In this episode, Duncan Campbell of Scale Microgrid Solutions makes the case that distributed energy resources (DERs) — solar panels, EVs, home batteries, etc. — are, thanks to rising electricity demand and constraints on grid expansion, poised for a tsunami of deployment.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
At this point, most energy geeks know that we need to electrify everything to solve climate change. They know that electrifying everything will dramatically increase electricity demand. They know that the electricity system needs to grow rapidly to accommodate that new demand, but that getting new power plants connected to the grid takes forever and building new power lines has become a slow, bureaucratic grind.
All of this has left energy experts wringing their hands and grinding their teeth (and utilities turning back to gas). But for some reason, attention has not yet turned in earnest to the family of technologies that could help with all those problems.
I speak of course of distributed energy resources, or DERs (think solar panels, EVs, home batteries, etc.). They can help reduce the need for new supply. They can help avoid the need for new transmission and distribution lines. They can be built and attached to the grid relatively quickly. And they promise owners lower bills and greater resilience.
In other words, they seem like an answer to many of the grid's current problems. To hear that case made in more detail, I talked with Duncan Campbell. He works at Scale Microgrid Solutions, building DERs for customers, and co-hosts the DER Task Force podcast, which is, in the hosts’ words, “DER-pilling today’s youth.” He’s convinced we’re on the verge of an explosion of DER investment; today, he will try to convince you.
Without any further ado, Duncan Campbell, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Duncan Campbell
Hey, David. Good to be here and excited to chat DERs.
David Roberts
Yeah. My first question is, am I, like your dad, misappropriating your slang? Is it DER or DER? Do you guys just say DER now?
Duncan Campbell
Some of us do, because I think it's kind of funny, but I guess DER is, like, the proper acronym. But, yeah, distributed energy resource, which even itself is maybe — I don't know. There's debates about whether that's outmoded or not at this point.
David Roberts
It doesn't trip off the tongue, but DER. I don't know if DER really trips off the tongue either.
Duncan Campbell
But when I started this stuff ten years ago, people called it DG, right? Distributed generation.
David Roberts
Yeah. Right.
Duncan Campbell
And then called flexible loads "demand response." And then batteries broke, that whole thing cause they're kind of both. So here we go.
David Roberts
Yes. We had to get a little more generic. So, as I understand it, well, tell me, which of these is true: Is it that you think that now is a good time to invest in DERs and there ought to be a big wave of investment in DERs? Or is it the case that you think that there is inevitably going to be a huge wave of investment in DERs right now? Which case are we making here?
Duncan Campbell
I'm going to give you the frustrating answer and say both.
David Roberts
We can and should in other words.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. In the words of the DOE's liftoff report on DERs and VPPs, the author recently said there's a tsunami of DER deployments coming, and that's without any additional policy or tinkering, that's just going to occur. I've been doing this stuff for a while, and I'm more confident in that than ever. But also, there's a really important conversation to be had about how can we effectively utilize this stuff to drive beneficial system outcomes rather than just whatever sort of an end customer's sort of responses to the situation they're in.
David Roberts
Right, right. We'll definitely get to that. So let's start with the case, then, that that tsunami is on the way. There are a number of factors, a number of trends, a number of things converging right now to lay the groundwork for that tsunami. Can you lay the groundwork for a tsunami? I don't know, but. So let's, let's start with one of those. One is just demand's gonna go up, right. And I'm not sure people have absorbed all the implications of that. So start there.
Duncan Campbell
I definitely am not sure if people have absorbed the implications of that. You know, for 20, 25 years, we've — everyone in this industry, everyone observing this industry has learned heuristics and sort of modes of thinking that were defined in a flat load growth paradigm. So battles about net metering, battles about replacing coal with gas and then gas with renewables, and that being zero sum, all this stuff was a zero load growth environment. Everyone who works at utilities, independent power producers, etcetera, has only ever really known zero load growth, except for maybe the eldest of us out there.
And that's about to change in a big way. And it's not just one concentrated thing that's going to change that. It's like many things happening at the same time.
David Roberts
I think the one that we obviously have our eyes most on is the rise in electrifying everything. But that's not what's doing it yet. That wave hasn't even really taken off yet.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, that's definitely happening currently. I'd say at the edges. So you have a few people, say, buy EVs on your block, not a big deal, right. But if you look at say, a large commercial electricity user, some building, some factory, some distribution center that's deciding to make their fleet electric, that can be a really big deal at their exact spot on the grid. Right. Like the wire coming into that facility is very likely far too small for that new load and that creates an opportunity to maybe deal with that in a smart way. So yeah, electrification I'd say is — it's happening at the edges, but we should all remember EVs are the most expensive they will ever be today. Right. So it's definitely coming.
David Roberts
But what's driving up demand now?
Duncan Campbell
So at this moment, yeah, there's been, and this has really emerged in the past, I'd say six months, a flurry of grid managers, ISOs utilities suddenly forecasting much higher peak loads than they initially anticipated. And really a lot of that has to do with data center load growth. We all remember when like the whole bitcoin topic became hot several years ago. This is probably going to make that look really small and non consequential.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. AI too, right? I mean mainly because of AI.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. And certainly people can potentially be bearish on AI, obviously. I don't know, there's a whole other sort of like topic there on AGI, et cetera. I don't know much about that. But basically you have suddenly a new class of energy users who are extremely price insensitive and see their ability to consume megawatt hours as the thing which is in the way of them creating super intelligence and winning some enormous economic race. You know, we have folks who run AI companies raising $7 trillion. Right?
So, there is a race for power that got started about a year ago when ChatGPT got released. The only other thing similar to that is the race for transformers to convert that power into something useful. That's also an issue, but yeah, it's enormous. So, you look at, say for example, the Grid Strategies report that got released recently and they're seeing basically ISOs everywhere kind of realize, "Oh wow, something big is happening that we didn't really see a few years ago."
