In this episode, Jesse Morris of international nonprofit Energy Web discusses his group’s work toward building a transparent and trusted “operating system” for distributed energy resources, with an end goal of enabling a more sophisticated and resilient energy grid.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Recent years have seen an explosive rise in distributed energy resources (DERs) — energy devices that are located “behind the meter,” on the customer side, like solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), and smart appliances.
Distributed energy has the potential to change the grid for the better, making it cleaner and more resilient, but as things stand, there’s a problem.
Consider an EV. The customer has a relationship to it, a way to see its capacity and behavior; it wants to operate the EV in a way that best serves their own transportation needs. The aggregator — an entity that gathers DERs and treats them as a single entity, to sell their services — has a different relationship with the EV; it wants to operate the EV to meet contractual requirements. The distribution utility has a different relationship; it wants to operate the EV to maintain grid stability. And the market manager (ISO) has yet a different relationship; it wants to operate the EV in the way that best serves the market.
All these entities want different things from the EV, but they’ve all built bespoke systems to track it — systems that do not communicate with one another. Consequently, most DERs are wildly underutilized.
This can not last. Confusion and crossed wires will only grow with distributed energy. What the world needs is a common, transparent, trusted way to track DERs, their capacity and interaction with the grid.
That is what Energy Web, an international nonprofit, aims to provide: “an operating system for DERs” that will assign each DER a record on the blockchain (yes, the blockchain), allowing all interested entities to have a common source of information and tracking.
I am a bit of a skeptic of toward blockchain hype, but this seems like an excellent use of it, which could unlock a much more sophisticated and resilient grid. I’m eager to talk to Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris about what the product is, how it can help DERs, and where we might see it adopted next.
Alright, then. With no further ado, Jesse Morris of Energy Web. Thanks for coming to Volts.
Jesse Morris
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
David Roberts
You know, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of Energy Web, but I feel like we should do a little background, a little scene setting, a little contexting. So let's start, then, because Energy Web is, I think, primarily a way of solving the problems, some of the problems posed by distributed energy. And so I don't want to assume too much background knowledge on the part of listeners. So why don't you just really quickly sort of tell us what qualifies as distributed energy? What's the sort of technical definition of distributed energy? What is it? How much of it is there? How much is coming on board? And what challenge does it pose to the grid?
Jesse Morris
So I think that is a very accurate statement, in terms of our primary focus at Energy Web and the problems we're trying to solve. For us, distributed energy, and I'll add the additional word on here, distributed energy resources. What are we talking about there, at least in kind of Energy Web's world? So we're really talking about any kind of electricity using, storing, or generating device. So that could range from a battery in a home, a battery in a commercial and industrial building, an electric vehicle, a charge point, a heat pump, any kind of load that can be flexed over time.
So our definition of distributed energy resources, at least in terms of the work that we're doing, is actually quite broad. And if I think about the challenges and opportunities there, these are things that anyone working kind of under the broad umbrella of the energy transition, especially you, David, would be super familiar with. We know that in many grids around the world, we're undergoing one of the biggest shifts in the 100+ year history of the grid. More and more customers are adopting these distributed energy resources. Again, I'm sitting here in California, massive amounts of rooftop solar coming online.
The model three is the fastest selling and the best selling automobile in the state. So all of these distributed energy resources, in some places, are presenting problems. We do a lot of work in Australia, where they have too much solar at specific times of the day. It's literally backfeeding into the transmission system. It's unbelievable. But then we also are in places where those same resources can provide immense value to the grid. My electric vehicle can help reduce congestion at certain times of the day to prevent our overhead lines from overheating and starting more wildfires. So a little bit of the context about what we're focused on.
David Roberts
As I've thought about distributed resources over the years, I think, in the beginning, most people are, I think intuitively, most people still just think solar panels, and kind of batteries, sort of the generating and storing of energy. But as you note, any energy consuming device in the house that can be controlled, really counts as an energy resource, as a distributed energy resource. So, like your water heater. Very sort of banal household appliances, we're kind of starting to think about them now as energy resources, which is really a new way of looking at things. But the one piece about distributed energy that I think is worth adding is that all these devices that you're talking about are what's called "behind the meter", which means from the utility's point of view, the utility comes and reads your meter, and that's how much energy you use.
So it does not know what is going on behind the meter. I think a key part of this is just that these distributed energy resources are operating largely out of sight of utilities.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. That is the problem that we're trying to solve at Energy Web. We are trying to make it possible for all of these devices to be seen and be able to communicate by these utilities. And maybe a little context there. My background. I worked at RMI, or Rocky Mountain Institute, for about ten years. And my tenure there, I can't tell you how many times I walked into a boardroom or with some executives at a utility or another energy company, and we had these beautiful charts and models showing how much money different companies could make by taking all of these distributed energy resources and bidding them into wholesale markets, and eventually, with regulations changing, bidding them into local, I'd call them "distribution markets" for electricity run by local utilities.
And the charts were beautiful, the performers are beautiful, but you had to make two pretty fundamental assumptions. One, that regulations would continue to evolve, which as you know, is ...
David Roberts
Not always something you can bet on.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. But the second thing, and this is why I spun Energy Web, myself and several other colleagues at RMI spun Energy Web out, is it was very clear to pull off any of these business models we were talking about, software was going to be needed. And these utilities, it's not an innovative place necessarily. Building software means using Zoom in a lot of cases. So that's really where this came from. We said, "Well, wait a minute, can we start a new organization to build open source software to crack this problem of giving grid operators visibility into these assets that sit behind the meter?"
David Roberts
Yeah. And one more thing to add, maybe, you're referring to the many potential benefits that could come, if these things are seen and coordinated in some rational way. But I just want to emphasize one last time before we move on, that from the utilities point of view now, not being able to see them, it's not just that they're leaving benefits on the table, it's causing them severe problems because utilities turn power plants on and off to meet demand. And demand traditionally, as you know, has been pretty predictable, right? It goes up and down. It goes up when everybody gets home from work and then down at night.
And it's relatively predictable for utilities how much power they're going to need. But if you've got like a solar panel generating behind the meter, from the utilities side of the meter, that just looks like demand going down, right? Demand from that household going down. Only now, because you've got all these thousands and thousands of DERs, of distributed energy resources, behind all these meters, suddenly demand is just becoming less predictable for the utilities, right? Because you got things generating and storing and timing their consumption behind the meter, you can't see any of it. So all of a sudden your sort of very predictable demand curves, that you're used to sort of orienting around, are starting to look wonky and weird.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. And I'd say I'd push it even further. Two examples come to mind for me. So another one in Australia, there's so much solar being exported at the distribution network that grid operators there, today, need a tool to be able to communicate directly with smart inverters and shut off those solar systems. Most cases they don't have that.
