Hello, welcome to Ask Jigger, a weekly segment on Energy Empire
where I answer your energy questions.
Ask Jigger is supported by our friends at Octopus Energy.
If you want to submit a question, the link is in the
show notes. All right, let's get into it.
Our first question is from our good friend Andy Refkin and he
asks when you were running the energy loan program, there was
an abundance and federal assets for clean energy inefficiency.
You wisely told me that the key need was for community based
energy mavens to connect local decision makers with federal
resources. What's your advice to local
leaders now? I would say that my advice is
the same, right? I mean, I think when you think
about how much energy costs have gone up and just how many
solutions we have that are right to go, whether it's solar and
battery storage or whether it's electric vehicles, whether it's
heat pumps or insulation or you know, these days there's next
generation technologies for heating, ventilation and air
conditioning, right, to really reduce your costs of managing
your HVAC units at your work. We have a lot of technologies
that have paybacks that are less than four years that just aren't
being installed. And when you ask people, they
say, well, we've never heard of them.
We don't know those companies, right?
I mean, and so I talk about a lot of those companies on my
LinkedIn or on my podcasts or on Twitter.
But I think that we've got to collect that information.
And we've got to go to City Council meetings.
We've got to go to County Council meetings.
And we've got to go to the school board meetings and say,
hey, you know, this stuff is cost effective.
How about we figure out how to deploy it at this moment of an
energy crisis? The next question is from Joe
Murray. And he's a student at Duke
University and he was talking about being at a Goldman
recruiting event this past fall and asking a managing director
what he thinks about virtual power plants and how it'll
influence valuations for utilities.
Look, I think that at the end of the day, the virtual power plant
grid utilization stuff that I'm working on, other people working
on is not going to reduce utility stock prices.
I think what it'll do is to get them to stop overspending on
infrastructure that is underutilized.
And so today, we're faced with 9% rate increases for as far as
the eye can see. Whereas if they deploy virtual
power plants, if they deploy grid enhancing technologies,
advanced conductors, lots of stuff that's lower cost, then
you could imagine using the grid that we've already paid for more
efficiently and keeping rates flat, right?
And then if you then add data center load growth, then you
might actually be able to reduce the utility bills by 10%, right?
So I think that this is not a bad thing for utilities as much
as it's a culture change. And they're used to doing things
the old, most expensive way. And we got to get them to do
things in a way that's smarter for their repairs and their
governors, frankly, many of whom are running for election right
now. The next one is from Rod Adams.
He asks, please explain why nuclear energy supporters should
love cheap battery storage. And the answer is because it's
not about nuclear and it's not about solar and it's not about
wind. It's not about natural gas or
coal or hydro. It's about the grid.
The grid is the greatest engineering accomplishment of
the 20th century, not any of those one technologies.
And battery storage actually allows you to manage the grid
better. So we have the largest commodity
supply chain in the world that doesn't feature storage in the
electric utility system. What do you think about our food
system? Or we're all learning about
storage with the Straits of Hormuz challenge in fuels, or
whether we talk about other commodity supply chains, we
feature storage. But in the grid, we don't really
feature storage except for some, you know, like pumped hydro.
And so now I think we're adding storage.
And the storage helps nuclear, it helps solar, it helps wind,
it helps natural gas, it helps everything run better.
And higher grid utilization is how we get to lower electricity
bills for everybody. Our last question is from karma
dispensary from the energy subreddit on Reddit.
And he says or she says. I live in Northern California
and the utilities feel less reliable every year after buying
a place. We're in the process of getting
enough solar and batteries to be entirely self-sufficient.
I know there are many benefits to distributed grids.
I can't shake the impression that if everyone makes this
decision, grids will be much worse off.
Fewer users to spread capital investments over.
Is mass disconnect something you think about much?
And if it is a significant threat to the grid, look, I
think mass affection is a significant threat to the grid
as is not metering 2 point O as you get to 10% of all the homes
in California having solar on them.
But now we have NEM 3 point O NEM 3 point O features a much
higher fixed cost and it also features that you don't really
get paid much to export power back into the grid.
So you're really running your home more like a micro grid
where you basically take it off grid, right?
That's awesome because remember, we are going to have to
electrify everything. So right now the United States,
our primary energy is roughly 25% electricity, 75% non
electricity. China is at 35% electricity, 65%
non electricity. So we should be able to meet
what China has done if we went from 25% electricity to 35%
electricity, right? That means a lot more electric
vehicles. It means a lot more heat pumps.
It means maybe induction stove, all of that is increased demand
on the circuit that your home is on.
And the question becomes how do we get the utility to use the
battery that you're going to install as part of the grid?
And that's a lot of the work that we've been doing in
California through a nonprofit I support con deploy action, but
it's also a lot of the arguments that we're having across the
country. So when you think about data
center load growth, when you think about all these other
things, figuring out how to do virtual power plants with your
battery is how we actually get to electrify more of the grid,
more of our primary energy, while reducing electricity costs
for everybody. So everybody should be thanking
you for putting solar and battery storage in.
And when the utility finally offers you a virtual power
plant, you should opt in and get the discount that they offer you
for doing that. That's it for this week's Ask
Jigger. Thanks to our great friends at
Octopus Energy for supporting this segment.
If you've got a question you want me to answer, send it in.
The link is in the show notes.