David Roberts
Well, what was it that, I think it was the Georgia Power IRP. I wish I'd written down the quote, now researching this, but something like actually peak load is going to be something like twelve times larger than we thought it was like multiples, not just like a little bit more, but multiples of what some of these utilities thought was coming.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, totally. And it's a very interesting time for that to happen. If you look at, say, for example, PJM, which is the grid that serves Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Chicago, Maryland, I think it's the biggest power market in the world, potentially certainly the biggest in the US. It serves a ton of loads. PJM is simultaneously predicting tons of load growth and also realizing all of their capacity is actually less firm than they thought it was. Like gas plants are all connected to the same gas system, which is at times failing. So they're actually derating the capacity value of a lot of their power plants while suddenly their capacity needs skyrocket.
You basically increase demand, decrease supply, and prices respond vigorously.
David Roberts
Yeah. So just to wrap up the demand thing, I think the way to summarize is I think a lot of experts and a lot of utilities foresaw electrification, boosting demand, but maybe on like a nice glide path and maybe starting in like five years in earnest or something like that. So the sort of sudden arrival of massive demand from data centers and AI and the rest has kind of just moved up this crisis and compounded it. Like, so the load growth is going to be sooner than a lot of people thought and a lot bigger than a lot of people thought.
So that's kind of the context in which all of this is happening.
Duncan Campbell
And it's not just AI. Right. It's certainly electrification, like we mentioned, but it's also just a general national project of reindustrialization, which has kicked off about four years ago. And that's very real, you know, at Scale Microgrids, a lot of the customers we serve aren't necessarily just electrifying their fleets or something. They're just like manufacturing some metal part and cannot find power.
David Roberts
Wild. Yeah. And so that's the context. And so within that context, a couple of things are happening. One is quite famously, I think, Volts listeners are very familiar with this at this point, getting a big generator of any kind, solar, wind, or whatever, connected to the grid is taking longer and longer and longer. So as demand rises, it's more and more difficult getting big chunks of supply online.
Duncan Campbell
Definitely.
David Roberts
I wanted to ask about this because we all know, I think it's pretty well known at this point that this is facing the big power plants. Is it the case that DERs are easier to get interconnection permission for in general?
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. Easier, relatively, yes. I'd love if it were smooth.
David Roberts
Not easy, but easier.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. So the way to think about this is for large scale plants connected to the transmission system that are organized in power markets. In 2007, the average time from the interconnection request to actually being hooked up and producing power was about 1.7 years. And in 2022 was five years. That's an enormous increase. It's pretty much a straight line between them. It's not as if 2022 was just a singularly bad year or something. There's really no end in sight to that trend. I'm not saying it will just go forever, but there's no clear reason for someone to say "2025 is the year that stops."
Right? We don't really know.
David Roberts
Yeah. Yeah. It looks like all the things pushing that are still pushing it. Like, it's not clear what's going to change dramatically. I mean, I guess all the ISOs could adopt Texas-style interconnection rules, but I don't know that that's on the horizon either, or that that would really completely solve it, because some of it is supply chain stuff, you know, some of it is, as you say, transformers. So interconnection is taking longer and longer and longer. And then the other big thing we need to do to accommodate a big rise in demand is transmission.
You know, sort of famously, the model out of the Zero Lab at Princeton that shows the IRA reducing US greenhouse gas emissions, whatever it was, 40%, relies on tons of new transmission. And that's not happening.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. Transmission is this amazing tool that lets you move power over very long stretches, even over time zones, which almost makes it temporal in that regard.
David Roberts
You can move it back in time.
Duncan Campbell
And if you could sort of magically plant a bunch of transmission around the US, there'd be enormous gains to the power system. Put another way, if you have a power system model that doesn't account for actually having to move power around, that's called a copper plate model, where it assumes just infinite transmission: costs are enormously lower than if you actually have to deal with the physical reality of the grid. However, we're not good at it. It's like, a bummer to say out loud, but it's just true. Right? The historical annual growth of transmission, gigawatt miles, which is a funny unit, but it's basically, how much transmission do we have, historically from, like, 1978 to somewhere around today, is like maybe 2%.
And if you look at the chart that then shows from today what we need by 2050 for, like, the Net-Zero studies that use a lot of it, it's like a massive hockey stick. I don't actually have the percentage number, but you look at it, and it just kind of like, looks hilarious. It's a gigantic amount of transmission we have to build. And actually over the past handful of years, what, like 2013 to today, our growth rate is actually decelerating. It's not saying we're losing transmission, but it's just the rate at which we're building it is going down, not up.
So there's some fundamental stuff that would have to happen there. And I would personally just say transmission is an amazing tool and we should build a lot of it. But any sort of capacity expansion model or energy transition model that relies on, say, I don't know, 20, 30 x-ing transmission to achieve its goal is a model that's at the knife's edge of feasibility. Right.
David Roberts
Yes.
Duncan Campbell
It has such a concentrated risk in that, that I'd say we should probably think about a portfolio approach here.
David Roberts
Yeah. Although we should say, as Jesse Jenkins said on your podcast in the last episode, the rates of transmission growth we need are not historically unprecedented. We've done it before. We've hit those rates of growth before, just not really in the modern era. As we said, it's been 20 years now with no load growth. So there just hasn't been a ton of impetus to build new transmission.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, it's fair. We did build it at high growth rates in the New Deal era when presidents were getting three terms, and there was sort of a broad national consensus to get out of the Great Depression. And it was enabled by institutional capacity. Right. This wasn't just like cowboy transmission developers doing it because it made sense. Is our institutional capacity where it was at that time? We certainly should aspire for it to be, but I sort of don't want to just hope. Right. Like, there's got to be something else we do as well.
David Roberts
Yes. We need some backup plans. So. Okay. Demand going up, interconnection taking longer and longer, transmission growth slowing down at a time when it needs to radically accelerate. And then another thing that's going on that I don't think is as well understood as those previous trends, which is transmission and distribution costs, "T&D costs", as they say, are getting bigger and starting to dominate bills. Talk about that a little bit.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, I think this is probably the least understood of these trends. So much of energy and electricity sort of analysis and discussion really revolves around the bulk system because that's where a lot of the action is. Right. And that's where a lot of money has been historically made.
David Roberts
When we say the bulk system, we just mean large power plants connected directly to the transmission system.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, and sort of organized and dispatched, whether that's through a power market or a vertically integrated utility just in a control room. Yeah. That bulk system. Not a lot of people focus on the end customer's bill and the constituents of that bill. What makes up the bill, right? We'll often just say "I pay twelve cents a kilowatt-hour," but that's really ten different line items all blended into one.