If I spin around the world to Europe, so far we've been talking about customer-owned resources that sit behind the meter, they actually have this problem with their own equipment in some places. A lot of sensors that are used and a lot of automation equipment on distribution networks. They're actually using relatively analog technology to kind of track where those assets are and communicate with them. And so, even there, you might have some industrial sensors that you're using some old school technology to actually collect data from them, instead of having a nice dashboard to show you the temperature of your distribution network in different places. So it's not just customer-owned resources that are operating a little bit with kind of old school methodologies and technologies. It's also some utility-owned ones.
David Roberts
It's a little wild, and I won't do all this, but many people have remarked how amazing it is that the grid works at all.
Jesse Morris
Shocking.
David Roberts
You can't store electricity, at least you couldn't until very recently, at least very well. So you have to be generating exactly in concert with demand at all times, 24 hours of the day. And they've been doing this for a century without clear visibility into the things that are at the end of the lines, right, the edge of the grid. It's just amazing that it's been pulled off as long as it has. But the idea that, "oh, we should have some real time awareness of what's going on out there on the grid that we're trying to manage," it just seems so obvious. It's crazy that it's only just now coming along.
Jesse Morris
I continue to be surprised. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting with a grid operator and made an assumption, being a millennial in their mid-30s and has a supercomputer in their pocket. "Wait a minute, you're telling me you haven't thought about sending me a digital communication to maybe not use electricity at a certain time? And you're talking about, let's make sure we send Jesse a flyer to engage in a demand response problem." I mean, that's a real conversation I just had.
David Roberts
I love it. I love it. Direct mail. They're still in the direct mail phase of things. It's crazy how primitive some of the pieces of it are. So there have been some efforts to try to address this, and to try to sort of make use of distributed energy in a more coherent way, but it hasn't really taken off much. So, like, for instance, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, issued this Order 2222. I'm not sure what's the right industry way to say that. Is there some slang?
Jesse Morris
I think you got it.
David Roberts
22-22? I don't know.
Jesse Morris
Sure.
David Roberts
Meant to sort of authorize DERs to bid into wholesale energy markets, so that all the energy that's generated that isn't self consumed by the consumer doesn't just go to waste. And there have been sort of efforts in this direction in the EU, but your sort of take is that they have fallen short. Nothing's really gotten along. So what are the efforts so far? And why haven't they done much good?
Jesse Morris
Unfortunately, I kind of said there's two things you need to believe for these DERs to be being fully utilized, right. One is these regulatory barriers need to be overcome, and the second is you need technology to go out and get them. We're really focused on number two, in particular, and one of the reasons we're focused on number two is because one of the reasons, that are at least put forth by key people in some of these utilities, especially in the US, is that a grid largely relying on DERs to help balance the grid, instead of centralized thermal plants, just isn't reliable enough.
And our approach there is, say "No, no, no, let's prove that wrong. Let's show that we can give grid operators near real-time visibility and, potentially, control, if a customer allows it, into exactly when, for example, an electric vehicle is charged and with how many amps." So we're really focused on the technology side, but if we want to talk, I can offer a couple of, at least, observations on the regulatory front. I'm lucky enough to be able to have conversations with every time zone on the planet pretty much every day. We're really active in Western Europe. We have some projects in Turkey. If we spin all the way around the globe, we're very active in Australia, then here in the US we've got a lot going on.
So if you look globally, I mean there are opportunities for DERs to make money via either bidding into the wholesale market under some limited programs. So California is probably the best example of that. And then these local programs managed by, for lack of a better term, distribution utilities. So the companies that are running the distribution networks, and there's your traditional virtual power plant demand response programs. You hit the nail on the head though. If we're trying to generalize around the world, very few places can distributed energy resources have unfettered access to the wholesale energy market or to these, what I like to call, "distribution level markets", even though they don't really exist yet.
And David, you know better than me why that's going on. I mean, you should, perhaps, offer that synthesis.
David Roberts
Well, there's a bunch of reasons. I assume you're referring to the fact that utilities traditionally make money off building big infrastructure, and to the extent, consumers or customers are building that infrastructure for them, basically, which is what you're doing when you put solar panels on your roof and a battery in your garage. You're building a little piece of grid infrastructure. To the extent customers build it, utilities don't make any money off the building of it. The same problem that faces DERs and efficiency and anything else that might trim consumption of central thermal plants.
Jesse Morris
Yes, exactly. And there are other issues too. In Europe it's a little bit more nuanced. I would say the conversation in Europe about DER provision of services locally, and at the wholesale level, is a little bit more advanced than here in the US. I think more and more market participants are recognizing that there needs to be a way for them to be compensated. So there's a lot of really interesting work going on on these energy communities. There's a lot of different ways for some of these devices to be able to participate in the market. In Australia, there has emerged what I would call rough consensus on kind of what the market is going to look like as it relates to DERs.
Most of the 25 or so distribution utilities in the country are going to start offering more full-blown virtual power plant demand response programs. We call them "local service exchanges." So it's not just capacity shaving from DER, but it's, "Hey, I need X, Y or Z service at this time. What DERs can help?"
David Roberts
Right. Well, I want to get into some market structures later, but first, we've been sort of dancing around the topic, but now let's talk about it. You say, in one of the papers that you guys wrote, that, in some sense, these arguments over, "how to aggregate them, and how to get them into wholesale markets," are a little putting the cart before the horse. It's like, I think the analogy used, "It's like arguing whether Gmail or Hotmail is better before you have established an email protocol via which you can exchange emails." So with that said, sort of tell us what Energy Web is trying to do with all these DERs.
Jesse Morris
So our ultimate vision here is to make it as frictionless, as easy and as cheap as possible, for any DER to be either rolled off the manufacturing line at a manufacturing plant, or plugged in at a customer's house, or activated by an energy aggregator or retailer. Our vision is to make it just completely frictionless for that DER to be energized, and immediately digitally connected, and trusted by every grid operator that has a relationship with that device.
