The rise of permissionless DERs

[swooshing] Latitude media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. - I'm Shail Kong and this is Catalyst. - For the first time, maybe our industry can really focus on affordability being the Bial and Endal in DERs and not resilience because I think over the last decade it's been a lot of resilience because it's a premium product but permissionless speaks to, no, these are super cheap, they're easy and it's all about cost savings. Coming up, it's plug and play or plug and store, I guess. [upbeat music] - Catalyst is brought to you by antenna group, the Communications and Marketing Partner for Mission-Driven Organizations, Developing and Adopting Climate, Energy and Infrastructure Solutions. Their team of experts helps businesses like yours identify, refine and amplify your authentic climate story. With over three decades of experience as a growth partner to the most consequential brands in the industry, their team is ready to make an impact on day one. 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More than 160 utilities trust energy hub to manage over 2.5 million devices. Learn more at energyhub.com. - I'm Shail Khan. I lead the early stage venture strategy the energy impact partners. Welcome. So distributed batteries are starting to have a moment. There are lots of examples of this. The biggest recently probably being base power. You may remember, I had Zach Dell, the founder of base on the pot a few months ago, just right in the wake of their billion dollar fundraise to go deploy residential batteries throughout the country. If you're talking residential batteries, base is kind of at one end of a spectrum. Their whole play is over sizing the battery to use it for market participation. But there's another end to the spectrum, which falls into the category of so-called permissionless the ERs or plug-in. It's a broader category that includes things like balcony solar, which is really popular in Germany. But I would say the main thrust of the category, at least in the US, are very small batteries that you can usually plug into a standard 120 volt outlet. And you can use them to provide backup for a large appliance, but also maybe to reduce peak charges on the bill, maybe to participate in the manage bounce programs, maybe even to aggregate enough to become a virtual power plant. By the way, they're not just for residential consumers, as you'll soon hear small businesses also can take advantage of them. It's an interesting area with somewhat unsettled policy and regulatory landscape. But there are some things about it that are extraordinarily attractive, largely the potential for speed and low cost installation. I've been spending some time trying to make sense of this category, and the person who really understands it best, I think, is the one who's actually deploying these systems. And that is James McGinness, who's our guest today. James is the founder and CEO of David Energy. They are deploying these plug-in systems today. He'll hear a little bit about doing it at small businesses in New York, and they believe there's a real business there. So let's hear why. Here's James. James, welcome. - Thanks, Shell. Thanks for having me. I'm super, super pumped to be here. - Excited to finally have you on. And to talk about permissionless DERs, start by telling me what are permissionless DERs? - It's funny, because I think we coined, I think Duncan coined the term permissionless on our podcast a couple of years ago, and I've actually started using a different term. - Mm-hmm. - But I would say-- - He's particularly smart to teams the name. - Yeah, I mean, but I think permissionless is for the wanks, and what I've been using is plug-in as for customers and for sort of consumers, it's more intuitive. But I do think there's also an important distinction between what those two terms mean. So permissionless, to me, is a very broad category of technologies across segments and verticals and customer sizes that really refers to not needing interconnection agreements. Although I admit that when we came up with it, it was sort of just even something that required less of an interconnection was part of the concept. So really anything that helps you get interconnected to the grid faster and puts less burden on the interconnection process falls into this bucket of permissionless of things that I'm personally excited about. So I think some particular examples of that was, is everything from impulse labs having a battery in a cooktop that's plug-in to, at the time, we were thinking a lot about electric era, doing battery-enabled DC fast charging where you wouldn't need an interconnection upgrade. You may still even need a permit or permits in that case to C and I off-grid where you may still need permits of some sort, but you don't need an interconnection. I think there's companies like Critical Loop out there like now doing stuff like this. Then that's not to mention there's plenty of permits that aren't even interconnection related that you do actually need to be thinking about our rules and regs. And so I think permissionless, though in the end of the day, speaks to the concept of being able to do things without heavy red tape or regulation and particularly when it comes to interconnection. - You're not asking for it. You're not submitting an interconnection request, but there is an interconnect there still. - Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of one