Microgrids

“The microgrid and the software control here is going to be absolutely key. And this is a place where I think we as a community are under invested today.”

“Microgrids supporting such infrastructure will Definitely have a multiplicity of generation sources. Each one comes with very different attributes, and you may need particular attributes depending on what your end, end need is.”

“And we have seen cost reductions up to 80% in, in California and 60% in Virginia While the electricity rate was really almost half than in California.”

“We really get down to three, four cents, including all the capital that we installed there, and we model actually escalation on the electricity side by 10% every year, and natural gas also going up by five percent every year. But still, at the end of the analy…”

“And the analysis is that we did for these two cases actually suggested you can run 100% grid independent, right? And then it just becomes a redundancy challenge for the generators.”

“Bulk power systems don't scale well, which is why you're talking about these seven to 15 year timelines. Microgrids scale very well, so they can really help that path occur in a very reliable, efficient, and I would say financially sound way that minimizes ris…”

“If you, if you're focusing on costs and carbon emissions, you will always see a combination between renewable technologies and In some gas fart engines for backup reasons or for resiliency reasons, right? It's pretty bad idea from an economic perspective to ha…”

“As I did this the first time, I mean, more than 10 years ago, it was half a million dollar five engineers working a full year to figure out how big a battery, a PV system should be for demand, charge management, all that stuff, right?”

“You just don't see that working out economically for any customer who has access to the macro grid.”

“The distinguishing feature of a microgrid is it can island from the grid during periods of macrogrid disruptions. That's, like, the thing that matters and separates microgrids from the rest of the distributed energy resource community.”

“Storage is probably the biggest component that's unlocking value in the microgrid and distributed energy space right now. So that plays an outsized role in terms of, you know, economic value, grid participation, things like that.”

“Solar storage, switchgear, and dispatchable generation assets, and some combination of those come together to, you know, create most microgrids that are being deployed in the market today.”

“Data centers are probably the biggest driver of microgrids right now.”

“Ninety-five-ish percent of commercial and industrial loads are below two megawatts, right? But almost all the microgrids are built above two megawatts, and the reason for that is not technology cost, it's all soft cost, right?”

“These data centers generally speaking are somewhat price insensitive, but time sensitive. And when you have that dynamic it creates a different kind of an opportunity to say like, well, okay, we got to deliver power sooner, even if it is a little more expensiv…”

“I think they have worked in a number of cases, but in some ways they're this hybrid where they have All of the challenges of an off-grid system and all of the challenges of a grid. And so figuring out the financing model, the operational model, like how you ac…”

“Those strategies, I think, will continue to both offer positive environmental impact, but also accretive propositions to the users, to, you know, data centers who are looking for that kind of local reliable power.”