So I give a very specific example. I'm sitting in Northern California. My utilities, I have three: I have a community choice aggregator, I have my distribution utility, and then I have the California ISO that's managing the whole network. All three of those entities can extract value from my DER, assuming that regulatory piece is solved with at some point, but they are blind to that device right now. In this case, I'm talking an electric car.
So that's our vision. "How can we make it possible for my car to be automatically integrated to all of these different markets and programs, and so that these utilities can see it and interact with it?" And to just paint a picture of how acute this problem is right now, my colleagues and I recently counted in California, there are at least eight different programs for DER to provide some level of service to local utilities and regional.
Now get this. How many of those programs do you think are coordinated, as it relates to an underlying protocol or technology?
David Roberts
I'm guessing they're all bespoke?
Jesse Morris
You got it. Zero. So that is recognizing that we still have a lot of evolution that needs to happen on the regulatory side to unlock the value proposition of these DERs. We are saying, "let's just focus on the underlying technology to make it as easy as possible for all of these different assets to be trusted and able to communicate with each other."
David Roberts
Right. So the idea here is you make every DER transparent, basically, its capacity, its capabilities, what it's currently doing, what DER programs it's currently enrolled in, like who's getting what value out of it. All these things about the DER are just going to be accessible to all these different utility parties.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. Able to be trusted and to be able to transact and participate in these different ... we have to protect customer identity information. We have to protect person identifiable information. But no, you're right. It's all about making those DERs usable in these different markets and programs, and making that process as seamless and low cost as possible.
David Roberts
And so, related to this, there's something called a narrow waist protocol. And I'm wondering if I need to know what that means.
Jesse Morris
That's definitely an Andreessen Horowitz Silicon Valley term for technology. It might be useful. And this is where, if we want to go there, there is the whole blockchain Web3 of it all, if that's what you're trying to get at.
David Roberts
Well, I do want to know how that relates, but I think sort of, again, to go back to the email analogy, I think most people, most listeners, even not particularly tech savvy, will know that there is a sort of protocol — it's called SMTP — that structures all emails. And that's why any email can be read by any email program. And so you're basically trying to do that for DERs, right? Create a protocol that is universally acknowledged and universally accessible and readable.
Jesse Morris
Yeah, so the way the technology works, it's pretty simple to describe. Basically, we use these things called "digital identities" for every person, every DER, and every organization in our ecosystem. So basically every one of these DERs gets an identity. Those identities might sit in another aggregation of identities. And then every aggregator gets an identity, every utility gets an identity. So we basically construct these digital identities for every object in any grid where we're working. And then starting from those identities, which you could almost think of, like passports, we then enrich them with additional information about them: "Who installed them? Do we trust it to participate in this market or that market? What are the different characteristics about it?"
David Roberts
Sorry to interrupt, but once you've got the identity, is there any limit to the kinds of information you could add to it? I mean, I'm presumably you've started with basic stuff, but is there any technical limitation to how much information you can stuff in there?
Jesse Morris
The main thing is about latency. So if you have one of those identities, and you need to send very granular information at high frequency between identities ... let's think about frequency regulation in these wholesale markets, right. You can run into some very challenging engineering things where, "oh, my gosh, I now have 100 million DERs in California. 100 million of those things need to send some data every 2 seconds to the California ISO." You start to run into some scalability things. But then again, look, I'm an energy and climate guy. I think, David, on a podcast, I heard you talk the other day. You said, "Hey, everybody, the nerds have come to the energy transition." Well, if we unleash the nerds, so the incredibly talented software engineers and all those folks on that problem, it too can be solved.
David Roberts
I mean, I'm sure some of them can be solved, but it's interesting to sort of contemplate it. In a sense, electricity works at the speed of light, so in some sense, you're trying to move information around to get ahead of something that's moving at the speed of light. I can see how there could probably be some irresolvable problems at some point.
Jesse Morris
Definitely. And right now, most of the time-sensitive applications that we're building against is really more on the 5 to 15 minutes interval, of data being shared.
David Roberts
Which is plenty, we should note. You can get plenty out of that.
Jesse Morris
Definitely. But those identities, again, not to oversimplify how we work, but that's basically our technology stack works. You establish these identities, and there's a number of ways to do that. With some partners in Europe, we're actually working with SIM card manufacturers. So the cards that are in our phones, and they put those SIM cards into different devices, be they smart meters, or electric vehicles, or what have you. And then with those identities in the asset, you can literally trust it the moment it rolls off the manufacturing line, which is super interesting.
David Roberts
I mean, this feels like a dumb question, but is this a chip that needs to be attached in or onto all these devices? What does it look like? What's the actual ...
Jesse Morris
That's just one path. So if you talk about the SIM card, SIM cards can take a lot of different form factors. Literally, if you look at some of your credit card., you have a little chip in there.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah.
Jesse Morris
In many cases, that's a SIM card. And that can come in a variety of form factors. It could be in our car, it could be in your phone, it can be in a home energy gateway device, what have you. But that's not the only way, right? Because if we have to go around the world in retrofitting every IoT device, we haven't done this right.
David Roberts
Yes. I have in mind my humble water heater. And I'm just wondering, like, if I want my water heater to get an identity and play in these markets, what do I do? Do I stick something onto it?
Jesse Morris
If we are in a situation where you, or me, or our parents have to do anything to get paid a few bucks a day for your assets to provide services to the grid, we have failed. Let's just put that out there. So that's why the SIM card thing is interesting for long term, because we could maybe get these devices to be ready to rock from the beginning. But right now, most of our business is very closely focused on working with OEMs — so Volkswagen is an example of a company we work with — or aggregators. We basically conduct an integration with those companies.
So those companies are running their own servers, and those servers are having communications with all the different assets that they manage. And so we can actually conduct these kinds of integrations with those aggregators, with those manufacturers, to begin establishing these identities. Now, it's not as ideal from a kind of utopian and even a cybersecurity perspective. If you could go all the way to the edge of the grid directly, with every single asset, and have that, what's called in technology land a "root of trust", right, in every toaster, in every electric vehicle, that would be ideal. But that's going to take a really long time to get there, and climate change isn't waiting for us.
So our focus is, "Let's just move quickly." And that's why we work very closely with aggregators and OEMs.
David Roberts
So aggregators have an individual relationship with my hot water heater. How are they doing it? Like, are they communicating with my hot water heater somehow? I don't know why I'm obsessed with my hot water heater.
Jesse Morris
No, it's a good example. Have you had any aggregators on the pod?
David Roberts
No, I haven't. I should actually. I've been meaning to.