of the most powerful concepts in this whole thing actually, is that the reason it can be cheaper and easier to do and it's so exciting is that the 120 volt or the 240 volt outlet is a pre-existing bidirectional interconnection point on the grid that you can actually push power into and it's safe to do so at the circuit level. And so when you look at traditional installs, we're basically doing an open heart surgery on the panel. You have to do all this work with an electrician to actually tap into the system, but there's already a point sitting there for you that interconnects into the home and the broader grid through that outlet. - I was trying to think what the extension of that analogy would be, if normal interconnection is open heart surgery on the panel, are you sticking a lollipop in your mouth or something like that? - Yeah, it's like, well, I haven't even thought of that, actually, yeah, but it's, I don't know, you're just like putting on a t-shirt more like it. You're just like, you're using that. - That's better. - You're just, it's a function that you have available to you. So yeah. - Okay, so there's some stuff that's not so relevant in the US currently, but like balcony solar, this thing that is pretty big in Germany, not so much here could be considered into this category as well. But I think mostly, correct me if I'm wrong, like mostly what I want to talk about is batteries. And you mentioned a few different, I guess, form factors, right? Like there's the electric era battery integrated into an EV charger or there's the battery that's displacing an interconnection for a load or something like that. But I mean, the category that I know you're spending a lot of time in that I find interesting and wanna understand better is the just take a battery and plug it in behind the meter, maybe connected to an appliance inside a load, inside a home or a business or whatever it might be. Like a very small home battery. And so in that category, there are products available today, right? Like you can, anybody can go by a bunch of different batteries. So it seems to have emerged as a category. I don't know, it's been around because stuff like EcoFlow, I think has been around for a while, but like there's a little bit of a mini explosion here, right? - A hundred percent. And yeah, I think uswanks love our ever multiplying acronyms and definitions and stuff. I think of what you just described as plug-in because specifically, it's very intuitive. You think about plugging a DER or something with a battery or solar, I actually think balcony solar is part of this and is very relevant in the US today that is plug-in solar or plug-in batteries. I just think that makes a lot more sense intuitively and that it's a sub-category of a broader permissionless space that when we think of permissionless, we think of really big stuff too. That's how I think about it. But yeah, so for today, like I actually think plug-in is the right idea to think about. - Right, okay, so let's talk about plug-in, but before we get off of the idea of permissionless, the question of permission and of interconnection is actually like a core question as to the value proposition of plug-in. So what is the state of affairs? If I wanna plug one of these little batteries in my house, maybe I'm using it as backup for my fridge or whatever it might be, What is the lay of the land in terms of what requirements it needs to meet? What permissions I do need? Is it murky? Is it defined? Like where are we there? It is murky. I think what really matters is the thing we focus on a lot is safety. So there are plenty of UL certified products that adhere to the NEC, saying you can plug this in in the following manner and it's safe to do so. And so there may be jurisdictional like AHAs or DOBs or fire departments that have an opinion on what should go in a given location, how big of a battery or something like that. But at the sort of electrical code level, this is already allowed under the current guidance. And there are many products that support that. So from that lens, you could say in most places you can go out and buy these things and plug them in in whatever state you're in. A lot of the attention that's happened recently around regulations is specifically, there's bills now introduced in, I think it's up to 30, sorry, 24 states with maybe 30 soon, introducing bills where you can actually export to the grid through these devices. And so we think of that as an extremely important distinction where a lot of that regulation that's being passed is focused on really what is an interconnection agreement, what permission do I need from there for the utility? Whereas I understand the utilities concern is hey, if you just start exporting and the grid goes down and our line workers out there, they don't actually know a line is energized and we don't like people just exporting without us knowing what's going on or how much power that may be. And so a lot of these rules that are being introduced in past are focusing on anything up to typically 1.2 kilowatts is you can export that amount from a meter from a home. And it's really even narrowly focused on consumer applications. That actually does tie back to the NEC in some ways because it gets into, okay, if we're going to make these commercially available and you're allowed to export them, how big of a system do we want to be creating and allowed under or being you all certified because it gets into what actually