David Roberts
Right.
Duncan Campbell
And it's not even based on kilowatt-hours all the time for a lot of customers.
David Roberts
Well, right. The power you're paying for the actual kilowatt-hours of power, is a small and getting smaller percentage of that total bill.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. Much of the bill is actually the sort of fixed infrastructure, that transmission infrastructure, that distribution infrastructure, substations, the transformer outside your house, the wooden pole on your block, all that stuff. And that stuff appears to, the best data appears to suggest that stuff is getting more expensive over time, while the cost of producing new power is driven by technology trends: Solar, wind, batteries —
David Roberts
And getting cheaper.
Duncan Campbell
geothermal, like, who knows, maybe small modular nukes. All this stuff is technology and hopefully getting cheaper, which is kind of like the grand arc of progress. Right? Moving power around is getting more expensive and not just like a little bit.
Right. So if you — the EIA releases good data on this. They look at all the spending by utilities, all the major utilities in the US, which kind of covers something like 80% of electricity load, and they bucket that spending into generation and transmission and distribution. So, generation is making power, building power plants, transmission and distribution is moving it around, all that stuff, generation, between 2012 and 2022, so the last decade roughly, has increased its cost at a compound annual growth rate of 2.3%. And that's actually less than inflation. Right. Inflation during that period was 2.5%. So, effectively, it's getting cheaper to make power.
And that's the whole fleet of power system. Right. If you were to isolate that to just like the new additions.
David Roberts
Right.
Duncan Campbell
You know, we've all seen the learning curves and stuff on solar and wind and batteries. It's getting like exponentially cheaper. Negative. Right.
David Roberts
And moving in the right direction as everyone keeps celebrating.
Duncan Campbell
Yes, right. Like, just the other day, you know, CATL saying it can sell a battery for $60 a kilowatt-hour, which is crazy. So at the same time, transmission and distribution spending has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 6.8%.
David Roberts
God.
Duncan Campbell
That is not quite, but almost three times more than inflation.
David Roberts
Yeah. What do we make of that? We're not building new transmission. We just said we're not building new transmission lines and yet transmission and distribution costs are rising. What's going on?
Duncan Campbell
That's a head scratcher, man. I think there's probably a whole host of explanations there. Now, one caveat I want to make here is this is spending in sort of aggregate dollar terms. How that turns into rates is complicated, but in theory, spending should become rates over time.
David Roberts
Right, right.
Duncan Campbell
But I also just look at, you know, I analyze commercial and industrial, so business power bills all day, every day. I spend so much time in utility tariff documents. And yeah, the charges associated with transmission and distribution for a lot of our customers are the majority of their costs these days. Right. So imagine ordering groceries on Amazon Prime and most of the bill is the delivery. Right? It's wild.
David Roberts
Yeah. So I mean, I guess some of that is the power lines are just getting old, right? We got aging power lines that just need a lot of upkeep and repair. Some of it, I guess, is wildfire costs and in general more sort of severe weather. I guess those are two factors. But that honestly just seems to under explain that trend a little bit to me. I don't fully have my head wrapped around that.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, I'd say a lot of folks will cite, we basically deferred T&D upgrades for a very long time. So a bunch of, it's kind of like coming to roost right now, which may be the case. They're long lived assets. It's not like you just replace the transmission line every other year. But with that said, I'll throw out a more challenging hypothesis, which is I think this is probably just the destiny of the IOU regulatory model. It is just the case that we haven't had a power system for very long. This is a relatively new thing. It's something like 100 years old.
And shortly after creating it, we sort of ossified this model where utilities build all this infrastructure, they get a regulated rate of return on it. And there's some political entity that sort of is the watchdog that makes sure they don't do bad stuff.
David Roberts
Right, right.
Duncan Campbell
And we did this in the name of economies of scale, natural monopolies, et cetera. And all this made sense. By the way. I'm not saying it was a bad decision, nor is it something that has to be changed today. But the result of that is that the rate base is going to grow forever those investments, and it is in the interest of the entity making those investments to continue to see that grow.
David Roberts
Right, right. That's the profit. This is something I say on the podcast all the time, but the arrangement you're talking about, the regulatory compact, they call it early in the century, was designed for growth. I mean, that setup is meant to induce utilities to invest and grow. Basically, it was meant to induce the electrification of a country that was not yet electrified. Right. It was meant to induce spending and growth. And now we're sort of like reaching the end of that. But the model is still sitting there, still incentivizing spending and growth. So you're just getting a lot of utilities looking for ways to make big investments and avoiding things that might reduce their need to make big investments, like distributed energy, for instance.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I will say, and maybe this is where my other DER friends will disagree with me, I don't think this suggests utilities are bad or anything like that. It's just a model we've been using for a long time, right?
David Roberts
Entities set up with particular incentives, pursuing those incentives. Like, yeah, it's not that they're bad-hearted, they're just doing what they're built to do.
Duncan Campbell
And it's not like a no-brainer to sort of move to some new apparatus. Right? Like no one just has some easy solution to this either, so. But regardless, I would just say it is probably the destiny of the power system to see T&D costs inflate forever. Right. Because that's just sort of the nature of it. And maybe that's okay in the long run. In a future where generating power, in our most Isaac Asimov future we can imagine, is virtually free. Well, then, yeah, all the cost is going to be moving it around. So that's not even necessarily like a damning sort of statement. It's just —
David Roberts
Well, I don't know. If you listen to the Amory Lovins of the world, what they'll tell you is that the more those costs rise, the more they push people to install distributed energy resources and to get off the grid, which will then screw the utilities in the long run. Right? So like the Amory Lovins line is that utilities are sort of driving themselves into a death spiral by doing this.
Duncan Campbell
There's a lot of talk about the death spiral, I think. Yeah. Sometimes from like the Lovins' perspective, sometimes from kind of the perspective of someone who wants to make folks afraid of DERs. I don't know. It's not something I think about too much, like it'll either happen or not. I don't know if there's anything we can do about it, to be honest. But yeah, the point basically is the greater percentage of your bill made up by T&D costs, the more likely you are to consider alternatives that help you avoid some of those costs. And rarely, that means going off the grid entirely.