Jesse Morris
I think it'd be a super interesting conversation because I've had a very bipolar experience with the aggregators that we work with. Some of them are going crazy on technology and are using all sorts of tech to do what you described, which is to have a really tight digital relationship between their server and your water heater, so that they can control it and optimize it for bidding into these different markets. Other aggregators are still sending text messages, like, just to be clear. That's what's going on.
David Roberts
Text message, like, "turn your water heater down" and ...
Jesse Morris
Yeah.
David Roberts
Oh my god.
Jesse Morris
So it's really a broad spectrum, and I say that not even to throw them under the bus. They're performing an incredibly important mission, I think, which is enrolling these customers, so that their DERs can eventually make money.
David Roberts
We should actually pause here. I don't want to assume too much on listeners parts, but just to make it clear, an aggregator is an entity that goes and makes deals with hundreds or thousands of DERs and gains the ability to control them. And thus the sort of aggregation of DERs, in sum, acts like a big battery, or a big power plant. Basically, you can treat it as one entity, once you have it all coordinated, more or less, you can. I imagine if you're sending text messages, your sort of ability to be nimble is limited, but to some extent, right, that's what aggregators are. I just want to make sure everybody knew what we're talking about. So I say with some trepidation, tell me what the blockchain has to do with all of this.
Jesse Morris
I share the trepidation and you should hit me with a ... we can have a whole other part of this conversation on blockchain and Web3 and what's going on. I'm happy to offer my candid take on all that. For what we've described so far, it's actually pretty simple, and maybe a little bit of context is useful. When we started Energy Web, we had a strong hypothesis that blockchain could actually help us do some of the stuff that we've been talking about, thus far on this conversation. But we didn't know exactly what. We knew that some of the high level principles about what blockchains could be capable of sounded really interesting, and let's experiment with them.
And since we started Energy Web in 2017, coming all the way now to 2022, I'd say we found 200 ways to not use a blockchain in the energy transition.
David Roberts
The entire world is currently sifting through ways not to use blockchain, I think.
Jesse Morris
Yes. And we found a couple of ways that we think make pretty good sense. And so the way that we use it, in the applications that I've talked through here, is they act as an anchor for those identities. So if we're talking about any of these use cases that we've talked about, you've got those identities, and you've got some metadata associated with them, that needs to be seen and trusted by a lot of different companies. And each of those companies, they have their own It systems, right? So we can't get them to come in and use a single gigantic centralized piece of software. That has a number of problems, a number of challenges.
It's also incredibly cyber insecure. I mean, just look at all of these things that have happened with different centralized databases being compromised and hacked. So the way we use blockchain is each one of those identities I've talked about are anchored onto that blockchain, which doesn't mean that all of the data is sitting on a blockchain somewhere, but almost like a digital thumbprint of that identity sits on the blockchain, which makes it very easy for these different market participants, at the end of the day, to trust that that DER is what it says it is, and to verify that it has the credentials that it claims to have.
David Roberts
Is that what a token is? I'm waiting ... so rapidly past my background knowledge.
Jesse Morris
Not quite. So I'd separate cryptocurrency and tokens from how these blockchains are constructed. So if you have an address, which is like a wallet on one of these blockchains, and I have a wallet, which is almost like a bank account on one of these blockchains, we can send tokens to one another. But these identities, that doesn't have to do with the tokens at all. It's almost like every one of these identities has one or multiple addresses on the blockchain that is associated with it. And so that's how the verification and check happens. Now, we still do use tokens, and there are other ways to use multiple tokens in blockchain.
But for us, the primary, most important thing here is using blockchain to act as this universal anchor for identity. And I should say, we're not the only ones doing this. Microsoft has a very interesting project about creating digital identities for college students and anchoring them onto blockchain, so they have an entire business around that. It's really interesting.
David Roberts
So we don't lose track of our college students. The whole thing about the blockchain, too, is that it's not sitting in some central database. There are basically copies of it all over the place. So there's no sort of way to get at — you can't corrupt it.
Jesse Morris
Correct. It becomes much more challenging to corrupt it. It becomes much more challenging to attack it. And I don't want to, actually, maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on the Web3 and blockchain folks. We're also experimenting with using it in very innovative ways. So if I put my energy hat back on for a second. Let's pretend that we're with a couple of utilities, and we're in a situation where there's a demand response program, and there's a wholesale energy market, and you have aggregators bidding DER into both of those markets at the same time. Well, somebody's got to run a solver.
Somebody has to decide, "Okay, given the constraints of the distribution utility and the bids and offers going to the wholesale market, we need to make sure there's no double counting going on, and we need to make sure that those services are going to the right places." That's a pretty complicated kind of solve. And most of the companies offering that to the market today, it's kind of done in a black box, which is, "hey, trust us, this works." So one of the blockchain concepts we're building, as we speak, is, "let's decentralize that function. Let's make it so that that matching algorithm, and that solved function, is actually being performed by a decentralized network of computers who are all competing to output the best result."
So that's bringing kind of how blockchains work into the energy sector and that's where these technologies can unlock an immense amount of value. So when I see the Metaverse, NFTs, it's very frustrating for me, and frankly our whole organization, to say, "look, we're actually proving how this technology can unlock real world value and help fight climate change." But sorry, I digress.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's hard to distinguish yourself from that large swamp right now. I'm sure over time that stuff will shake out, it won't all be lumped together. So here we are then. We got a bunch of DERs, thousands of DERs, each of whom now have an individual digital identity, which is anchored on the blockchain so that any utility, my distribution utility, my market manager, my aggregator, whatever can look at that identity and see what that device is doing, what it's committed to, like its capacity, et cetera. So that information becomes secure and transparent to everyone involved.
Jesse Morris
That's right. And at the end of the day, what we're just trying to enable is so that those devices can provide full value to the distribution network and full value to the transmission network, all with one plus one equaling two, as it relates to what that device is actually doing for the network.
David Roberts
Right. Not double counting. Alright, so we have this system now we're tracking DERs. So tell me then, give me an example of where is this being used in the world? And how is it being used thus far?
Jesse Morris
So I think that the real tip of the spear example, as with so many things in the energy transition, when we talk about the grid, has got to be in Australia. I mean, we have massive amounts of rooftop solar. I think half of homes now have rooftop solar in the country. You have these wild events with just an immense amount of backfeeding happening from the distribution networks because there is so much solar on the grid. You have more and more customers adopting batteries, and now electric vehicles are just starting to kind of really take market share against combustion-fueled cars.
