to democratizing resilience beyond corporate campuses and utilities, there's
00:37:22.559 --> 00:39:00.780
always opportunities to do better, right? We've seen a lot of advancements, and we see a lot of cognition of the locations on the grid with the most reliability concerns often happen to be those disadvantaged communities, those lower wealth communities. And so as we have some we have some performance based regulation. There are several utilities in the southeast that have to report in their rate cases on their worst performing circuits, right their highest or their lowest reliability circuits. And so how they can go on and improve that so that becomes, that becomes a kind of equity measure a little bit. And there are many state programs that we see coming out of like state energy offices in Louisiana, North Carolina, we see some, of course, in Maryland, where the state energy offices are engaging with lower wealth communities that have issues and even there are some private dollars, so parts of Minneapolis have resiliency hubs that provide community services with customer owned solar and utility owned and operated batteries so that they have if the if the power goes down in Minneapolis, the folks in the inner city there would still have access to charging refrigerators could keep their medications Cold if they needed it, that kind of thing.
00:39:03.239 --> 00:39:17.820
All right, let's talk about the future, looking ahead. If you step back, what does the next five years of grid modernization look like? What which policy or technology trend will dominate the conversation by 2030
00:39:20.039 --> 00:40:50.559
you know, if I had a crystal ball, I would be, I might be in a different business, but based on what we're seeing, I think we're going to see a lot more advancement in virtual power plants. We're of course, going to see more on site generation in either and either like micro grid development or large load customer specific like grid development. So with the proliferation of data centers, it seems like specified policies for data centers and other large load customers. I also expect that to kind of play into the micro grid conversation. So looking, looking at what they can provide to nearby communities in the case of a grid outage or something like that, I also think we're going to see continuing technology implementation, right? So so more and more sophisticated distribution management systems and other technology solutions that can be implemented so that we have fewer transmission rights of way that need to be taken up. I mean, we're looking at, you know, transmission lines that would require additional rights of way, and that's just, it's seems to be more contentious than one that's in the electric power sector would think, but that's, that's not my that's not my wheelhouse. But I think we'll, we'll try and cover it with technology solutions as best as we can.
00:40:51.880 --> 00:41:39.199
I guess you know your your opening comments about the evolution of technology and this phenomenon that the grid can become self healing, for example, when a asset, whether that's a single transformer or a, you know, a neighborhood, goes down, the grid, can smartly work around that problem, per se, kind of like a biological system self heals, if you had to venture kind of writ large today in America, how close are we to Having a grid that can, for example, self heal?
00:41:42.920 --> 00:41:52.300
We so we there are some locations in the population centers right where there's, there's a lot of distribution infrastructure.
00:41:49.000 --> 00:42:52.780
We're going to we see this more commonly, but when we have to traverse large distances through rural America, it's going to be really, really difficult, just because there's not a secondary line that you can carry that through in some cases, as we see Puerto Rico continue to develop in its energy restructuring after Hurricane Maria, it is a kind of a linkage, almost like like chain mail armor, of like micro grids that are just linked on to one another. And we see some of this kind of thing happening elsewhere, where there there are self healing grids in the Northeast corridors, in parts of Texas, in parts of the southeast, where we have large population centers. We've also done a lot of work with cooperatives that are traditionally lower on the population density side, right?
00:42:49.780 --> 00:43:58.960
These will operate in rural America largely, but they will find ways to Island themselves if there is a if there is an issue, so they will have housing developments there where they own batteries, and they're encouraging their members to install solar panels so that if anything were to happen, the housing development would stay Powered. And we see that happening here and there throughout and I'm looking forward to more of that kind of like, it's just factoring the two way flow, right? It's not everything comes from the substation and everything comes from the the generation station behind, behind that. If there's community cited energy storage, and there's community cited energy generation. How could that be more equally distributed? Right? We see hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina. I mean, we had a bad hurricane last September that just washed through Western North Carolina in the mountains.
00:43:59.199 --> 00:44:11.760
And so we're wondering how much could micro grids and how much could islanding have avoided in that so future course of study,
00:44:13.860 --> 00:44:36.679
I don't know if you track what's going on internationally, but you know, from my perspective, we're seeing a lot of moves in Europe and Asia towards long duration storage, hydrogen and resilience, funding. How does the US actively compare? Sorry, how does the US activity compare? Are we leading, lagging or simply different?
00:44:37.940 --> 00:44:39.920
I think we're a little bit different, right?
00:44:39.920 --> 00:44:59.019
China has a very centralized kind of national plan. Germany, Spain, parts of France, for the most part, have like kind of directives at the national level. But America doesn't really operate that way, right?
00:44:55.480 --> 00:46:06.719
We're thanks to our regulatory federalism. We have. Have 54 different regulatory environments that operate. We have 54 different sets of rules and statutes. Sometimes we find a lot of commonality because they're linked by, you know, an interconnection or a regional transmission organization or something like that, and sometimes we see just similar policy environments, state to state. But what's what the policies are in North Carolina don't necessarily affect what the policies are in Virginia or Tennessee or South Carolina, because they touch it just like what's happening in ERCOT, right? The Electric Reliability Council of Texas doesn't affect all of Texas. It doesn't affect what's going on in its neighboring states, in Arizona or Louisiana. So we have a very different system. We have something where we need a lot of economic levers to make it make the most sense, so we can kind of do it on a cost basis, but we can't do it on a mission basis.
00:46:08.760 --> 00:46:23.300
So my last question, if you were speaking directly to project developers, EPCs, investors or community leaders, what one or two takeaways would you give them from this report?
00:46:25.940 --> 00:46:47.320
So I've got different answers for the different audiences, right? So for project developers and EPCs, it is partnering with your utility early and understanding how you can provide value to them and how they can provide value to you, right? It's not always a one way relationship.