Although that does happen, and I would expect it to happen more and more, it's still going to be a somewhat rare case. But what that often means is supplementing your grid connection with something. Right?
David Roberts
Right. And we should say, I mean, this seems like a good place to say, you know, T&D costs, depending on your perspective, are either contingently rising or sort of inexorably rising. But one way or the other, they're rising with no real end to that on the horizon. In contrast, everything that we talk about under the broad rubric of DERs, and that's solar batteries, it's water heaters and appliances that are smart. It's the home energy management systems, it's thermal storage and water heaters. All that stuff, all of that is getting cheaper over time. That whole category is moving in the opposite direction of T&D costs.
Duncan Campbell
Correct, yeah.
David Roberts
Okay, so we've got load growth freaking us out. Interconnections taking longer and longer, transmission growth slowing down right when we need it to radically accelerate. And transmission and distribution costs getting bigger and bigger and starting to really make electricity bills in some parts of the country high to the point that it's verging on political crisis like California is just heading for something bad happening because those T&D costs are just going up and up and up there. So all of that in your thesis pushes us toward DERs. And one of the points you make and what I want to discuss a little bit is all this stuff is going to push people toward DERs.
We can either use that push toward DERs to solve all those problems or to help ameliorate them at least, if we integrate those DERs in a smart way, versus they could just make the whole thing worse. They could make grids more unstable. So just talk a little bit about what it means to do DERs well and accommodate them well versus them posing a problem.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, personally, I wouldn't even say them posing a problem. Right. Because it's sort of just what decisions do you face people with? Right. So I generally think of DERs as, like, those which are asked for by the system via the system's various signals and then collaborate with the system. And then there's the bucket of those which are responsive to negative signals by the system. Right. So I'll give maybe just like, two examples. A great use of a DER would be, say, a distribution warehouse is going to electrify its fleet. So it's going to have like 20 EV 18-wheelers, which is happening already.
The demand for power created by those, the peak demand will sort of double its usage. I'm just going to make up some numbers from like 2 MW to 4 MW.
David Roberts
Yeah, because like one of those, like one of those 18-wheeler chargers is like a megawatt.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. And they're not going to charge them all at the same time. They're going to use great software to manage that, et cetera. But they need more power, right.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Duncan Campbell
Many times they'll go to the utility and say, "Hey, I need more copper. Right. I need a bigger connection to get my peak demand." And the utility might say, "Here's what it costs and here's how long it's going to take." Much of the time it makes sense to install a large stationary battery at that site, which means the amount of extra power you need from the facility is less. Right. Because you can sort of spread your peak demand out over many hours.
David Roberts
Right.
Duncan Campbell
And so the customer will just do the math on that. Right. They'll say the battery investment's a certain amount versus what I would pay the utility, and then I consider the savings the battery can provide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Does this make sense? And if it makes sense, that's great, right. The system basically sent the signal to that customer, here's what more copper costs and how long it takes, and they weighed whether that's worth it or not. Right. And that's nice because then that utility's service upgrade department can go focus on some residential house that's getting a heat pump.
Right. That's good for the system.
David Roberts
Right. Good for the system, good for the utility, good for the grid operator, good for the customer.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. Basically, we just added a ton more load without increasing T&D spending in a manner that the customer paid for themselves because they were excited about it, because it somehow made sense to them. Right. And how it makes sense to them could be many things. It could be avoiding that upgrade. It could be also getting some backup power out of it. It could be preventing high demand charges, all this stuff. Right. So that's one model. A second model could be: You are a — and I work with businesses a lot, so that's probably where my examples come from.
But you're a business that isn't doing anything today or tomorrow different from what you did yesterday. And you just see your bills going up at 6% a year. Sometimes it's 10%, sometimes it's 3%. But it's going up on average a lot.
David Roberts
Due to the aforementioned T&D costs.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. For example, PG&E just got something like a 12% rate increase approved while simultaneously posting record profits. And whether or not that makes sense, like, I'm sure there's a bunch of good reasons for that. The commissioners who manage regulating the entities are good, blah, blah, blah. Whatever that means, it's just power shouldn't be getting that much more expensive every year. So folks will try to take matters into their own hands successfully. Right. And as they should, I would never tell someone, "Hey, don't look out for yourself." Right? So they install solar, they install storage.
They use that to reduce the amount of power overall that they consume, reduce their peak demand. It turns out that the way that their rates are designed often aren't cost-reflective. Right. So you get these cost shifts, you get the net metering battles, etcetera. And, yeah, perhaps that in a particular instance might not be great for the system because it just perhaps it's sort of like shifting costs. Right?
David Roberts
Yeah. The idea, just to spell that out a little bit, is, I think the idea is if a big load defects from the grid, basically, then the costs that they were paying to maintain the grid will then be spread over a smaller number of people and will rise. Basically. I think that's the worry for the system. Right?
Duncan Campbell
Yes. And so often people say, "Wow, look at that distributed energy is not good." Right. But it's very clear that the same sort of apparatus that is creating the conditions that lead to electricity costs rising very quickly is the same apparatus that leads to rates being designed poorly. Right. And so it's really not that DERs, in that case, are sort of bad for the system or something. It's just the system is asking them to do something that's quite dumb. And if the system continues to ask that of DERs, well, DERs will show up and do that.
Right. And I think this is what kind of the power system managers and analysts really have a hard time wrapping their heads around, which is these things are emergent. Right? They're not in utility IRPs, no central planners deciding "how many solar panels are we going to put up on houses this year?" Right. They just happen when the customer feels they need to do it. And so you can either send the customer good signals, and still a lot of them will happen, but in a way that you, as the system manager likes, or you can send the customer bad systems and you'll get a lot as well, but maybe in ways you don't like.
So I would just say, "Stop asking for them if you don't want them. Fix rates." Right?
David Roberts
Yes. We're not. We're not going to get deep into this because that's a whole thing. It's a whole separate podcast. But, you know, like, one of the points people in this area frequently make is utility rates are poorly designed: specifically, they do not reflect the actual cost to the system of electricity at different times and places. Because different, you know, electricity has different value depending on where and when it's generated. And rates don't reflect that. So at least some of these DERs are being built in response to bad signals in a way that they would not be built if there were cost-reflective rates.
