The DERVOS content announcements are rolling out! Our second ThunDERdome of the day is one we’re super excited about. Check out the details below!
Permissionless DERs Wait for No One
This new category promises to put the power in your hands.
The very early days of distributed solar often fell into the “guerrilla solar” bucket. Enterprising home owners, indoor pot farms, and anyone else who wanted to reduce their power bill or hide their electricity consumption might mount solar on their roof, wire it into their panel, and let the meter spin backwards without telling their utility.
One of our favorite examples of this was the original Energy Task Force in NYC, who put an old wind turbine on top of their Lower East Side co-op, got sued by the monopoly utility, and ended up charting a legal path for distributed energy that culminated in PURPA being signed.
While it spurred tons of innovation and we are grateful for these pioneers, this approach was not scalable. Paralleling your own power source with the grid without the appropriate protections processes could put the power system and its staff at risk.
With that in mind, the last 25 years of mainstream distributed energy project development have involved lengthy permitting and utility interconnection processes. While these things serve their purposes, this established a highly permissioned structure for DERs to operate within. Timelines move slowly as they bounce between different authorities. Projects undergo rounds of design revisions in attempt to gain permission. Many customers get frustrated with the timelines and drop off, raising the soft costs of the installer.
What if there was another way? What if you didn’t need to beg for permission to make or store your own power? What if a complicated project sale was simplified into an easy product or service experience? And all of this would be done while still ensuring safety.
A new category of Permissionless DERs promise this. By virtue of their architecture, they don’t require all or some of those authorities to sign off, and some don’t even need professional installers. There are many different types, from plug and play solar like Germany’s (and now Utah’s) well known approach, to batteries that sit in your home like a beautiful appliance, to electrical devices that integrate batteries natively, to on-demand commercial and industrial power systems that can get you up and running in days rather than years.
Permissionless DERs are here and they don’t wait for anyone.
Speakers
This is likely one of the more novel topics we’ll be exploring during DERVOS, so we’ve assembled a true supergroup of guests to dive in and help us out.
Cole Ashman, Founder & CEO of Pila Energy, is a former Tesla engineer who’s team is building the future of plug and play batteries. Pila’s sleek batteries are meant to be plugged in at the device level, offering backup power, energy shifting, and more. Cole recently appeared on the DER Task Force podcast shortly after he launched the product.
Bala Ramamurthy, Co-Founder and CEO of Critical Loop, previously held a key leader at SpaceX, where he led the development of the human-rated Falcon 9 rocket, playing a pivotal role in the United States' return to human spaceflight. Bala is bringing his experience in developing mission critical hardware and software to on-demand power systems for commercial and industrial facilities.
Stephan Scherer, co-founder of Craftstrom Solar, wants anyone with a standard power socket and a wifi connection to be able to easily install solar and batteries. Their suite of solar panel, inverter, battery, and smart breaker products promise to make solar a simple product purchase that anyone can self-install.
Kevin Chou, Co-founder & Executive Director of Brightsaver, leads a nonprofit with the mission to make solar energy and battery storage accessible to everyone. They work to build a future where clean, affordable energy is in everyone’s hands, and everyday people, no matter their income or address, can power their own lives, save money, and lead the shift to a more sustainable world.
We can’t wait to see you all there! Snag your ticket quickly before they sell out!
Epic topic.