Podcast: Bill Shevlin on Clean Energy Microgrids and Decarbonizing the Energy Supply Chain

Highlights from the Conversation

I’m excited to have Bill Shevlin from Santa Cruz, CEO of Mavericks Microgrids, here with me this morning. Bill, I’m going to start off with a random question: is “Mavericks” akin to the Mavericks Beach surf site? It’s just up the street.

• Yes, we named the company after the surf break because it’s one of the most impressive and powerful waves on the planet. Also, it doesn’t stop—just like we’re going to create a wave of energy that washes over the US.

I love it! So let’s just dive right in. Bring me all the way back before you get to Mavericks Microgrids. We’d love to hear a little bit about you and how you got started at the beginning of your career.

• Sure, thanks, I appreciate the time and being on the podcast.
• I started out my career in real estate development management. We built buildings mostly in commercial and office/retail, and always built around the efficiency standards in the industry.
• In 2000, I joined a company that was focused on commercial roofing, and we utilized energy efficient roofing, which is now referred to as cool roofing.
• I actually went out and worked with the California Energy Commission and Lawrence Berkeley Labs to prove that they saved energy; we did some calculations on it. We would sell roofing based on a return on investment, which was different. We also developed some of the initial rebates, and a lot of what we did became Title 24 standard in building envelopes throughout the US.
• From there, I worked with a national company and we developed a solar program back in 2008-2009. We used to do a lot of corporate national accounts for Walmart, Kohl’s, Marriott’s—companies like that.
• We did onsite energy generation to offset customers’ bills: we essentially went in and figured out how to decarbonize their portfolio before people really knew what that meant. We also reduced their energy costs at the same time by putting renewable assets on site.
• One of the issues that I had with those projects was always working with the utilities and dealing with the long delays of being able to connect the solar projects and feed them into the grid so we could offset that meter.
• When I first started installing solar commercially, the costs were about $8 a lot. And they got down into about the $1.50-$1.75 per watt range. And I saw batteries following that same expense curve.
• In 2018 I took a deep dive on the microgrid space and was looking not just at the technologies, but what was going on in the markets as far as what was going to be taking place in terms of energy intensive uses. Obviously, EVs were a very intensive energy use, data centers, and controlled environment agriculture (ag). And so that’s where we spent a lot of our initial focus.
• Now we’re really focused on decarbonizing a site, but also on using that strategy to decarbonize vehicles and transportation, which means that we can touch the entire supply chain. And in some cases, now, we’re talking about larger sites that will generate hydrogen, and we can offset the supply chain on the hydrogen side as well.

I want to kind of highlight a couple things going back through that. Are you a lifelong resident of Santa Cruz?

• Yeah, I grew up around here. A lot has changed; it’s a hub of Silicon Valley now.

You were quite a bit ahead of the game, thinking about sustainability in the context of roofing and building materials at that time. Is that a result of being in the environment that you’re in? Or is that something that you always just naturally fell towards?

• In a community like Santa Cruz, you can be in the redwoods or at the ocean in 15 minutes, or we can drive an hour and a half to the Sierras and be in the snow. I grew up around the environment.
• When I was a senior in high school I was involved in a program where we taught Special Olympics athletes. We built ropes courses and we learned how to rock climb; so we were really out in the environment a lot. So, growing up around that I wanted to make sure that what I was doing was going to make an impact.
• But I was also really, really good at math from a young age. I saw the cost benefit of saving energy, which led me to the efficiency space, and then I got into the renewable space, because what we’ve seen, and what we’re continuing to see, is when we work at a site, and we provide energy infrastructure, we can deliver power, cheaper, faster, better than the utility, and we can do it cleanly.
• We can get really good returns on it, which then allows us to sell some of that excess energy back to the grid and do a lot of different things.
• We’re right at the forefront of the transportation and electrification market is the decentralization and digitization of electricity. It’s one of the last remaining infrastructures that hasn’t been upgraded.

I’m drawing a bit on my former experience in the data center space where there’s a lot of energy consumption, but you hit on a point there that a lot of people need to understand about the grid. In some places the grid is 60, 70, or even 80 years old in some places. It’s extremely archaic and it needs a lot of upgrades. It’s sort of like plumbing in that we take it for granted until it breaks.

• And there’s no visibility to it right now. What I mean by that is, for example, in a computer network you can see what’s going on, you can see where the traffic is, you can see if you have an issue with the network.
• With electricity there’s no visibility into the greater grid. If a section goes down, the way that they find it is that person drives out in a truck, they look at the lines, and they will manually turn something on and off. They have to climb up the pole or get a hook and turn the switch on and off manually.
• When we install a project, we can monitor every panel, we can monitor the cell on the panel, we can turn the entire system on and off remotely, we know exactly what’s going on. And the utilities haven’t made those investments into the grid like most energy companies have today.