at the circuit level like a 20-up circuit, what can that handle? And so there's actually somewhat of an alignment between those two concepts happening, but we view them as actually very clearly distinct. You could be have 20 kilowatts of behind the meter capacity and your peak load is 50 kilowatts and you're never exporting. And then that's an interesting question. Do you need an interconnection agreement for that? It's all happening via the plug with you all certified products that the NEC stands on how you're deploying it based on like panel and circuit sizing and stuff. So I just think about it that like when people say backfeeding they typically mean into the grid, but I think under current NEC and UL, you could actually go by some of these systems today and use them at home. And that's an interesting sort of debate going on right now because some utility people even say even if it's not exporting there should be a permit and you know or permission. And that is still you are still interconnecting into the system by doing that. Right. Okay. So it is murky as you said, but seems like in some cases there's stuff you can do now. In other cases, there's stuff that might be coming you can do like exporting with grid under certain conditions as some of these bills pass. Let's talk about why like what's interesting about this? How much of the value proposition for putting a battery in a home or a business that's very small if it's say it's sub 1.2 kilowatts. Is the value proposition resiliency like are you plugging it into a load and saying this is backup for this particular appliance. Or are you thinking of it as like this is savings on your electric billers and some combination of the two. I think what's really excited about permissionless and plug-in is that it is about affordability. That's what we saw sort of why it got adopted so quickly in Germany. It's not about resilience. That said, I do think in these early applications and this actually gets back to what's allowed. What certainly does seem to be allowed no matter what is if you just plug a battery into a wall and then a device into that battery, you're not pushing power back into the circuit at all. You're just removing loads from the grid that doesn't seem to need an interconnection of reman or is allowed. As long as that product is certified. So I do think a big focus right now is on the appliance level. And given that, there's a resilience angle to it. So some of the companies out there are talking about resilience and self-reliance and it's that's important. You can put a battery connected your fridge at home and it'll back that up. However, I think the big story and the really exciting one is what this really does to what we think about. Install and the costs of the costs and accessibility of these systems. It's going to drive them much, much lower than we've seen in the past. And that means that for the first time maybe our industry can really focus on affordability being the the B.O. and N.D.E.R. and not resilience because I think over the last decade it's been a lot of resilience because it's a premium product but permissionless speaks to know these are super cheap. They're easy and it's all about cost savings. And they're super cheap and easy because in part you don't need there's no design. There's no engineer. There's no electrician. There's no and so it presumably you get but it is smaller. So you had less economies of scale like how much cheaper do you think it can be relative to a power wall or something like that like a larger home battery. Yeah, so I mean an easy rule of thumb is that soft costs are typically 50% or more of a residential install. Permissionless can effectively put that to zero. Because two of the big components there are three of the big components are permitting labor and CAC. And so think about a buy online motion where a consumer is just going Amazon and buying one of these and plugging them in themselves that totally removes CAC and soft costs. And then also based on all the regulation that's being worked on now is the permitting side of things you know can go away as well. So half of the cost and a residential install you could think of as basically being gone. So obviously they're smaller systems you could say maybe there's marginally more expensive just the size of the unit maybe there's some efficiencies say in like a power wall or how you set up the inverter there versus like an all in one system. But I think the what what matters there is that that's a marginal difference and the real plummeting costs are still in the hardware side of things so solar and storage continue at cheaper. If that were to continue the case these soft costs aren't going anywhere on traditional installs and so if you're going to remove that it basically means that in permissionless your floor your floor is like all the way down to just the the hardware costs and I find that incredibly exciting. 