David Roberts
Again, totally screwing up the demand curve that the utility sees. Like now, once you have a battery, a home battery, and an EV and panels interacting with your consumption of energy, your demand profile just becomes completely opaque and unpredictable, unless they have some visibility into these devices.
Jesse Morris
So unpredictable that the CEO of AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, which basically manages the wholesale market there. The CEO recently said, and I'm not directly quoting here, but, "We need to be able to manage a regularly 100% renewable by 2025," right? So this isn't something that's coming in the future. This isn't, "let's hem and haw about regulations." No. "Let's go." Right? So in Australia, what we're doing is using this technology approach we've talked about, we're building for them. It's a distributed energy resource data exchange that does exactly what we've talked about. We're partnered with some of the distribution utilities.
We have four aggregators on board and we're working directly with AEMO, Australian Energy Market Operator — they manage the wholesale grid, again — to do what we've talked about. So basically to make it really easy for distributed energy resources to participate in what's called a "local service exchange" — so that's a market for services from DER managed by the distribution utilities — and doing it in such a way that those aggregators can also bid their assets into the wholesale market, without those two programs kind of tripping over each other. So that's what we're bringing to market. And it's more interesting for other reasons too.
Distribution utilities need a way to communicate with solar systems, so they can shut them off, which we talked about earlier. They need a way just to know what the heck is on their system. I mean, that in and of itself is valuable, right? So that's what we're building for them. And we're also doing another version of it in Western Australia for the market participants on that part of the country.
David Roberts
So I want to draw one thing out. I mean, you mentioned that, obviously, part of this is preventing DERs from inadvertently doing damage by backfeeding, or things like that. But also you say this is about fully utilizing them. So just explain a little bit like why, in the current regime, they're not being fully utilized and what this sort of transparent information about them would enable.
Jesse Morris
Right now, in most places around the world, batteries in particular — if we just take batteries as an example of a DER — they are paperweights, to be blunt. When I was still at RMI, we did some analysis about these large batteries in commercial and industrial buildings that were bought to pull down peak electric demand, so that you could avoid demand charges in some of these different markets. A lot of our analysis showed that those very expensive, very slick, state of the art batteries were sitting unused for 95% of the year. And one of the primary reasons for that is because, well, there just weren't other ways to make money with that battery.
You weren't allowed to participate in the market. So in places like Australia, where now the grid operators are moving to a point where there are multiple products and markets that those assets can participate in, that's where we come in with the tech, that's where we come in with that protocol, to make sure that those assets can seamlessly participate in those different markets and programs that are now coming online.
David Roberts
So intuitively, when I think about Australia with these thousands, tens of thousands, I guess millions, depending on how expansive your definition is, millions of DERs in Australia that heretofore were being underutilized in some cases, as you say, dramatically underutilized, paperweight 95% of the time — that just seems like an enormous resource, a huge resource of basically power — it's like a new power source that we are discovering, that's just sitting there, that requires almost nothing but information and coordination to exploit. So point being, have they been doing this long enough to get results? What do we know about how this is working so far?
Jesse Morris
It's an immense resource, and it's growing so fast in different markets. Look in Australia we're not even talking about electric vehicles, because they're just coming online. So if we just look at California, how many electric cars are in the state right now? I mean if those things are networked together and charging or not charging at the right time in the right places, we have the world's biggest, most beautiful distributed battery.
David Roberts
And I think it's just worth emphasizing, in case listeners don't appreciate this, but the batteries in EVs are, cumulatively, going to absolutely dwarf any other kind of battery, commercial or home batteries or anything else. Like the amount of capacity in the global EV fleet is eventually going to be just galactically larger than anything we're dealing with now. So the size of the resource is mind-boggling.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. How far are we ... and I'm not even going to just say Energy Web here. I mean let's just zoom out and say there are dozens of really innovative companies looking at bringing the full power of DERs to bear. I don't think any of us are happy with where we are right now. We know that these devices are technically capable of providing these services. There are some technical challenges. Part of the work we're doing, making sure all these things can talk to each other, they're integrated with utility systems.
David Roberts
That honestly seems like step one. I can't believe it's ... it's a little weird that it wasn't the first thing everybody sort of went after. Like you need to know where these things are and what they're doing before anything else is possible.
Jesse Morris
There was recently a new program announced in California called the Emergency Load Relief Program, which is a new demand response program to try and help bring some of the peak generation off of the mix in the state, when we have these congestion events. In the bottom of the order, and I hope that they address this, it said, "it is our hope that this program will coordinate with other efforts to orchestrate DER in the state."
David Roberts
Is that an official hope? Or did the governor sign off on that hope?
Jesse Morris
Yeah, it's very much cart before the horse. FERC 2222 that you mentioned, I mean, there was very little thought given. Most of the negotiation and process work, based on my experience and our contributions to those proceedings, is very much legal and regulatory. There's such little discussion of the technology, which I find really disappointing because, again, when you can show otherwise hesitant stakeholders and regulators what these DERs are capable of, how we can use software to trust them, it does defray some of those second or third order questions that they have about the future we're moving towards.
David Roberts
Wait, but let's get back to "Have we been doing this in Australia long enough to learn from it?" What have we learned?
Jesse Morris
Not no ... so this is relatively fresh off the press. I mean they have been running demand response and virtual power programs for several years. Interestingly, batteries have been able to bid into the wholesale market to some of these ancillary products for some time. So things like the equivalent of frequency regulation here. And what's really interesting is that's been very successful. So much so that the value of those services in Australia are not that high.
David Roberts
It's cratered, right. I mean, this is the thing that all the energy nerds say, is these ancillary service markets are very shallow, and it's going to take like twelve batteries basically to exhaust that market.
Jesse Morris
Right, So I think with this new construct that I described, this is very new. Some kind of a system to coordinate across the transmission and distribution interface that is all open source and uses this decentralized approach. I mean, they haven't had any technology filling this gap to date. So it's being deployed as we speak. There's an entire kind of second work stream, where some management consultancies are doing a super detailed cost-benefit analysis. But then we're pushing as hard as we can for this to go to kind of the standard way of doing business in 2023.
David Roberts
I mean, maybe I'm being naive, but it seems like something like this is just inevitable. There's no solving the problem without a shared, trusted system of tracking, right? I mean it's got to be this, it's got to be something, or else we're all just flailing in the dark.
Jesse Morris
Oh man, if only everybody saw it that way.