00:46:48.699 --> 00:47:12.000
And then for community advocates, it is finding the right partnership. So sometimes a community needs to work with the local government first and then engage the EPC or developer. And sometimes they need to do it the opposite way, and start with the developer with an idea that can then help them pitch to local government for permitting or what have you.
00:47:12.300 --> 00:47:24.320
But I would love to see more community advocacy organizations, or just community based organizations getting more involved in the energy space.
00:47:20.659 --> 00:47:30.019
They're really big in the energy efficiency space already, but I would love to see them on the der side as well.
00:47:31.559 --> 00:47:56.385
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.
00:47:56.925 --> 00:48:04.304
I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you.
00:47:59.804 --> 00:48:24.929
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.
00:48:19.349 --> 00:48:24.929
All right, we'll leave it there.
00:48:24.929 --> 00:48:39.030
Thank you so much. Vincent Potter, Policy Project Manager and author of 50 states of grid modernization. Q2, 2025, from NC State clean energy technology center.
00:48:39.375 --> 00:48:41.355
It's a mouthful.
00:48:39.375 --> 00:48:41.355
I know it is.
00:48:43.635 --> 00:48:59.414
Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Tell a friend about the show, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners and follow us on YouTube. With that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage.
00:48:59.414 --> 00:49:02.235
I'm Tim Montague, thanks, Vincent, thank you. Tim.
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:44.920
00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:59.679
00:00:55.539 --> 00:01:09.780
00:01:11.700 --> 00:01:32.060
00:01:28.099 --> 00:02:00.420
00:02:00.420 --> 00:02:04.019
00:02:04.319 --> 00:02:57.280
00:02:58.419 --> 00:03:11.520
00:03:08.400 --> 00:03:54.400
00:03:56.439 --> 00:03:59.740
00:04:00.699 --> 00:05:01.319
00:04:57.699 --> 00:05:02.100
00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:20.720
00:05:22.100 --> 00:07:07.980
00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:40.100
00:07:42.079 --> 00:07:56.259
00:07:56.259 --> 00:09:12.240
00:09:13.379 --> 00:09:59.500
00:10:01.019 --> 00:10:09.539
00:10:10.139 --> 00:10:13.559
00:10:13.559 --> 00:11:17.519
00:11:19.200 --> 00:12:02.220
00:12:02.279 --> 00:13:47.799
00:13:49.360 --> 00:14:12.840
00:14:12.899 --> 00:14:35.360
00:14:36.019 --> 00:15:10.200
00:15:10.259 --> 00:15:36.679
00:15:37.220 --> 00:15:59.860
00:16:01.179 --> 00:16:14.759
00:16:15.960 --> 00:16:19.320
00:16:15.960 --> 00:17:00.159
00:17:00.700 --> 00:17:55.960
00:17:57.880 --> 00:18:25.759
00:18:26.240 --> 00:18:41.380
00:18:31.400 --> 00:18:43.599
00:18:44.980 --> 00:20:27.440
00:20:29.539 --> 00:21:37.220
00:21:38.180 --> 00:21:57.220
00:21:57.220 --> 00:22:13.440
00:22:09.599 --> 00:22:51.819
00:22:54.880 --> 00:23:18.480
00:23:19.079 --> 00:23:45.400
00:23:41.380 --> 00:24:29.240
00:24:31.460 --> 00:24:42.099
00:24:35.720 --> 00:25:42.759
00:25:39.799 --> 00:26:46.119
00:26:47.079 --> 00:27:35.599
00:27:29.900 --> 00:27:36.920
00:27:37.460 --> 00:28:13.019
00:28:13.019 --> 00:28:48.640
00:28:51.700 --> 00:29:00.539
00:28:55.779 --> 00:29:16.799
00:29:18.720 --> 00:30:55.000
00:30:56.079 --> 00:30:58.420
00:30:58.420 --> 00:30:59.019
00:31:00.460 --> 00:31:49.900
00:31:51.579 --> 00:32:03.480
00:32:05.279 --> 00:33:20.220
00:33:20.640 --> 00:33:36.500
00:33:37.519 --> 00:34:00.839
00:34:01.200 --> 00:35:02.760
00:34:52.780 --> 00:35:17.639
00:35:20.219 --> 00:35:31.940
00:35:33.500 --> 00:37:02.340
00:37:05.099 --> 00:37:18.659
00:37:22.559 --> 00:39:00.780
00:39:03.239 --> 00:39:17.820
00:39:20.039 --> 00:40:50.559
00:40:51.880 --> 00:41:39.199
00:41:42.920 --> 00:41:52.300
00:41:49.000 --> 00:42:52.780
00:42:49.780 --> 00:43:58.960
00:43:59.199 --> 00:44:11.760
00:44:13.860 --> 00:44:36.679
00:44:37.940 --> 00:44:39.920
00:44:39.920 --> 00:44:59.019
00:44:55.480 --> 00:46:06.719
00:46:08.760 --> 00:46:23.300
00:46:25.940 --> 00:46:47.320
00:46:48.699 --> 00:47:12.000
00:47:12.300 --> 00:47:24.320
00:47:20.659 --> 00:47:30.019
00:47:31.559 --> 00:47:56.385
00:47:56.925 --> 00:48:04.304
00:47:59.804 --> 00:48:24.929
00:48:19.349 --> 00:48:24.929
00:48:24.929 --> 00:48:39.030
00:48:39.375 --> 00:48:41.355
00:48:39.375 --> 00:48:41.355
00:48:43.635 --> 00:48:59.414
00:48:59.414 --> 00:49:02.235