Duncan Campbell
Correct. Then the key, I would say, though, is that those bad signals are the very same signals that are causing their bills to go up 6% a year without DERs. Right. So, like, don't blame the customers. Don't blame the DERs. Right. They're just protecting themselves from, I mean, violence. Right.
David Roberts
Right.
Duncan Campbell
That's what this is. And so you kind of have these two models where, like in California, I'm legitimately concerned about the beginnings of something that could look like a death spiral because of these, all these conditions.
David Roberts
I mean, politically, I mean. Cause California is practically on the flag of the clean energy transition, right? I mean, it is the sort of avatar of the clean energy transition. And if it runs into power bills that are so high, it creates a political backlash that justly or not, fairly or not, is going to redound against clean energy.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. Right. And you can fix things like net metering. Right? They fixed it. Now it's this thing called NEM 3.0. And it doesn't give you symmetrical rates, blah, blah, blah. And yes, you saw solar installations plop down, but now they're coming right back. And now they're just coming with storage. People are happy to do it. Right. So the problem is the rates are high. Right. So anyway, that's, I think, how we can think about this. But you have great examples of dealing with this too. Right. If California is one way, look at New York, right? New York state introduced this notion of, they call it VDER: the value of distributed energy.
It, in a cost-reflective way, compensates energy exports to the distribution system. And it kind of deals with all the nuanced, nerdy stuff about short run costs, long run costs, etcetera. And what you have is distribution connected solar and storage starting to play a really big role on the grid. And in a way that everybody's happy about, like, not even the utility is complaining about it.
David Roberts
So they're helping grids because the signals are more cost-reflective. They're inducing DERs to be put where they're actually needed by the system. Physically needed by the system. And that's good for grids. Good for grid managers.
Duncan Campbell
Operated in the manner that's good for the system, too. Charging and discharging at the right times, et cetera. Right. Helping reduce the long-run costs of upgrading substations during an era of load growth, all that stuff. Not to say it's perfect. There are challenges everywhere. I think those are two good examples of ways DERs will emerge. Again, whether we ask for them or not. They will emerge just sort of, which way are we going to ask for them?
David Roberts
Yeah, this is a point you made a couple of times. Which is that this explosion is going to happen regardless of policy. Regardless of whether things are done well. But I have, I guess, some questions about that. Because obviously, the value of resilience for the customer, right, just the ability to have some power during blackouts or brownouts or wildfires or whatever that exists regardless of policy, right. Regardless of what utilities do or how rates are built. And self-generation, if you're just interested in lowering your greenhouse gas emissions, that's a freestanding benefit. But a lot of the benefit that people get from DERs in practice are selling excess power.
And that is very policy sensitive. So why do you think that this DER explosion is so policy insensitive? Why do you make that argument?
Duncan Campbell
It's a good question, and certainly it's not entirely insensitive. But I mean, again, I think in the energy space, we do a pretty bad job at thinking in actual ten-year time periods. We do when it comes to big, fixed investments, but we don't when it comes to technology. We saw that with utility-scale wind and solar. 20 years ago, people were like, "this will never work." And then ten years ago, they were like, "we'll have a little bit of that." And then today, it's just everything, right? All new power plants.
David Roberts
We never learn. It's always faster than we think. And we never catch up. Our models never catch up.
Duncan Campbell
And certainly the early waves of distributed solar and storage, rooftop solar, et cetera, probably were brought on by, I would say, sort of rich policy — things like straight up, symmetrical net metering, big solar RECs. The stuff someone like, say, Jesse Jenkins might critique, which I think is a fair critique. Because those things often don't make a lot of sense. Maybe that initial wave. But we're just at the beginning of the wave of it, it just works on its own merits now. We get rid of bad net metering. There's no solar incentive in California that a utility system doesn't receive.
Right. A rooftop solar system in California doesn't get net metering anymore. It gets NEM 3.0, which is cost-reflective and determined by all these sort of quantitative people to make sure it's not giving you extra money. And it was this sort of big win. There's no utility grant or anything like that. Right. And it still gets deployed. So we're just sort of at the beginning, I'd say, of distributed energy systems really just being able to show up and do their thing without having to really consider the policy environment.
Hmm. One more question about that, and this is also probably something that is worth a bigger pod about. But it seems to me like one of the big growth areas for DERs is "front of the meter" DERs. And just so listeners get a sense of what that means. So it's "behind the meter" is the kind of traditional, like, you have your meter on the outside of your house, and then basically, like everything, your solar panel and your battery and all your other stuff are behind that meter. So the meter just sees, all you see from the meter is net demand.
David Roberts
The meter doesn't know necessarily what's going on behind it, that's balancing out. It just sees that net number. And that's, I think, what most people think about when they think about DERs, is behind the meter. Customer-owned DERs. But the definition of DER is just energy resources at the distribution level. And you could theoretically or not theoretically, you do have in some places now starting, you know, sort of like a mid-sized solar field at the distribution level, which is hooked directly up to the distribution grid. In other words, not behind a customer meter. It's hooked directly up to the grid just the way a big power plant would be hooked directly up to the transmission grid. You know, and that opens up — so, like, you know, if I'm a customer, I generally only want enough solar to cover my needs, say, but if I have a giant warehouse, I might not even, you know, like, maybe like a fraction of that warehouse would serve my needs.
But if the utility can basically treat my warehouse roof like land and just install all the solar it can bear and just have that feed directly into the distribution grid that's in front of the customer meter, utility-owned but distributed. And this is just a long way of asking: it seems like that because it's not directly tied to customer needs, that is policy dependent?
So maybe talk a little bit about where you're seeing front of the meter distributed and how that fits into this picture.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, certainly distribution connected solar and storage is what makes up, for example, New York state's community solar market, which is really just compensating those systems on the VDER rate, which is just the rate you get instead of net metering if it's behind the meter. Right. I mean, that's policy dependent in the sense that, yes, something like VDER has to exist, which just gives it a revenue mechanism, which is fair.
David Roberts
It's taken off in Texas, too, is it not? I mean, they got a bunch in Texas, don't they?