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Partner with energy hub to manage over 2.5 million devices that provide 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity read the white paper and discover what vp's can do for your grid at energy hub dot com. Yeah, it is super interesting the limitation is scale unless the regulations turn out to be you can do as much of it as you want to do you know let's just say you're capped at 1.2 kilowatts per house there's only so much saving so so OK the point that you're making maybe just stepping back for a second is that and I think people don't always appreciate this folks who are buying home batteries now right they're generally doing it for one of two reasons. One reason is if they're in like California and you have a net meter if you have solar and you have net metering rules that make it like super un economic to have solar unless you can. discharged into the house or discharged into the grid at different times a day when solar is not generating. And so it's economically beneficial to you to have storage in addition to solar. But the other reason outside of that specific context, say you don't have solar, you're not in a California type net metering thing, it's basically entirely resiliency value proposition, because the economics, if you're just trying to save money on your bill of having a battery aren't a residential scale or not that great yet, but you don't say that much out of demand charge, right? But is that true with the permissionless ones? Because yes, you get a cheaper battery, but you can only shave a tiny bit of the peak because the battery is small, right? Well, what's interesting though is that this gets into the market opportunities that it's opening up and small is relative to the load you're placing on when you say like that. 1.2 kilowatts and a kilowatt battery may be a decent amount of the load. And if you're a single single bedroom apartment renter, like this is the balcony solar stuff, right? And for them, it's extremely economical. And really is that that's just opening up a tab that no one's really, I know people do multi-family installs, but like the idea of just a tenant buying one of these and having access now is totally is like, I think just like radically new and people are still under appreciating this point. And this is where looking to Germany is very interesting because this was, you know, COVID, Ukraine war stuff going on, energy prices were going through the roof in Germany, which led to a lot of the acceleration in these systems because people were putting their hands up and saying, I'm paying 40, 50 cents a kilowatt hour. I'm just going to go buy my own solar plug it in. And all that's doing is offsetting the 40 cents they would have had to pay, right? And so you don't even need complicated, you know, you know, you know, a Vitor or even that metering, like a lot of this, again, people are thinking about this from an exporting to the grid, but there's a lot of damage these things can do to your bill in a good way behind the meter that you don't even need to be compensated that much for for the exports. And that's the action that we saw in Germany. And really remarkable there is in the last four years or so, they've seen 4 million of these systems adopted. So 4 million in homes or apartments or whatever you think about it, whereas that's about the same size as the traditional single family installs, which did see a lot of growth in the last year, but those have been around for decades, right? And so I think that comparison is really remarkable, but just the idea that in a handful of years, people just started buying these systems and it's over a gigawatt now and basically installed capacity and deploying that in four years through these systems is remarkable. So. But I want to make sure that we're clear on that that's basically all about that's the balcony solar stuff, right? That's solar, not storage. That's balcony solar. Some of those are starting to come with storage, right? Right. Whereas what we're talking about here, you made the point, maybe it does include the balcony solar concept as well, but I think just as often it's just the battery here. Right. And so yeah, that does get into to your point on demand charges or demand response programs. But to that end, some of the work we've seen in New York City, it's about $50 per month per kilowatt shaved, which to a small business actually can mean a lot, especially if they own 10 locations or so. And if you're doing a couple kilowatts, then that can be pretty meaningful or you look at some other work like standard potential has done this with HVAC units in apartments, just sort of disintermediating the window unit that you can enroll those in demand response programs even without demand charge management. And so we in a commercial application are stacking the full value that everyone usually thinks of of like delivery charges, demand response, energy values, etc. But in commercial, you're exposed to demand charges, for example, whereas you're not in an apartment, basically, are these typically multi-hour duration systems? Are they like one hour, like does it matter? If it's 1.2 kilowatts, how many kilowatt hours is it? They're often sized like basically one to one, but that doesn't mean you're using the full 1.2 kilowatt, especially if you're plugging into an appliance, like the appliance may be 400 watts or something. So that's basically a three hour battery. But the other thing I'd say is like in Texas, for example, demand charges are volumetric and a lot of people add batteries to their solar systems in the traditional way to avoid consumption because they're getting billed for delivery. And so if you do have solar and storage together, you can avoid delivery charges. Storage alone isn't going to do that, but there are things you can get out of storage alone, even in residential and even more so in commercial. I'm just doing rough unit economic math in my head on the New