David Roberts
Well, I'm telling everybody, get on board. We've got to have this.
Jesse Morris
At the end of the day, I'm with you. I don't even care if it's us. But this has to be there. If we're in a situation where there are hundreds of bespoke, centralized information technology setups to basically perform the same function in every energy market around the world, wow, we have missed a huge opportunity.
David Roberts
Is it fair to say then, that just, that the Energy Web is new enough that we don't have a good real world example yet to point to. We don't have any track record yet.
Jesse Morris
We have track record because we've done this project in Australia. We've rolled out an enterprise solution in California. So there's an entire system in California, where we're using these identities now for the Flex Alert system, which is their voluntary demand response program. We have active solutions running in the market in Western Europe that's focused on helping electric vehicles directly participate in these programs. And we haven't even talked about it, but we've got a bunch of different solutions running in the wild today, actually using this same approach to facilitate creation and tracking of just RECs, so like renewable energy certificates, which is a much, much easier use case.
We have the solutions out there, and they're running. Do we have five years of historical data of them running in an enterprise environment? No. And that's because Energy Web or not, this layer of the grid simply doesn't exist today, right.
David Roberts
Right. I just have such high hopes because one of the things about distributed energy is unlike big centralized thermal power plants, which are, there's a small number, they come in large units. Distributed energy, sort of by definition, is a swarm type of thing, and that's what tends to produce, I think, emergent effects that you can't always predict in advance. So I just feel like once you have a handle on where all these things are, I feel like a bunch of stuff is going to fall out of that, that no one could have predicted in advance.
Is that too utopian?
Jesse Morris
That's the hope. I mean, who knows what kind of startups can emerge if you have all of these devices? How much easier can an aggregator's life become, if all of these devices are already out there? I mean, look at the competition we have in the Telco networks now, especially in places like Europe where it's more deregulated. I mean, you have dozens of different, effectively, retailers fighting for your mindshare and walletshare, for your cell phone use. And that's because every SIM card can be trusted, every customer can be trusted. Imagine if we had that kind of landscape for DERs.
David Roberts
Yeah. So this is an open source protocol, meaning, I guess, that anybody, it's like Linux, I guess, anybody can just grab it and use it if they want to. So how do you make money or do you?
We try to. So our business model as an organization is very close to, if you're familiar with, Red Hat, that got bought by IBM recently.
Oh, vaguely.
Jesse Morris
Okay, so I mean, I'm not an expert in enterprise IT or software either, but effectively the way that works is open source software is great. It's sitting there, there's repositories, which are web pages online with a bunch of code. But typically, you need some people, either within these utilities or outside of them, to make that code usable and to run that software on some servers somewhere. And so what businesses like Red Hat did was all the code is open source, so that it can be reused in different places around the world, but they basically offer services around it.
So we have teams that ... we have a membership program where companies pay us, and we basically teach them how to use this software. We actually have teams sitting with these different utilities around the world, building this software and running it and deploying it. We're actually structured as an international nonprofit, which is pretty cool because we don't have any shareholders. I have a board, that is managed by folks who, themselves, sit on a mix of different nonprofits and then other active companies in the energy transition. And the only thing I have to prove is, "Jesse, are you covering your costs as an organization? And what kind of impact are you driving?
Because we're completely focused on the energy transition and climate.
And so, as you say, once this thing is in place, or if it ever gets fully in place and all the DERs are on the blockchain and available to anyone who wants to access that, I can imagine that opening up a huge competitive market. Who knows what the future nerds could do with this? I just imagine this is like as a creation of an entirely new market sector almost.
That would be amazing. That would be amazing. Look at all the innovation that happens in these other sectors, whether it's social media applications or whatever. All of those startups that have gotten just tens to hundreds of billions of this Silicon Valley money, it's because data is readily accessible, and in the energy transition, that is just not the case right now.
David Roberts
Yeah, as you say, most of your work is devoted to, the way your website puts it is "to building an operating system for electrical utilities that can accommodate all these DERs," which, of course, is huge. But you're also tracking other things, as you mentioned before. So tell us about this. I think most listeners are familiar with RECs, with renewable energy certificates. So if you're a company, you want to offset your energy use with renewable energy, you can go buy renewable energy certificates, which allegedly represent a unit of carbon-free energy. And, of course, the sort of problems around those markets are very well-documented, and a lot of them have to do with this sort of traceability and trustability and information. And just like does this REC actually trace back to a specific ton? Or is there fuzziness and double counting going on here, et cetera, et cetera.
So tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do in that market.
Jesse Morris
Using the same kind of technology approach for all the grid stuff, we also just help provide deep levels of traceability to any supply chain having to do with the energy transition. So RECs are one, right? "How can we give just more visibility and bring more by volume to certificates?" But there's many others. We're doing a bunch of work on sustainable aviation fuel. We're looking at green hydrogen and basically every other kind of hard to decarbonize sector. I mean green steel, renewable heat, the list goes on. "How can we actually use this to improve the trust in voluntary carbon markets?"
So before I talk about RECs in particular, again, from our perspective, using this technology approach, we can just bring very detailed levels of visibility into stuff that happens to do with the energy transition.
David Roberts
So anything that needs tracking and tracing and trusting that's traded around or sent around in the energy world, you want to try to get in on that.
Jesse Morris
Yeah. And if we zoom in just on electricity, I think what's really interesting right now is, and I know you've covered and talked about this in the past, David, there's a lot of work in electricity being focused on this 24/7 concept, but then there's also this other set of work around carbonality or emissionality, right. And what's really cool is we're actually using our technology to support both concepts, because, I don't know about you, I don't know which one is going to win out in the long term.
David Roberts
Well, again, being able to know for certain what you're accomplishing is a necessary precondition for either of those, right.
I mean, to get back to the theme, it's amazing how much has been going on without us really knowing concretely what we're talking about, right, without us having a clear view into what we're talking about. So just being able to track those attributes in a verifiable and trustable way alone, will, I think, have an effect on those markets.
Jesse Morris
Definitely. And we're also looking at more advanced ways to use this technology to frankly push the renewables sector harder. And one example that might be interesting of that is what we're trying to do with Bitcoin miners right now. So Bitcoin miners look, frankly, a lot like data center operators, if you're a utility. You've got a bunch of servers sitting somewhere, they use a bunch of electricity. Right now, you can go ahead and be a data center operator or a Bitcoin miner, you can have loads somewhere, and then you can go buy a bunch of RECs that are totally unbundled from your actual power consumption.