Yes, a lot of this core infrastructure is expensive to change, but it needs to change. And it’s a long time coming, like a lot of sustainability work that needs to happen. But let me go back to the first thing that you started to focus on: sustainable roofs. What was it about roofs that made you want to get into it?

• Around 20 years ago when we did efficiency projects for buildings, we would upgrade the HVAC and lighting and such, and what we found was that most roof systems were asphalt. Well, think about an asphalt parking lot when you walk across it. When it’s sunny out, it’s 30, 40 or 50 degrees above ambient temperature.
• Roofing materials were always traditionally built out of the same material. The building would get really hot, and that heat has to go somewhere so it goes inside of the building.
• If you use a reflective emissive material that stays cool all the time or close to ambient, that heat never has the chance to go into the building. And when we did some of the initial studies with the California Energy Commission, they actually came out and put sensors on the building and sensors on the HVAC. In some cases, we had 50% savings on cooling costs in those facilities.
• So we could do an HVAC upgrade that would get maybe 5%, 10% or 15%, but when we did the envelope upgrade, we could realize sometimes a 50% savings. That was a huge, you know, kind of “aha” moment.
• Then we would utilize that to build additional upgrades, we would daylight buildings, we put in skylights, we put in lights with sensors to try and cut down those energy costs overall. It also increases the health of the building and the longevity of the building lifecycle.
• There’s a lot of costs and benefits when you put an infrastructure correctly, whether it’s a roof system or a micro grid infrastructure.

It seems like you spent around seven or eight years in energy efficient projects.

• When we started doing solar, I actually worked at a national company. We had clients all over the US and my region was Western US; that’s right when solar was taking off.
• We started getting a lot of calls from the accounts, but also from a lot of the material manufacturers that we worked with, complaining that solar companies were coming out and creating warranty issues.
• So we actually ended up being an installation partner for multiple solar companies, because we could install the solar on a roof or in a facility and do it in a way that didn’t void warranties and didn’t damage the buildings, because we knew how to build things quickly and efficiently. And so we became an installation partner.
• Then we ended up launching a national solar division. By that time, I was traveling a bunch and my kids were younger, so I got a little bit tired of that. I got offered a position at a local Bay Area company, and we basically bought him out. We built the company up from a few million dollars a year to $30 million within about a three year period of time.
• During that time, I also developed about eight different patents for attaching solar arrays to roofing structures and buildings. We essentially did it in a way that utilized the existing building materials, and it was integrated with the systems that were already on the buildings and didn’t void any warranties—it also cut our installation costs down.
• So, again, we were able to do it cheaper, quicker, faster, and better than a lot of the competition.
• At one point in time, we were installing about a million square feet of building envelopes, insulation upgrades and solar on these facilities a month.

Sounds like there are a lot of parallels with what Elon Musk is doing with SolarCity. But going back to the whole concept of how the infrastructure is old and needs replacing, there’s not a very good way to do that wholesale, without going, ironically, from the end user, and creating and generating power and then pushing that back onto the grid. Then, you’re starting to replace the grid incrementally, leading to what could be called microgrids. Did you start to see the dots connecting on how to do a wholesale infrastructure replacement?