York example that you gave. And it actually sounds really good, right? Because you're saying 50 bucks a month in savings. So that's 600 bucks a year in savings to the customer. And these are, let's say it's a one kilowatt hour system, you know, install cost of a residential battery. Normal typical residential battery might be let's say 800 bucks a kilowatt hour or something like that today. People think they can get it down below that, but say it was half that'd be 400 bucks a kilowatt hour. So you're paying $400 for the thing pays itself back in less than a year. That's right. Basically on just that rough math. That's actually pretty compelling. And what we've seen is in the commercial application installed costs of like less than 10% of system costs. And it's closer to zero because all those those self-costs are gone. But yeah, so I think whether it's a it's a battery, it's solar plus storage, it's solar alone, and these plug-in applications that it is about affordability. And if we can learn from Germany, the more that we see bills go up in the US, regardless of what the rules out there are, people are going to go on Amazon, they're going to start buying the stuff, they're going to start plugging it in. And so I think this is coming one way or another. And it's really exciting because it is like a bottoms up economically driven motion that I think we'll see. How do you solve for CAC? Because it strikes me that I mean one of as you said, one of the big components of the cost of a traditional system is customer acquisition cost. You don't get to spread that customer acquisition cost across as large a system. So you so the only way it feels to me to make this work is if customer acquisition cost is effectively zero. So like if there's a yes, the customer proactively goes online and buys the thing sales motion, then that does mean customer acquisition cost is effectively zero. But you are offering a somewhat complicated value proposition with energy bill savings and all that kind of stuff. So like how do you how do you sell this without blowing out the cost because of the because of that's off cost? Right. Well, I this definitely right. Obviously there is there's online, you know digital channel CAC and stuff like that. I do think it's very different for say a third party wanting to offer this to customers and use it for as a VPP or stuff like that versus say an OEM that's just like listing it on a website that is maybe much more actively bought by the consumer. So I think more about the the latter case where yeah, if someone's just going and buying, you know, it's it's just think about that compared to door knocking, right, which is still like a big big it's it's exponentially cheaper. And so if not zero, I still think it's going to be, you know, a very small part of the overall costs for the for the customer. You mentioned demand response participation. That was interesting because I think generally for demand response programs, correct me if I'm wrong, you need like minimum scale to participate. And so like a one can a one kill a lot load reduction participate on its own and demand response program. Is that an economic thing to do or do you need to amass a sufficient density and capacity to be able to then bid into the program? It can be both where like an aggregator needs this minimum thresholds say of like 100 kilowatts, but then at the device level like per meter enrolled. It's a minimum of 100 watts or 10 watts or something like that. It's different based on every jurisdiction like what I just mentioned is more I think Elkhana had things about it in nice. So there may be like a 10 kilowatt per meter per device rule. Other places like Massachusetts will have it by actually just the device itself you enrolled directly. It's not even done through the meter. And so they all differ. But from a technical lens, you can go as small as you want, right? It's it's not hard to validate that these things are actually doing what we think they're doing. So really the block any blocker there would just be sort of how the rules and rags are set up for a given program and all of those vary. But what we've seen is like there's plenty where yes, things this small can participate in in in this stuff. I know you're doing this at businesses too, right? So it's not just a consumer thing which and you made the point of like $50 a month savings that a business is relevant. So this is sort of small commercial also is relevant here as well. At the micro level, the macro level, the question is can you get because these things are small, can you get enough of them deployed that it starts to matter? Can we get to hundreds of micro watts gigawatts of this stuff and like what does that have to look like? Yes, 100%. And yeah, I heard you is the time now for DERs episode with Andy. I think recently I to listen to. And you made the great point where you're like it's all about removing friction basically right and if you think about affordability and scale it ties back to friction how much friction is there in the buying motion the deployment the installs etc and again if you look to Germany like doing a gigawatt and a handful of years in what is a much smaller you know country than than ours it wouldn't shock me to see tens of gigawatts deployed in the next five to ten years in the US where that's actually making a meaningful dent not just in the whole DER space but in the sort of gap the capacity shortfall that we're seeing