So I can have a data center in California, and I can buy RECs in any number of other geographies in the US. And I can then claim that I'm 100% renewable for my electricity consumption.
David Roberts
You just buy some cheap wind from the Midwest. And I keep hearing Bitcoin people going out and trying to brag about environmental credentials. Is that what most of them are referring to? Is that what most of them are doing now? Are they just buying RECs?
Jesse Morris
Some are buying RECs, unfortunately, some are just buying carbon offsets, so not even buying RECs. People are pretty harsh on the Bitcoin crowd for some of this stuff. And look, I get it. I'll just say from personal experience, a number of them, these are not companies that understand how to buy renewable energy buying. Let's step back for a minute. Let's go back to like 2010 when these initial power purchase agreements were coming out from Google and Microsoft. They had huge teams that were figuring out how to structure those deals and how to decarbonize. The Bitcoin miners are at the front end of that curve. And so they're trying, some of them are trying.
And so what we're trying to do with this kind of work is say, "Well, look, if you're going to buy certificates, how can we structure some sort of a certification to get you to buy them in the most impactful way possible?" So what we're doing with our technology stack is basically asking a series of questions that they have to answer, and then we verify them about, "Okay, where is your load, and how clean or not is that grid? What kinds of renewables are you buying? Are you directly investing in them? Are you buying unbundled certificates? Are you in a green tariff? And then finally, if you're buying certificates, where are you buying them from? Are you buying them from a new solar system in Kentucky, which would have a great carbon impact?" Or are you buying, as you said, "unbundled certificates from the middle of the country?"
So with that kind of an environment, where you bring more transparency into what kinds of renewables these companies are buying, it's our hope that we can sort of push a new sector of renewable energy buyers into buying more impactful renewables.
David Roberts
And also, well, a big part of the 24/7 push is this notion of hourly RECs, a REC just for a particular hour, so you can know exactly how much carbon was displaced in that particular hour, et cetera, et cetera. And when I was researching those, I kept wondering over and over again about the tracking and trustability of those hourly RECs. Have you gotten into that at all yet?
Jesse Morris
Big time, yes. So we have an entire 24/7 solution that we've put out there. We're working with a couple of different market participants in different geographies to do it. You know what's interesting, is, and I see the same news announcements you do about these different corporates doing these 24/7 deals — the big thing that is very not transparent is the matching. So you've got the data coming in about the load, you've got data coming in somewhere about the renewables, and then, typically, you have a nice dashboard, hosted by one of these corporates, that says, "Don't worry, it's 24/7 matched," right?
So that's what we're trying to make more transparent is to say, "let's make that visible. Let's actually open up and decentralize the matching algorithm for those different solutions." So that's what we're trying to do there is just bring dramatic transparency to these 24/7 claims that companies are making.
David Roberts
Interesting. Alright, well, we're coming up on time, so I just had sort of two final related questions. One is just: what's next for Energy Web? I assume you're talking with other grid operators? Or what's the next big thing on your list?
Jesse Morris
The big, primary focus is getting as many of these kinds of rollouts, that we talked about in Australia, happening with every ISO in the US and every TSO in Western Europe and beyond. That's our primary focus, is just trying to replicate that architecture in as many markets as possible. And the really cool thing about working in open source is as we get other markets on board of this platform, we learn and advances that we make in PJM territory, who we're also working with, we bring to Australia and vice versa. So you start to create this network effect that really knows no boundaries.
So that's what's next for us is our team is just relentlessly pounding the pavement and trying to do everything we can to get senior decision makers at, frankly, all of the regulated ISOs and RTOs in the US, and then most in Europe, to come on board with this architecture.
David Roberts
Is there a US ISO that's taken some steps?
Jesse Morris
California.
David Roberts
Of course. California.
Jesse Morris
Yeah, of course. Right. So we work directly in partnership with the California ISO. As I mentioned, we've rolled out our technology stack to enhance that Flex Alert program. And now the next step is, again, just trying to make the case to the load serving entities in California, the Public Utility Commission, and all of the, frankly, morass of political agents that work in California that, "hey, we can really solve some problems in the state, if we all come onto one technology stack." So that's more of a political effort, than anything right now. But I'm hopeful.
David Roberts
Yeah. And I wanted to ask about this earlier, but I'm just going to squeeze it in here at the end. One of the things ... when I think about grid architecture, and I think about the profusion of DERs, and then I think about these big wholesale markets opening up to DERs. These wholesale markets traditionally are used to dealing with dozens, let's say, of participants bidding in and bidding out in real time. And I've just been wondering, over and over again, even if you can persuade them to open up those wholesale markets to DERs, it just seems like pretty rapidly you're going to run into just computational issues, right?
Like these institutions, that were meant to track a couple of dozen participants, are going to be tracking tens of thousands, and quickly millions. And I always took that as sort of evidence that we're eventually going to have to devolve responsibility for markets down to a lower level, to the distribution level. And this is getting into a whole different topic, which we don't have to get into. But the idea is that you could have, at the distribution level, a distribution market operator that's sort of like a mini version of the ISO, that's running a local market and sort of managing the profusion of local DERs and then just reporting up to the wholesale market kind of a single number like.
This is our remainder after we've dealt with all our local market stuff. These are called DSOs. There's a lot of talk about them. But I wonder, in relation to Energy Web, do you think that by kind of solving the information problem, by getting the information problem all trusted and out in the open, do you think you're going to enable wholesale markets to be able to handle these millions and millions and millions of DERs? Or do you also think that we're eventually going to have to move to something like a DSO model?
This is super abstruse. If anybody's listened this long ... they asked for it.
Jesse Morris
I'm a deep, deep grid architecture geek. And your pieces, David, in Vox, where you had these beautiful animated charts with the TSO at the top.
David Roberts
Yes.
Jesse Morris
I cannot tell you how many presentations I've used that in. So thank you very much. I think it's an incredibly important topic. Typical answer for me is: our tech can support both pathways. It really doesn't matter to us. I think you do run into some computational, not necessarily in the piping and the infrastructure part, but in the solver. You're going to run into some challenges, if you literally have hundreds of millions of DER bidding direct into the wholesale market, and we don't really work on that intelligence that is needed to perform that function. But I do think there are some potential challenges there.
