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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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A little-noticed provision would make the payment option used by tax-exempt groups all but impossible to claim.
A little-noticed provision in the Senate tax bill will sabotage the efforts of tribes, rural electric cooperatives, and public power authorities to develop local affordable energy projects by striking a section of the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled tax-exempt groups to claim the clean energy tax credits as direct cash payments from the Treasury.
The IRA included strict domestic sourcing requirements beginning in 2026 for groups utilizing this “direct pay” option. But the law also created exceptions for cases where domestic components were not available in sufficient quantity or quality, or would increase costs by more than 25%. The Senate bill would get rid of these exceptions.
“It just makes it unlikely for those projects to go forward — or more likely for those projects to go forward with a private developer, instead of with a public utility or a tribe or a rural co-op,” Grace Henley, a tax attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “And so they don’t really do anything to increase the amount of domestic material that would be used, they just hurt the projects that are seeking to invest in clean energy infrastructure for these communities to lower costs.”
Public power and tribal energy advocates warn that without the exceptions, energy development will become impossible for their constituents.
Wind and solar projects being developed by these groups are already threatened by the bill’s rapid phase-out of wind and solar tax credits and its complex rules related to using materials from China. Chèri Smith, the executive director of the Alliance for Tribal Energy, told me that Tribes face longer development timelines than the average private developer. “We have multiple stages of approval that are unique to tribal energy development,” she told me, including lengthy internal consultation processes. The changes to direct pay will put these projects further out of reach, she said.
The Alliance provides free energy development consulting services to more than 100 Tribes. Smith sent me a list of projects in Alaska Native villages, Arizona, California, and Oregon that could be killed by the tax credit changes. “Alaska Native villages face some of the highest energy costs in the country,” she said, largely due to their reliance on diesel generators. Just over a third of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona lacks access to electricity, but now multiple microgrid projects meant to close the gap are at risk. Many of the projects on the list are also doubly threatened by grant cancellations and the repeal of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
“The bill is particularly harmful to Tribal Nations, pulling the rug out from under projects that would strengthen their energy sovereignty and power local communities,” Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich, Ron Wyden, and Brian Schatz wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “Together, the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program and our Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits have cleared pathways and removed significant barriers for Tribes to finance and build their own resilient energy infrastructure.”
The American Public Power Association is also sounding the alarm. John Godfrey, the group’s senior government relations director, told me that in addition to wind and solar, municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops are also considering nuclear and hydropower projects. For example, Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 public utilities in Washington State, has plans to retrofit the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant to increase its power output. It’s also in early stages to deploy four small, modular nuclear reactors. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote a few days ago, the governor of New York has also tasked the New York Power Authority with developing a new nuclear plant in the state.
Nuclear and hydropower “are technologies where often there is not a U.S. source, but there is a good trading partner source — Canada, Germany, Japan,” Godfrey said. By tightening the domestic sourcing requirements for direct pay, the bill would “hinder the very technologies that there’s generally a bipartisan consensus we need to be developing.”
Public utilities and electric co-ops, which serve close to 30% of electric customers in the U.S., are also unfairly singled out by the provision, he said. “If my public power utility wants to develop a project and they need a Canadian turbine, they can’t get any credit. But if a taxable corporation down the street develops exactly the same project, they can.”
“If the purpose is to encourage hydropower, that’s not a good use of resources,” he said.
Senate Republicans tucked a carveout into their reconciliation bill that would allow at least one lucky renewable energy project to qualify for a major Inflation Reduction Act tax credit even after the law is all but repealed.
The only problem is, it’s near impossible to be sure right now who may actually benefit from this giveaway — and the mystery is driving me up the wall. I feel like Charlie Day in that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, stringing documents together and ranting like a lunatic.
The Senate bill would phase out the tech-neutral production tax credit starting next year and completely eliminate it by the start of 2028. For the past week and a half, I have been trying to solve the riddle of an exemption tucked into the language that would allow a wind or solar facility that is “part of a single project” to continue to take advantage of the tech-neutral production tax credit as it exists today, which means it would not begin to phase out until 2034.
To qualify for the exemption a project must, according to the Senate text, meet two conditions: It must produce more than 1 gigawatt of electricity, and be sited on federal lands where a “right-of-way grant or lease” had been given by the Bureau of Land Managementbefore June 16, which is the date the text was released.
Only a handful of projects in the U.S. could possibly fit that criteria. But every time I think I’ve identified one that will actually qualify, I learn a new fact that, to me, takes it out of the running.
Here’s why my head hurts so much: A renewables facility that would benefit from this language needs to be sited at least partially on federal lands. But because Trump isn’t issuing new right-of-way approvals or leases to most renewables projects right now, it likely had to get its right-of-way or its lease before he entered office. (The June 16 language feels like a bit of a red herring. Nothing that fits the other definitions has received these documents since the start of Trump 2.0.)
Then there’s another factor: The only projects that would benefit from this language are ones that haven't started construction yet. Even if a project doesn’t have all of its permits for federal land use, its developer can build stuff like roads on any connected private lands and technically meet the deadline to start construction laid out in the new legislation. The construction start date is what counts — it doesn’t matter whether a project is placed in service and provides power to the grid years later, as long as it began construction before that deadline.
Taken together, all this means that a project that would benefit from this language probably has to be sited on federal lands and hold permits already … but for some reason can’t start construction to qualify for the program.
When I first started hunting for an answer, many people — including renewables advocates, anti-wind activists, and even some Senate staff in conversations with me — speculated that the language was a giveaway to two wind projects under construction in Wyoming, Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which together make up what would likely be the largest wind farm in the U.S. if completed. These two projects are largely sited on federal lands and received all their approvals before Trump entered office.