with with load growth in the US and so when I think of how these things act in the aggregate I think in the in tens of gigawatts would not shock me in the near future well you just as the thought exercise it's like an interesting question right so the everybody in DER world right now is like chasing this data center needs to come online utility needs more capacity in order to bring the data center online can you construct this kind of third three-party deal wherein somebody deploys a bunch of DERs in one constructor another there are various versions of this and it counts as sufficient aggregated capacity to accelerate the interconnect right like that's the everybody's chasing some version of that thing to do that here right like the scale minimum scale from a data center perspective is probably 100 megawatts or something like that so you would have to deploy that at a hundred thousand premises right to to get enough capacity or probably more because you're not going to get full ELCC credit or whatever so hundreds of thousands which sounds crazy but at the same time I don't know if you're in New York and you can do it in every every unit in a apartment building or something like that like it starts that up so it's interesting to think about yeah and I mean I think that example is interesting you know my hope would be also the data centers building a lot of onsite capacity as well and it's not fully burdened by say residential systems but yeah you just think about a lot of the big grids out there we're talking 30 to 70 80 90 gigawatt peaks maybe more if you're in PGM and you know either way you're getting into like double digit percentages of of capacity potential you know from these resources off of what the like the current the current peaks that we're seeing it's not like it's just to say it's not some afterthought where it's like 0.001 percent of the total peak load on that grid I think we could see like 10 percent or more which is wild to think about in these small systems the other thing I would say is like in in the commercial application we see paths to do power wall size or multiple power walls right and so when you just narrow this to to apartments and you know these smaller residential applications it's a it's a little narrowing compared to what plugin can do in general like you could see 510 20 kw systems just deployed through through through outlets to some degree and again like a lot of that is based on regulations etc but I I don't think this story of them is only like these hyper hyper small in apartment applications from a product perspective are these just like pretty commoditized like it's just a small battery is there much to it is there any magic are there improvements that could or should be made apart from just like driving down cell costs 100 percent I think we're just seeing the early beginnings of form factors I think there's me a lot of innovation in form factors around batteries you can think of that as a battery in a cooktop or you can think of that as the battery how it actually is designed for a plugin application which is actually extremely nascent as well actually a lot of the early plugin stuff was using what is normally for like camping setups for for a consumer application because that was what was available as like a fully mobile plug based battery you look at some of the work happening now it gets into like 120 volt outlets versus 240 volt what is the right actual like shape of these are you trying to place them on a fridge are you hanging them on a wall are you tucking them in a corner how big should that battery be for a home or a a business also just the idea of it being an infrastructure grade asset so I think one of the interesting things for example Pelo which I'm sure you know about is focused on is like we're not going to build some camping battery that doesn't have the greatest API reliability like we're going to build these things to be networked at scale where you may be running hundreds of megawatts or gigawatt size VPP with just all these little plug in batteries everywhere and so so pretty much aside from the camping battery stuff a lot of the companies I mentioned have all been started in the last five years and so I think we're it's incredibly nascent from a product standpoint and there's already some early interesting form factors being developed but I think there's the list of things that could happen is endless like if I think there's even a company doing like a battery and a heat pump or something I've seen her and it's actually like I just hear I mean it's the biggest that's right that's right yeah it is yeah so yeah I just think that there's there's gonna be a lot of innovation and inform factors over time and what we're seeing is already pretty interesting yeah all right well there's all the time we had now super interesting to watch how this is going to play out I think it's like an under appreciated category at least in the US you've made repeatedly the point that it is well appreciated in Germany but appreciate your time thanks for helping me walk through it thank you shall James McGuinness is the founder and CEO of David Energy this shows a production of latitude media you can head over to latitude media dot com for links at today's topics latitude is supported by prelude ventures this episode was produced by max savage levenson mixing and theme song by Sean Markwond Steven Lacey is our executive editor I'm shale con and this is catalyst