And just having worked with these different market participants around the world, seeing the direction Europe going, seeing the direction Australia is going, that local market operator model, to me, intuitively, as somebody who's worked on this kind of stuff for about twelve years now, it feels like it is a better fit for the direction that the grid is evolving for a variety of reasons. But I don't pretend to have a crystal ball to say what direction it's going. From our perspective, we can solve both architectures.
David Roberts
Well, the utility sector, especially in the US is so sclerotic and kind of constipated. It's difficult to imagine such a fundamental reform these days. But I agree, that the technology and the markets are kind of pushing in that direction. Either way, having good information is good. So I asked you what the next step is. Now, by way of wrapping up, I wonder if you could just indulge, maybe, in a little utopian dreaming, a little utopian speculation about what kinds of things you think might be unlocked or possible, if the world's DERs, I guess then you're probably getting into trillions ... if the world's DERs are all on the blockchain, all have identities, all tracked. We know the capacity, and the capability, and the behavior, and the market commitments of every one of those DERs in the world. What kinds of things might we be able to do in that future utopia?
Jesse Morris
I worked directly with Amory Lovins for a long time, when I was at RMI, and he had this beautiful way of going zooming into the micro and then going to the macro. So maybe I'll try and answer it with that kind of framing. At the micro level, to start simple, Iwant for you, me, my parents, eventually my kids, when they have buildings that they're working in or living in and all these devices, I want companies blasting them via text, via email, knocking on their door, saying, "sign here to make a few bucks a day in order for your stuff to help decarbonize the grid."
David Roberts
And beyond signing, you don't have to do anything.
Jesse Morris
Exactly. It just happens, right? And you get no sacrifice. Your beers are still cold. You can take hot showers when you want. So at the micro level, I think that's really important, because if we haven't constructed that, I just don't think it's going to happen. If we zoom out to the macro level. What happens in aggregate if we can do that? I don't have the specific numbers, but I think something, like, we should be able to shave 20% to 25% off of these peak moments, so that here in California, we don't have these rolling blackouts in the most advanced economy in the world.
If we have that happening, we should be able to network together some of the biggest batteries in the world through all these different electric vehicles, in order to make optimum use of these increasingly low-carbon grids, so that we don't have to have dramatically oversized wind and solar systems all over the place.
David Roberts
Well, also, I'm not sure ordinary folks necessarily understand that there are lots and lots and lots of power plants out there that were built just to provide those peaks. That's a disproportionate amount of capacity, fossil capacity you're taking offline, when you shave those peaks.
Jesse Morris
Yes. So if we could use all of these beautifully networked together DERs in every country, you could effectively eliminate the need for these thermal power plants to provide that peaking capacity, which would go a real long way towards cleaning up the grid and, frankly, make us all more resilient. I think this gets buried sometimes, but if we are able to move to an electric system that has these local sources of flexibility, instead of having these central points of failure in the system with these large thermal plants that just happen to turn off at the moments you need them most, we're all going to be happier.
David Roberts
I think everybody can understand intuitively, that if you're operating a system with ten units, that your ability to take things off and on is limited. But if you're working with millions or billions, that gives you such fine-grained control, right? It gives you such fine-grained, you're not working in big chunks anymore, you're working in exactly as much as we need, like real time, exactly as much as we need kind of levels. And that's just going to trim an immense amount of waste too, it seems like.
Jesse Morris
And hopefully it won't be a utopia, at least in some places, right? I do think in the next decade, we're going to see some of this happen, certainly before 2030. And I'm watching Australia really closely. They're close to 100% renewables several days a year. They have the pressures to do it. Their energy prices are going up. There's an election about to come up, where some more liberal leaning politicians may come into power. So I'm crossing my fingers because ...
David Roberts
As Saul Griffith is fond of saying, "it's cheaper to buy power from your own rooftop panels than it is just to transport power from a power plant," right? Even if the power plant power were free, just the cost of getting it to your house exceeds the cost of your home solar, which is just so mind-blowing. It shows what's possible here, if we would quit messing around.
Jesse Morris
Indeed.
David Roberts
Truly final question, and I'm not lying this time, and this is asking you to descend into wild, hand-wavy speculation, but there's a big sort of meta argument about distributed versus centralized power that's been going on a long time. The Amory Lovins soft path is more distributed, and then there's been pushback to that, saying that to really provide modern levels of convenience and to run a city with factories in it, et cetera, et cetera, requires big, centralized, concentrated power.
And I'm sure you're very familiar with this argument. It goes back forever, it's endless and generally tedious. But it does seem like once you're tracking all the DERs, and you are fully exploiting all the DERs, then you're kind of going to be able to answer that question finally. You're going to finally be able to answer the question of, "how far can distributed energy get? And how much do we still need big centralized power plants?" And again, I return to the question of car batteries. People say there's just not enough distributed energy, but that's a shitload. The distributed fleet of car batteries is a ton that is not being exploited now.
So I guess I wonder whether you have an opinion on how far we can get with distributed. and maybe, like, what the sort of final balance is going to be between distributed and central.
Jesse Morris
Well, I have a very strong opinion on it, which is that I think that regulators should be forcing utilities when they submit these IRPs, before they even do an integrated resource plan, they need to say, "what is your plan for getting your stuff together to go out there and figure out what is actually on your network?" Because they should be starting from the bottom up. They should be tasked with saying, "you need to figure out how many DERs are on your network. what are they capable of providing?"
And let's not even have the distributed versus centralized argument. Let's just start from fact, and then we can get the nerds to run the models to figure out what the perfect mix is. So I would just start there, and say we absolutely should be starting with that "start from fact", which we just don't do today. If I had a magic wand to wave it and sort of look at this centralized versus distributed split, I think it's going to be intensely regional.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Jesse Morris
Right? I think it's really impossible to make a generic statement on that, especially ... I'm just putting on my hat where I work a lot internationally, there are definitely grids in Europe where there is much lower load. They've got a solution for heating, because they're doing district heating, and it's just different. So it's very challenging, I think, to make a generic statement on that. And I think it's going to be intensely regional.
David Roberts
Yeah, I guess, it's sort of one of my articles of faith. I think, just that distributed is going to surprise us. It's going to continually surprise us. It's unexpected. I think it's capable of surprising us in a way that giant thermal plants are not.
Jesse Morris
I share your optimism.
David Roberts
Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on. This is, in addition to everything else, like the first coherent and sensible use of blockchain I've heard about. So congrats on that, and I look forward to tracking your progress.
Jesse Morris
Thanks for having me, David. Keep up the good work.
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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