• That’s actually one of the reasons we’re so focused on the space. We work with residential clients all the way through commercial, industrial, and even municipalities.
• We have some food processor clients, and on a food processor site they use a lot of energy. But they are seasonal, both by day and by year. What that means is that they have really high uses of energy and they have really low uses of energy. And so what we do is we build a system that can create energy at the high point, but has access to energy at the low point.
• The other issue with a lot of people right now, whether it’s a home or a commercial industrial building, is the utility can’t get the power there. Now I’m in Northern California, which is a PG&E region. Everybody hates PG&E, because they’re starting fires and turning off the grid all the time. We have customers that have been told by the utility that they can’t get power upgrades until 2025.
• Right now, these customers want to convert some of their vehicles to EVs. And in some cases, they have fleets of 1,000 plus vehicles that might consist of small pickup trucks all the way through semi trucks. And when you think about a site that needs maybe 100 vehicles that are somewhere between 100 kilowatt and 500 kilowatts’ worth of energy, you’re talking about the equivalent of a small city at that location.
• We need to be able to put all the energy generation, the energy storage and everything else on the infrastructure basis that can charge those vehicles and supply power to that site.
• When those vehicles are not being charged, or the facility is in its low energy usage during the evening, or in the offseason, we can sell that excess power to the grid, or I can actually virtually net meter it and sell it to other customers.
• And if you do enough of those, you can actually create grid support in a region. So you talked about Musk—that’s one of his plans. Recently, Tesla just got approved to do energy trading in Texas. Essentially, they’re deploying a whole bunch of batteries, and they’re selling power between these batteries and between customers.
• We’re using the same strategy, but we’re focused on the customer site, providing power at that site, and we create additional monetization by selling that excess power.
• But when we do it at the site, we’re essentially decarbonizing their site, and we’re charging their vehicles, we’re decarbonizing the supply chain at the same time.
• For example, in the case of an agricultural customer, they’re taking their vehicle and they’re going out to the field to check if it’s ready for crop or if it just needs an inspection. That small pickup truck can be powered by EV that’s powered by the site. For a fleet truck that’s doing a local route, same thing.
• Meanwhile, on the electrical side there’s the dashboard reporting system that the customer can tie into, and they can see what their carbon footprint is and they can see what their energy usage is.
• Just on the energy usage side, we typically say save customers 5% to 10% at their site. But there’s also the fuel savings: we can save 20% to 30% because we can generate electricity much less expensively than they can buy fuel.
• The other thing that we do is we fix that cost over a 20-year period of time. So if you think about it from an operational perspective, they’ve got a fixed cost of energy, and they’ve got a fixed cost of fuel for 30 years. What’s the fuel costs been over the last 12 months? It’s crazy, right? It’s all over the place. Here, I think I just paid $5 a gallon for my combustion engine vehicle.
• So we’re doing a lot of different things in that space. We’re also working with a development company that’s doing 3D printed homes. We have a project coming up in Virginia that’s 200 homes, where we’re going to be building a microgrid or virtual power plant for the home, so each home will have solar storage and EV charging.
• We also will have smart circuit breakers for the home so the homeowner will know exactly how much energy is being used, the energy in the vehicle that’s traveling down the road will be provided at a lower cost than what they can get their fuel for.
• It’ll also keep their home on all the time in the case of an emergency or a catastrophic event. The community itself is within a micro grid, but each home also has its certain amount of storage and energy generation. So they’re each independent, but it’s interdependent as well.

I’d love to hear your definition of a microgrid, so people can understand what they are and why they’re important today.

• A microgrid has multiple components. It has a controller, which is essentially watching everything that’s being generated. Typically, it has some energy storage, we design systems so that they’re what’s called “behind the meter”. What that means is we have our own control system, we’ve got a battery system, and then we’ve got energy generation assets behind that microgrid controller.
• That microgrid controller and the battery are tied to the outside grid and the inside grid. On the inside grid, we have energy generation assets that may be wind, solar, fuel cell, waste-to-energy—it really doesn’t matter. But what does matter is making sure that we know what’s going on within that system, that we’re optimizing the load, and that we’re providing the energy over time.
• The really good microgrid controllers, not only are they built by large companies that have been in the electrical infrastructure space, but they also have a fair amount of software and machine learning/AI to them. Over time, they can learn the patterns of not only the energy production, but the usage of the facility and the usage of the vehicles, and they’re able to optimize that load. What I mean by that is, if we have solar, the system will actually look at the weather pattern, see if it’s going to be extra cloudy the next day, and make sure that the batteries are charged up.
• Depending on the energy assets that we have, it may use fuel cell power for part of that day, or another technology for part of that day to build some of the baseload. Or it may just use energy storage, and just put more energy into the storage that day, because it knows it’s going to have a deficiency the next day. If you go back to our original conversation around the grid, this is a great way to do that.

So at the end of the day a microgrid is a small grid unto itself, correct? And you need a way to generate power, you need to store power, and then you need to be able to deliver power back to the primary grid. Because I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that with all of our solar panels, we’re generating way more power than we can consume in our homes. So instead of letting that power go to waste, you store it somewhere, and then deliver it back to the grid, just like you’re describing. But that could be solar and, I guess, wind now as well, is that correct?

• Right. And if you have enough microgrids together, you can sell power in between them, and that becomes what’s known as a virtual power plant. You can do a lot of different things in that aspect and we’re kind of in a space right now, where the technology is ahead of legislation, just like always.

Go figure!

• A lot of the time we have to play catch up. We work with a couple groups that are in the European markets. The European markets are really kind of decentralized already, where they have a lot of community-based grids. They’re able to do a lot of virtual net metering and virtual power plants much more easily than we can here in the US.
• There’s a lot of regulatory compliance if you want to be able to sell power through the grid, obviously you have to pay transmission fees, but you have to get all kinds of approvals to be able to do that. And it’s kind of a long arduous process to get to that point.
• There are some technology partners out there that are going out and paving the way to get that pre-approval. You can just onboard your energy assets into those systems—almost plug and play energy is where it will go in the next few years.