I understand why people are pointing at Chokecherry and Sierra Madre. They are not expected to be online before 2029, and the House version of the bill would have locked them out of the production tax credit because it added a requirement that projects be “placed in service” — i.e. actively providing power to the grid — by around that same period. Any slippage in construction might have really hurt their finances. They’re also backed by a powerful billionaire, GOP donor and live entertainment power-broker Phil Anschutz, a man who made his initial fortune partially from fossil fuels.
Except … my colleagues and I are still not convinced. That’s because it is not clear that these two projects are at any actual risk of losing the production tax credit. They have been actively under construction for a long time, and the Senate bill killed the House’s “placed in service” requirement.
Another project floated is the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was fully permitted under Biden, is largely sited on federal lands, and would produce more power than necessary to qualify for the exception. Hypothetically, this project would be a great candidate for being a beneficiary of the bill because Trump banned work on the project via executive order amid opposition from Idaho politicians, making a carveout to get more time a worthwhile endeavor.
Except … Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, the lead author of the pertinent section of the Senate reconciliation bill, was one of those Idaho politicians who pushed Trump to kill Lava Ridge. Why would he give a tax break to a project he wanted dead?
Then there was my personal best guess for the beneficiary: Esmeralda 7, an expansive set of proposed solar farms in the Nevada desert that, as proposed, would produce more than 5 gigawatts of power and is largely sited on federal land. Construction can’t begin until Esmeralda 7 gets its federal approvals, and the Trump administration was expected to complete that work by mid-summer.
Except … I reported last week that the permitting process for Esmeralda 7 is now indefinitely stalled. The project is at best still months away from getting its right-of-way approvals from the Trump administration, which recently pushed back timelines for finishing reviews of other large Nevada solar projects, too.
Ultimately, it will be difficult to glean who the lobbyist giveaway here is for unless the legislators who wrote it disclose their intentions. I reached out to the communications director for Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to try and find out, but so far I’ve gotten crickets.
It may be that this language is revised and that future changes lay out the true beneficiary. Sometimes lawmakers will put the wrong date or word into a bill and they’ll edit it on the floor before a vote, chalking it up to a drafting error.
If senators decide to add back the “placed in service” requirement to capitulate to the House, this would easily be the Chokecherry-Sierra Madre giveaway. If Republicans were to shift forward the deadline for getting a right-of-way, Esmeralda 7 would qualify. Or maybe they could change some secret third thing and a different project I hadn’t considered will be revealed as the mastermind in the shadows.
Until then, I’ll be in my basement poring over more maps and going slowly insane.
Additional reporting was provided by Emily Pontecorvo.
On resuming rare earth shipments, hurricane tracking, and EV tax credits
Current conditions: The Ohio Valley is still sweltering through the last remnants of this week’s brutal heat wave • The death toll from recent floods in South Africa has risen to 101 • It’s 90 degrees in Venice, Italy, where the world’s rich and famous are gathering for the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.
The U.S. and China have hammered out the details of a trade deal, including an agreement that China will resume rare earth shipments to the U.S. Rare earth materials are essential for everything from planes to EVs to wind turbines. China controls most of the world’s rare earth production and halted exports in April in response to President Trump’s tariff hike, and China’s chokehold on rare earths threatened to derail trade talks between the two countries altogether. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a deal has now been “signed and sealed.” “They’re going to deliver rare earths to us,” Lutnick said, adding that the U.S. will then “take down our countermeasures.” Lutnick also indicated that Trump plans to announce further trade deals with other nations in the coming two weeks.
As climate talks in Bonn, Germany, wind down, negotiators there have agreed to increase the budget for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by 10% over the next two years to 81.5 million euros ($95.4 million). The UNFCCC runs some of the world’s largest climate negotiations and tries to ensure countries follow through on their climate commitments. Its budget is funded by government contributions. China will account for 20% of the new budget, Reuters reported. The U.S. is supposed to cover 22%, but President Trump has pulled international climate funding. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm has stepped in to cover the missing U.S. contributions. UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the budget increase was “a clear signal that governments continue to see UN-convened climate cooperation as essential, even in difficult times.”
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Hurricane forecasting is about to get a little bit more difficult. At the end of June, the federal government is going to stop distributing readings from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, a tool forecasters all over the world have been using to track and predict hurricane development. As retired federal meteorologist Alan Gerard told Bloomberg, this particular satellite program is unique because it lets forecasters peer inside storms and monitor for rapid intensification. As the planet warms, hurricanes are strengthening much faster than they did in recent decades. Hurricane expert Michael Lowry says the Department of Defense seems to be concerned that the satellite data poses a security concern. Its termination “will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines,” Lowry wrote.
A group of U.S. car dealers penned a letter urging senators to “reject provisions in the budget reconciliation process that would abruptly eliminate EV-related tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act,” warning that sudden changes would bring about market uncertainty, damage businesses, and hurt Americans. The signatories – including EV Auto, Carmax, and Caravan – instead call for a “gradual sunset” of the EV tax credits to avoid disruption to the used car market. “A multi-year transitional period would also provide the opportunity for Americans to continue adopting cleaner vehicles more affordably,” they add. The tax and budget bill put forward by Senate Republicans would end the $7,500 EV tax credit within 180 days after the law’s passage.
A report out today from the International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that the world’s private jets produced more greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 than all the flights that took off from Heathrow Airport — the world’s fourth busiest airport — that same year. Emissions from private jets increased 25% over the past decade. A few more interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbits from the report:
International Council on Clean Transportation
Solar power accounted for more than 10% of U.S. electrical output in April, while wind provided about 14%. As Michelle Lewis at Electreknotes, “solar is now producing more electricity than hydropower, biomass, and geothermal combined.”