Duncan Campbell
Texas is a little different because there's no thing like VDER. There's no sort of, like, construct for it. Texas is kind of, I mean, as you might expect, like cowboy land for power. And folks are installing some distribution connected stuff just because perhaps there's cheap land or something like that. If it's front of the meter, there's behind the meter happening, too, for other reasons. But, yeah, no front of the meter is certainly going to be a big thing. I think we're getting back to what unique value does distributed energy offer that sort of traditional, centralized energy does not.
And certainly one of the things it offers is that by being connected to the distribution system, it means you need potentially less transmission, fewer substations, all that stuff. Right. The T&D benefits. The second benefit is certainly backup, which you can only get really behind the meter today, at least. Although, who knows? Perhaps someone can pull off community microgrids.
David Roberts
But until that happens, well, in our mutually dreamed of future, we'll have distribution system operators and distribution systems that could theoretically island off from the big transmission system. And the whole thing could be the distribution system could be a microgrid.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, that's definitely possible. I think there are real fundamental issues to sort out there to make that one happen. That's definitely policy dependent.
David Roberts
For sure.
Duncan Campbell
But I also think we sometimes overthink what DERs can be. Right. There's this new induction stove that has a battery in it.
David Roberts
Oh, yes.
Duncan Campbell
Why does it have a battery in it? It's because running thick enough copper to the stove can be expensive. And it turns out it's just cheaper to put a battery in the stove in a factory. Right. So I think sometimes we forget or not forget, but we sort of look at DERs with, like, the hubris of understanding what they actually will be in the future. Right? Similarly, we're seeing EV chargers with batteries built into them, but also just, you know, smart thermostats have been around for a long time. There's some future where just all your appliances start to think about this stuff in a way that's totally hands off and doesn't inconvenience you whatsoever.
Right? So we just have to get out of this sort of paradigm of like, "it's all planable and understood in advance." Right. Energy is becoming a technologically determined outcome as opposed to sort of a system and planning outcome. You of course, need system planning.
David Roberts
But that's what freaks the utilities out, isn't it? I mean, that's kind of what, that's a little bit what's freaking ISOs out.
Duncan Campbell
And for good reason.
David Roberts
They would like to plan.
Duncan Campbell
They need to operate this thing, right? They need to operate the grid. So I certainly don't begrudge that perspective. But again, they will emerge. It's just, there's no stopping it, really. Right. This stove company, for example, they put a battery in the stove just because it solved their problem. It wasn't some grand view on the grid. And, "oh, there's this incentive in this demand response program, and if we stack these..." No, it's just the thing to do. So we're going to see a lot of that
David Roberts
Where this comes in, I think where this intersects with planning, for one reason, is I sort of mentioned it in passing in the intro, but a lot of utilities are facing this dilemma that we've sketched out, you know, rising demand, et cetera, et cetera. And they're turning to gas plants. They're starting to go back to gas plants just because they understand gas plants. They know how to build them. They're reliable, always on supply.
Duncan Campbell
Sort of.
David Roberts
And if you — yeah, ish. And if you could incorporate an expansive vision of DERs into your planning, maybe you wouldn't do that.
Maybe you wouldn't turn to gas. So, like, it would be nice if we could incorporate them into planning somewhat.
Duncan Campbell
Agreed. Yeah, no, certainly it would be a good thing. And we try to do a lot to make that happen, I think. Yeah. The point I just keep trying to hit is that they'll happen no matter what. Right. It's just sort of inevitable at this point. The last one I'll say on that point is if you believe EVs are a better technology than internal combustion engines for, let's say, 70% of car users, every building is going to have multiple DERs present at it that are actually enormous. Right. So whether that's just scheduling the charging of those EVs or discharging them just into the building, not even exporting to the grid or getting the policy approval to export them to the grid.
The DERs future is just coming. There's no way we can avoid it.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. It really becomes clear when you think of EVs as DERs. It really makes the point clear that, like, there's just a bunch of DERs coming. Like. Like, no matter what grid managers want, the EV market is exploding. And so they're, you know, even if nothing else happened, voila, there's, like, multiple gigawatts of DERs floating around the country. So you either deal with them rationally or have them become a giant, unpredictable, flailing load that you — that screws up your whole system.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. My view with all this stuff, basically, at the end of the day, is to sort of policymakers and planners, what I would say is "The DER tsunami is coming. You can't stop it. Let's figure out how to use it." And then to builders and entrepreneurs and investors, I would say "The DER tsunami is coming, get on board." And this is really true. Right. I think it's just sort of in this moment that the community of people who want to build power system components, technologies, invest in projects are realizing that this is happening. Right. When we started Scale six or seven years ago, finding the opportunities where we could make an advanced solar plus storage microgrid with all these fancy controls and stuff work, I wouldn't say it was like finding a needle in a haystack.
But it was challenging to the extent that we were focused on indoor agriculture customers who had all these problems.
David Roberts
Wait, was it economics that made it hard, or was it just. Nobody knew what the hell you were talking about?
Duncan Campbell
It was economics. It was economics that made it hard. Right. All this stuff was expensive, so you had to find the perfect situations where the utility rates were high enough and the customer need for backup power, like, blah, blah, blah. Today it's so much easier. Half the projects I look at work, and that is slowly trickling through the community of infrastructure investors, equipment manufacturers, it's just like, contractors, people who install stuff that's just becoming realized today.
David Roberts
Right, and as we keep saying, all that's getting cheaper, even as utility bills are getting more and more expensive. Like, those two trend lines are very clear and moving in opposite directions.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. They're, like, anti correlated. Yeah. And, you know, just three or four years ago, everyone was worried about, say, for example, lithium prices. And, you know, today they're ten times cheaper than they used to be. Just go on Tesla's website and look at the price for a megapack. It's extraordinarily cheap relative to where it was five years ago. And that's just going to keep going. And then there will be new things like sodium ion batteries, et cetera. So as the sort of infrastructure supporting DERs ramps up, the financing, the contracting, the purchasing, the software systems for designing these, et cetera, as all that ramps up, we are also going to see kind of like, the weight of DERs abilities improve.
And to date, that's been very minimal because it was harder. So it's just very clear, I think, to anyone who's in the game that things are about to get very crazy.
David Roberts
Very DER. Very DER.
Duncan Campbell
Yes, very DER. We're entering the thunderdome. Yeah.
