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I got DER-pilled at DERVOS 2023.
The hottest ticket in Brooklyn last week wasn’t for an indie rock show or a buzzy new restaurant. It was for the most niche, nerdiest clean energy conference of the year — the sold-out DERVOS 2023.
The conference name — a satirical play on Davos, a stuffy, World Economic Forum event attended by governmental and business elites — tells you much of what you need to know about this irreverent subculture of the climate movement. A teaser video for DERVOS described it as a “rad clean energy summit … where youths get DER-pilled and the hot takes haven’t been approved by PR.”
To translate, DERVOS is for people who are stoked about a category of technologies known as “distributed energy resources,” or DERs. They encompass pretty much any device that can generate or store energy, or use energy flexibly, at the scale of a single building, like rooftop solar panels, batteries, and smart thermostats. This kind of tech has historically been written off as less important than big projects like wind farms — “nice-to-haves” but incapable of cutting emissions at climate-relevant scales. But once you get DER-pilled, another vision for the future emerges.
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Imagine a solar panel on every roof, a battery in every basement, and a smart thermostat in every home. Now imagine these devices being aggregated and synchronized across neighborhoods, cities, or entire regions. If 5,000 batteries discharge at the same time, you’ve got the equivalent of a new power plant. If 5,000 smart thermostats turn the temperature up by a few degrees on a hot summer day, you can prevent a natural gas “peaker” plant from firing up. In that sense, DERs offer a potentially faster option for growing the electric grid than large-scale projects, and could provide significant savings — around $10 billion in avoided infrastructure costs by 2030, according to a recent Department of Energy report.
But that’s not all. To the DER-pilled, this future will also be a “better world, a higher performing world,” as James McGinniss, one of the organizers of DERVOS, put it. It’s a world where your heating and cooling and EV charging are orchestrated seamlessly to utilize the cleanest power at the lowest cost; where solar panels and batteries aren’t called upon to keep your lights on when the power goes out, because they are preventing system-wide blackouts from occurring in the first place.
“How many industries can you work on that are going to completely change the way one of our foundational systems works and flip it entirely on its head?” Nathaniel Teichman, a DER-pilled former financial analyst, told me at the conference. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else with such importance or at such an inflection point.”
To kick things off at DERVOS, McGinniss painted a picture of an industry on the verge of an explosion. “It feels like if DERs were the internet, it’s 1995,” he told the roughly 250-person crowd. “We’re very, very early in this. And I think there’s massive, massive growth coming to this space.”
The event was held at Newlab, a startup incubator located in a renovated shipbuilding warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Unlike other energy summits, it’s not put on by a trade association or a professional organization. It’s organized by a loose collective called the DER Task Force, a bunch of enthusiasts who met on Twitter.
The story is a roadmap for movement-building in the modern age. It started in March 2019, when McGinniss posted a tweet asking if anyone in New York wanted to start a monthly happy hour to talk shop about distributed energy. “Like 30 people responded. And I had like 100 Twitter followers,” he told me.
The tweet led to a group message called “DG Beers” (for distributed generation) and eventually to a series of real life hangs. They got drinks. They went to see The Current War, a movie about the 19th century battle over which electrical current system would prevail. They had people give powerpoint presentations. When COVID-19 hit, they moved the monthly meetup to Zoom and started a podcast. The group blew up. “Suddenly we had people from like, South Africa and like, rural Alaska joining us,” said Duncan Campbell, another one of the original members.
Regulars at the meetups told me it was unlike other networking spaces. “What stands out the most is the atmosphere of strong opinions, weakly held,” said Kyle Baranko. “I think there’s a lot of people who are intellectuals, who like getting into the big picture and the small details. But they never take themselves too seriously.”
That’s also a fitting description of DERVOS, which covered broad, heady topics like the concept of “energy abundance” with a combination of deep expertise and lighthearted, often crude informality. “We need to double or triple the grid. That is crazy,” said Pier LaFarge, the CEO of a company called Sparkfund, during the first panel, which contemplated the potential for centralized grid planning. “That is like the technical challenge of the space race and the economic scale of the highway system. That is non-trivial, societal shit.”
During the next session, Andy Frank, founder of the home retrofit company Sealed, was talking about how DERs can help avoid the need to build transmission lines and power plants. “We need a — and this is a very technical term — a fuck-ton of DERs to try to avoid an even more fuck-ton of costs,” he said.
“Is it a metric fuckton?” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer from Princeton University and Heatmap contributor on the panel, shot back. The audience burst out laughing.
The conference skewed very white and male. Nicole Green, another founding member, speculated that it might be because that’s still the demographic at a lot of university engineering programs. Integrating DERs into the grid and into power markets is technologically complicated, and the community is largely made up of engineers.
When I asked other attendees to describe the vibe, one said it was “tech bro-ey, but better — not as toxic.” Another said “young and exciting.”
“It feels a little bit like the energy industry underground, in a way,” Baranko told me.
“There’s a rebellious, counter-establishment ethos within the DER community,” said Teichman, “both by the nature of what it is and the people it attracts.”
Part of that comes from the fact that these technologies challenge the monopoly utility model — the way that electricity has been generated and distributed and commoditized for decades through big, corporate power plants. The DER community also likes to push back on the narrative that tackling climate change requires sacrifice. “That’s also where the irreverence bleeds in,” said McGinniss. “It’s just like, this is an awesome, exciting future. That’s what we want people to feel.”
To illustrate the point, McGinniss and his friends organized a DERVOS afterparty with the first-ever “vehicle to rave” demonstration. Working with another group of DER-enthusiasts called the SOLARPUNKS, who specialize in sustainable event production, they used a Ford F-150 Lightning to power the sound system at an old fire station-turned-event space in lower Manhattan.
But this better, higher performing world is still mostly out of reach. “We’re mired in a lot of decades-old thinking at this point about DERs and how they can be a part of all of this,” Campbell told the audience at the start of the conference.
The obstacles preventing DERs from realizing their full potential was a major theme of the day. Frank talked about how DERs aren’t properly valued in energy markets. Leah Stokes, a political scientist from the University of California, lamented that utilities haven’t taken DERs seriously or integrated them into their resource planning. Jenkins suggested we regulate utilities differently so that they have more incentive to utilize DERs. Jen Downing, a senior advisor at the Department of Energy, said regulators need data showing that DERs are reliable.
Part of the problem is that there’s no DER industry association, no one advocating for funding or policy changes to support these solutions at the state or national level. During last year’s conference, Jigar Shah, a Department of Energy official and a sort of Godfather figure in the DER scene, pushed the community to be more ambitious. “You guys are left out of the narrative, and it’s just fun, it’s sort of like, 'oh that’s so cool, I’m glad that they’re doing that,’” he said, calling in to deliver the keynote speech from the car during his family vacation.
The DER Task Force took up Shah’s call to arms and decided to use its revenue from events and the podcast to hire Allison Bates Wannop, an energy lawyer, to work on policy full time. At this year’s DERVOS, Wannop announced the group’s initial plans, which include turning New York State into a DER “nirvana,” and a campaign to “occupy NARUC,” the association for utility regulators that holds triannual conferences, which are heavily attended by the natural gas industry.
Colleen Metelitsa, one of the founders of the Task Force, told me the current landscape for DERs was like the internet before the iPhone came out. There was a lot you could do with the existing technology, but the iPhone “proliferated so many things we do on the internet that we didn’t even think about.”
What else, besides raves powered by pick-up trucks, does the future hold?
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misattributed a quote. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.
Read more about batteries and solar:
Why Batteries Might — Might! — Solve America’s Power-Line Shortage
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.