Sep 18, 2025 · 42m · catalyst
Is now the time for DERs to scale?
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Host Shail Khan and Energy Impact Partners' head of research Andy Lubershain analyze why distributed energy resources and virtual power plants are now positioned to scale rapidly to resolve severe modern grid capacity bottlenecks after a decade of unmet market hype.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Shayle holds 22% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Shayle as informed peer 6.0 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 1.2 Shayle pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is Shayle, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 27:53 Lubershain acknowledges economic bias against friction
In a very collegial discussion, Lubershain pushes back gently on Kann's skepticism by acknowledging his own economist training while asserting that macro grid desperation will overpower institutional friction.
Hardest push from Shayle ▶ 25:43 Kann plays devil's advocate on regulatory inertiaKann explicitly challenges the guest's optimistic thesis, arguing that grid need alone does not guarantee DER adoption when state regulations and utility procurement cycles move at a glacial pace.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:22 Lubershain details the dispatchable vs passive DER taxonomyLubershain methodically educates listeners and the host on why grid planners value solar and efficiency whereas real-time operators require on-off dispatchable capacity.
Shayle holds their own ▶ 25:43 Kann reframes DER economics around rising alternative costsKann demonstrates expert market knowledge by redirecting the discussion away from DER hardware costs toward the rapidly increasing cost of comparative capacity like natural gas turbines.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Shayle as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Shayle pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reassessing Historical Hype and the Utility Death Spiral | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Kann sets the stage with deep historical context around the 2014 utility death spiral narrative and prompts Lubershain to break down his DER taxonomy. The exchange is highly collegial, with Kann interjecting to clarify that dispatchable capacity DERs are constrained by duration limits. | |
| Analyzing Past Market Failures: Low Need and High Soft Costs | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Lubershain recounts his 2017 experience with utility engineers finding zero non-wires alternatives due to flat load growth. Kann frames this with the venture capital trope of selling vitamins versus painkillers, which Lubershain readily adopts and extends with an FDA approval analogy. | |
| Mid-Roll Sponsorship Break: Bloom Energy, Engie, and EnergyHub | 7 | 4 | 2 | 6 | Following the mid-roll ad read, Kann plays devil's advocate against Lubershain's core thesis, arguing that comparative capacity costs are already favorable but regulatory inertia and utility friction remain massive bottlenecks. Lubershain concedes his economist bias toward rationality and points to surging Voltus dispatch data. | |
| Differentiating Expanded Demand Response from Virtual Power Plants | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Kann asks Lubershain to delineate the practical distinction between legacy demand response and modern virtual power plants. Lubershain provides an educational breakdown of how automation and sophisticated asset aggregation differentiate the two paradigms. | |
| Projecting the Five-Year Outlook: Bull vs. Bear Scenarios | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Kann prompts Lubershain to outline the five-year bull and bear scenarios for DER deployment, interjecting with potential hurdles like fire codes. Lubershain explains the risk of utility planners sticking to 100% centralized solutions rather than probabilistic distributed assets. |
Statements from this episode (10)
Kann: The decade's predicted utility death spiral completely failed to materialize
“Surprise, surprise, it didn't happen, and I don't actually even think that is really worth talking about now, because it's definitely not happening these days, but the backdrop to that line of thinking was the concept that we were going to see this wave of dis…”
Lubershain: Distributed natural gas gensets are near-perfect resources for grid operators
“The closest thing to a perfect resource from the perspective of a grid operator is, you know, a flexible, you distributed genset of some sort that can turn on and off really quickly, can ramp, ramp up and ramp down very quickly. And ideally, if it's a natural …”
Lubershain: Flat power grid load growth suppressed DER adoption for 15-20 years
“The past 1520 years in the power system, we just haven't seen, till very recently, much load growth. So there just weren't that many places on the grid where there was tremendous amount of pressure to upgrade things quickly. It wasn't all that expensive to mak…”
Lubershain: DER soft costs remained stubborn despite plummeting battery hardware prices
“What we didn't get right was that the soft costs of deploying DERs would not fall, and that's largely the cost of customer acquisition. It's like getting people, getting customers, whether they're homeowners or businesses, to sign up, to put something on their…”
Lubershain: Operational VPPs Are Now Dispatched at Hundreds of Megawatts
“There are real VPPs now. Hundreds of megawatts in scale that are being dispatched to actually make a difference on the grid in some places.”
Lubershain: Grid Dispatches of Voltus Demand Response Are Surging Exponentially
“So not, not the resources they have signed up to turn down when someone calls on them, but the number of times they actually do. And That, in the last two years, has been kind of, ah, escalating off the charts. I mean, it seems to be going exponential, ah, in …”
Lubershain: Every major utility could deploy hundreds of megawatts of DERs soon
“Could every utility, every major utility in the country within five years have a several hundred megawatt DER program, instead of it just being a few that have a several hundred megawatt DER program? And in a few places where, where you're, you know, have a li…”
Lubershain: DERs can scale to hundreds of megawatts faster than centralized resources
“That's one of the advantages of many classes of distributed energy resources, you know, whether it's a natural gas genset or whether it's a residential battery, you know, you can go out there and put a bunch of them out there very rapidly, and that can scale u…”
Lubershain: Cost-effective battery systems will rely on Chinese cells for longer
“Not, not the cells, right? Those have gotten really cheap, but the full systems need to get cheaper if they're going to be really cost-effective resources. That probably means some portion of the battery, like the cells, at least for a while longer, is coming …”
Lubershain: Utility planners stick to 100% solutions because nobody gets fired
“Because utility planners, they are inherently always going to prefer a 100% solution. That's how we've built the grid in the past, and Nobody gets fired for putting in place a 100% solution that is going to work every day for all of the hours of the day, all t…”