David Roberts
We only have a few minutes left, not nearly enough time for the introduction of a radical regulatory reform proposal. Nonetheless, just for funzies here at the end. I think we've — just to sort of review, we've established there are all these trends pushing demand up, making it difficult for the bulk power system to respond to all that. All that pressure is setting DERs up for success, even as DER costs fall and fall and the usage opportunities grow and familiarity increases and software gets better, et cetera. So those two trend lines are moving in the opposite direction, yielding an inevitable DER tsunami.
So, just as a way to see us out here, let's toss your big idea out, if nothing else, just so listeners can marinate on it. And I'd love to hear what they think about it. Lay it on us.
Duncan Campbell
Okay, so when considering how best we can integrate this tsunami into the system, deliver great societal benefits, et cetera. There's one sort of view out there, which, on the DER Task Force podcast, we recently discussed with Pier LaFarge, who runs this company, Sparkfund. His view is basically, "let's empower utilities to build DERs." We'll have them integrate it into their system planning. They'll run giant RFPs to procure them. Customers won't necessarily see the benefits on their bill. They'll just see the benefits in the system getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper. And there's something to that.
David Roberts
And the logic, we should say, the logic to that is, if you want to get around utility resistance to all this —
Duncan Campbell
Put them in charge.
David Roberts
the best way to do that is to put them in charge. And so that they own the stuff, then they can rate base the stuff, they can get a rate of return on the stuff. They can control it and plan it. This is sort of, I would say the easiest way to get utilities on board would be to do this.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, and it has this sort of proven socialized cost model where you kind of just like, make big investments, everybody pays it off slowly. You get cheap money from Wall Street. And I'm not necessarily allergic to socialized costs. They've built a lot of great things for us. Right. But the thing I'm a little concerned about is the central planning involved in that. Just because DERs are so emergent and so new, I think it's very hard to concentrate our ability to pull this off and just like a handful of people who are in the room making these plans.
Right?
David Roberts
Yes. And we should point to the history of utilities dealing with new kinds of power technologies. Like, there's not a long record of prescience, let's say.
Duncan Campbell
Remember when folks said, like, for example, "we'll never get past 5% variable renewable penetration," like all that stuff? Right?
David Roberts
Yes. Utilities were in charge in planning that would get written into IRPs. Right. Like that would become true because they think it's true, and then they would make it true.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah. So I'll propose basically the opposite of that and purposefully push the envelope a little bit here. But I think it's worth considering in the spectrum of wherever we'll go with this. And I can promise you the future, however far out it is, I'm not sure, and how we deal with this stuff will be very different than how we deal with it today. So, there is white space to be filled here. I would say the utility does all this stuff and plans all this stuff because building the T&D, the transmission distribution system, is a so-called natural monopoly.
Right, right. A thing in which it is better for all if only one entity does it. Competition is bad.
David Roberts
Right, right. You don't want multiple companies building multiple power lines to the same place so that they can compete. This was one of the early decisions in the regulatory compact, is one entity needs to be in charge of the wires.
Duncan Campbell
Yes, yes. And I don't know. There's plenty of debate to be had there. I don't, it generally makes sense. Like, I don't think it's black and white, but it generally makes sense. I don't want to get into that right now.
David Roberts
I'll add one other thing just to set you up here, which is that it used to be that the "natural monopoly" was the whole power system: was generation, transmission, distribution, billing, et cetera. And over time, that monopoly has been whittled away a little bit. We've broken off pieces of it and opened up pieces of it to private competition, sort of famously restructuring. We took the generation piece and said there's no reason for a utility to have a monopoly over generation. It's a good place for a market. And so we have power markets where generators compete on price.
So the original monopoly vision was not written on stone tablets and delivered to us. It was a contingent thing, and it has been altered numerous times.
Duncan Campbell
And I'd even say if you're someone who's maybe a little allergic to what sounds like privatization, I understand that. I'd say in these power markets, the private developers also compete with the public entities and often lose. In New York, NYPA is a publicly owned entity which has generation and transmission, and it's cheap, and it forces private developers to kind of do better. Right. And there's a goal for NYPA to build a whole lot more via the Build Public Renewables Act. And that's great, I think. Right. Like, let's test the socialized model against the private model, and some will win in some cases and not others.
Still doesn't mean you need the investor-owned utility to run the show. So what I would propose is that let's just say transmission and distribution wires, substations, hardware, et cetera, is, in fact, fully 100% of the time a natural monopoly, and that we want to figure out how to utilize DERs because they have these transmission and distribution cost reduction benefits. Well, I would say those things are really virtual wires. They're not wires. Right. They're just sort of the absence of wires. Right. And that definitely isn't a natural monopoly.
David Roberts
And this is not a new concept, virtual wires. Like, even now, I think in New York, they hold auctions for, basically, it's like they'll put out bidding for a power line. Instead of bidding a power line, you can bid, I will install XYZ technologies that remove the need for this power line. And that is considered a virtual power line, basically. So this is a concept that's been around a while.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, and it's often referred to as a non-wires alternative. Has it been done well? There's a ton of stuff to argue about, but what I would say is that service to the power system certainly isn't a natural monopoly, neither in design, construction, financing, or operation. Maybe operation, you could argue. So what I would suggest is that — first of all the the system operator should be separate from the utility company. Just like at the transmission level, we have a system operator that's separate from the power production groups. The system operator at the distribution level should be separate from the investor-owned utility.
David Roberts
This is the DSO model: distribution system operator. We will be having more pods on that in the future.
Duncan Campbell
When that entity who's in charge of the system planning, because we still need to plan it. This is an orchestrated system; you can't just totally wing it. When that entity determines, for example, substation A is going to need to be upgraded soon because of all this load growth — Sam Altman has figured out artificial general intelligence, and it's everywhere now.
David Roberts
In the few years we have left before it destroys us all.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. When that happens, they should essentially hold an RFP, a request for proposals, an auction, if you will, and they should determine the need and the technical requirements and validation of being able to serve that need. The utility should get the sole right to bid on the physical hardware way of supplying that need. You know, building wires, putting more stuff in the substation, etcetera. And then anyone should be able to bid on the other stuff, right? Which is maybe there's —
David Roberts
The virtual stuff.
