What is this place?
The DER Task Force is where passionate DERs talent comes to learn, teach, and collaborate. Whether you develop projects, write software, market EVs, advocate policy, finance projects, analyze markets, fund companies, or just want to learn about how people and businesses interact with energy, this is where you want to be.
We’re on a mission
The energy sector has entered a period of radical change, and distributed energy resources present a tremendous opportunity to improve the electricity system. We can build not just a cheaper and cleaner grid, but also a more resilient one, that enables electrification, and offers us more control over our energy usage.
This is a call to action to join a movement that has reached an inflection point. The work of the Task Force dates as far back as the 70’s, when the original Energy Task Force installed NYC’s first distributed energy system. We are part of a lineage of builders who aim to make the energy we depend on more sustainable for all. That means that we are asking you — yes, YOU listener, reader, contributor wherever you are — to join the fight. We need you. We’re here to help in any way we can, to pass on knowledge, provide context, make connections, and offer feedback. But, this isn’t about us. The onus is on you: in whatever way you can dream up, drive this space forward. Go build. Go debate. Write new policy. Organize. Create new business models and technologies. And if you’re doing any of that, then you’re in the DER Task Force. We welcome you, as the work is just getting started.
We’re different from most organizations
Independent — We’re funded by the community, not companies
Collaborative — We’re here to lift each other up and advance DERs together
Not Boring — We’re allergic to generic industry networking events and stuffy organizations
Curious — We’re up for anything and insatiable learners
Rigorous — We’re obsessed with uncovering truth and deeply understanding topics
Our History
The NYC DERs Meetup was born in May of 2019 after a few informal twitter meetups and “DG Beers” group messages. At its inception the mission was clear - there are a ton of smart distributed energy folks in NYC, so lets stick them in a room with drinks and see what happens. But what evolved over the next year turned out to be way cooler than we expected! After a while we started getting requests like, “Hey, I’m in Texas and wasn’t able to make the meetup, but could you at least send me the slides?” We realized the dialogue that was transpiring at these events was really interesting stuff. It was shaping up to be the place you go to get the inside scoop on distributed energy, and it didn’t make sense for that to be confined to a small event series in a single city. So in early 2020 we decided to start recording podcast conversations that attempt to summarize and expand on everything that transpires at each meetup. It’s basically an energy nerd post-game show. Plus, we took the meetups virtual, so anyone from around the world could tune in live and participate. At this time we also decided to re-launch everything (the meetups and podcast episodes) under one name - DER Task Force. At the time we had become obsessed with this old story of a group young people illegally installing a rooftop wind turbine in the Lower East Side in the 70s. You can read more about it in Russell Gold’s book Superpower, but the synopsis is that this one bold act launched the future of distributed energy and made everything our community does possible. And it turns out this group called themselves The Energy Task Force. Our name is a shoutout to this original, optimistic, brave distributed energy project.