Duncan Campbell
And it could be all sorts of stuff, right? Maybe there's a company that installs home insulation that's going to reduce your heat pump's demand on the worst day. Well, that's a virtual wire, right? It also could be a company like Scale doing commercial and industrial microgrid systems and everything in between.
David Roberts
So, like if it's around a particular transformer, that there's congestion or overload. If I go to houses connected to that particular transformer and install insulation on all of them, thereby reducing their demand for all the houses in that particular area, I have obviated the need for that transformer upgrade. I have basically provided a virtual transformer upgrade.
Duncan Campbell
Yes. And I will say it's easier said than done. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen to really validate that, right?
David Roberts
Yes.
Duncan Campbell
And probably that includes collaborating with the system operator on how to make sure, for example, your battery's discharging at the right time. Also, questions about connectivity. So is that house 100% of the time connected to that substation, or is there switching going on? Which does happen. There's a bunch of stuff to do. So I'm not saying it's simple, but essentially all those entities would bid on this. And then comes the next part, which is, well, how are we going to finance this?
What is the sort of financing mechanism that makes this happen? And one might say, well, the way to do this is the utility has access to the rate base, which is the socialized cost mechanism. So the utility can then invest in those projects. So basically pay for those projects and rate base them. And that's perhaps one way, but I would probably purport putting numbers in a rate base certainly isn't a natural monopoly. Right? Anybody could do that. We have spreadsheets, we have sophisticated ways of tracking costs and expenses. So I'm not really sure why just the utility would do that, really.
Anyone should be able to do that, including other utilities, by the way. So, like, if in ConEd territory, there's a need to upgrade a substation, ConEd will bid on building and financing the hardware upgrade. But maybe PPL in Pennsylvania will say, "We actually have this great system for controlling batteries in people's houses. And we want to do that, and we want to get it in the rate base." There's no really reason that there should be a monopoly on the rate base if we believe that is a good socialized cost recovery mechanism.
David Roberts
All right, just to make this clear to listeners, you're talking about potentially ratepayers paying private companies to do what amounts to infrastructure upgrades.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, I'm talking about ratepayers paying the private company that gives them the best price. Right? Versus just paying one private company offering one solution. Right. Let's make all of them offer various solutions at various prices with various costs of capital and see what happens. And you don't have to go with the DERs, by the way. Like, if the system operator doesn't think they're going to be reliable, doesn't think they're cost-effective, don't do it. Right. But that is the only way for us to actually develop the knowledge of what do these things cost, who will finance them, what are their capabilities? Is to start holding the auctions.
David Roberts
Right. Because otherwise, as you point out, the other way is if the utility determines that DERs would be a cheaper alternative to upgrading the transformer today, all they can really do is rate base incentives to private companies to build the DERs, which is a little bit of a roundabout way of doing the same thing.
Duncan Campbell
The utility is just a financier there, then they have no particular role in it. Otherwise, there's a lot of folks with capital out there. Right. And it just seems that we should be trying to drive that cost down as low as humanly possible. And some of these upgrades or these so-called DERs may be so simple that you can just roll it into your mortgage or something like that at an incredibly low cost of capital. Right. So it just seems to me that if we have the goal of "quarantining the monopoly," which is a phrase used by Lynne Kiesling, who's sort of in all this stuff, then we really should.
Right. And, yeah, where those solutions could be provided by another understanding that traditional transmission distribution is a natural monopoly, but where a virtual wire can do the job, why not have all sorts of people kind of in the mix trying to do the best job there?
David Roberts
Right. And you could see, like, down the line, a DSO, a distribution system operator having a portfolio that's, like, I don't know, like, half physical wires it owns and transformers it owns and half just DER contracts with companies.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, which should penalize those companies if they don't perform, like all the normal stuff. Right. So there shouldn't be any, like, special awards given to DERs because we like them. Right? No, they got to perform. And, yeah, I think to some folks, this idea will sort of reek of, like, financialization or something like that. And I don't really see it that way. I would really just say when it comes to integrating DERs into the system, do you want, like, per sort of atomic moment of that occurring, do you want, like, 50 minds thinking about it and coming up with the best answer or, like, 5000?
David Roberts
Right, right. I mean, 'cause there are some things, I think even us dyed-in-the-wool lefties — or not to speak for you, just for me — even as a dyed-in-the-wool-lefty, there are some things that I will happily concede markets are really good at. Like, markets are excellent tools for some things. And one of the things that they are legendarily very good at is price discovery. Like how to do something the cheapest way you let people compete to do it. Right. Like, that's a — markets are very good at that. So insofar as they can be, you know, circumscribed and not gamed and not, you know, corrupted, et cetera, et cetera, regulated well. They would be a great tool to find out what is the cheapest way to get reliability out of that distribution system.
Duncan Campbell
And I'll concede my proposal's a little radical.
David Roberts
It's fun, it's fun for that reason.
Duncan Campbell
People who work on policy love quick wins, and this definitely isn't one, but I want to put it out there as the other end of the spectrum. And perhaps where we need to land is somewhere in the middle. But this is what I think is, is the other side of the spectrum, which is no less valid than, say, "just let the IOU do everything and guys stop paying attention to this." So, that's what I'd put out there as another way this could work.
David Roberts
All right, awesome. So the DER tsunami is on the way, and everybody, most especially including utilities and PUCs, for Christ's sake, if I can just pound the table there, PUCs need to be thinking about what are the best, cheapest, most effective ways of ensuring that those DERs improve system performance and reliability rather than the other way around. That's our summary of today, do you agree?
Duncan Campbell
I think so. And I'd even say if you're sort of a state regulator and your utility's rates are astronomically high and growing at compound annual growth rates way beyond inflation, and you're seeing a lot of DERs get deployed to deal with that, and you're worried about the DERs: I'd probably worry about the rates. I think that's really the problem. Right. And we can get the rate design right and all that stuff. And I'd see the DERs as probably a — it's nice that the people in your state have some way to deal with that overwhelmingly challenging problem.
David Roberts
Yeah. All right. Well, Duncan, thank you. This is awesome. I love talking about DERs. I recommend everyone to the DER Task Force. If you really want to geek out, dive into rate design and all that good stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for taking the time.
Duncan Campbell
Yeah, this was fun. Thanks, David.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.
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