So that brings us forward into Mavericks Microgrids. Maybe you can describe a little bit more about the core technology in there?

• In our company, we’re somewhat agnostic on the technology. We don’t have one preferred panel on solar, for example. But we use what’s known as tier one panels. Those are the panels that have undergone a certain testing rigor, they’ve been proven, they have accelerated aging studies, we know what they’re going to produce over that 20 to 30 year period of time, and they’re a warrantable system.
• Same thing with energy storage, or wind, or fuel cell.
• We have a microgrid control partner that we use that’s a large electrical manufacturer, but we put our own special sauce in it that improves grid efficiency.
• We’re also doing things a little bit differently, because we’re not just generating the electricity, but we’re going all the way out through the vehicle, and the facility.
• So we’ve got some smart panel technology that enables us to see what’s going on with energy usage within a building or within a vehicle, and match those loads and know what those loads need to do over time.
• One of the things that really makes it possible is that we use consumption to be able to finance those mechanisms. If we look at a facility that maybe uses $1 million a year worth of electricity, over a 20-year period of time. And, this is typical across the US, most utility companies will raise rates, right? Typically it’s 5% to 6% a year. So that million dollars today, over 20 years, is going to increase 6% annually every single year.

And it’s compounded as well! So, you might straight line at $20 million, but it turns into a $40 million lifetime.

• Exactly, so it’s a fair amount of cost, and it’s typically a cost that a customer doesn’t think they can control. Well, what we do is we actually use the mechanism to be able to control that cost.
• We look at that million dollars, and we know how many kilowatt hours are being used out of that million dollars, at 15 cents, 10 cents, five cents per kilowatt hour—or whatever it is.
• We reverse engineer how many kilowatts we need to develop on the site, we look at the highs and lows of energy production, figure out what the maximum is, what the minimum is, and design systems to be able to hit those profiles. Then we use different types of financing, like the investment tax credit, which has been used in the energy space for a long time.
• We also use other mechanisms; we’re actually working with a group right now raising some green bonds for some of our projects.
• Right now, there’s also a lot of carbon offsets available and other potential carbon credits available that we’re utilizing. So we stack all the different finance mechanisms, and then we provide that power to the customer. And instead of $1 million, it might be $900,000. And instead of a 6% escalator, it’s going to be a 1% to 2% escalator over time.
• In some cases, if we’re selling it at $900,000 per year, but we know that we’re going to create excess energy on top of that on excess revenue, we actually can give the customer a rebate off of some of that excess revenue so they can drive that $900,000 down to $800,000 per year, maybe, or lower, depending upon the system.
• So we work in partnership with the customer because we’re going to be there for 20 years, providing energy and energy infrastructure for them. We want to make sure that what we’re doing works for them today and works for them over that 20-year period of time. We try to future proof what we do.

Which makes total sense. So let me dive in on two things. One, you also mentioned the carbon credits. That’s an interesting topic right now, in the sense that carbon credits have been around for a while. They kind of missed the mark about 10 to15 years ago, when they first came on the scene. And so in a way, they’re being reintroduced—let’s call it carbon credits 2.0. How are you guys looking at carbon credits? Do you use them directly?

• We have credits and offsets within what we do if we’re developing energy on site, and it’s renewable. We shoot for always-on renewable, which means that we’re 24/7 renewable, that’s the strategy. Solar is great during the day, but during the evening, it doesn’t do so great, so we have to balance it.
• Here in California, the average kilowatt hour is about nine pounds of CO2, because we’re not 100% renewable in California, and about half the energy we get is carbon intensive.
• In an area like Virginia, the kilowatt hours are about two pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour. So in the example of the home projects that we’re doing down there, we’re projecting that each home’s going to use about 12,000 to 15,000 kilowatt hours per year, that’s 24,000 to 30,000 pounds of CO2 offset that’s affected by creating the right energy strategy for that home. That 30,000 pounds is about 15 tons of CO2 offset in the market.
• There’s markets available right now for those offsets, and you can go out and you can sell them for anywhere between $15 and $50 a ton, depending upon the markets that you’re in.
• Right now is that there is some legislation in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington, around vehicle electrification. On a per-mile basis, a consumer vehicle is about 0.9 pounds per mile of CO2, on average, if you convert a vehicle from gas to electricity. That’s based on an average mile per gallon of vehicles in the US.
• So there’s what’s known as low carbon fuel standard credits available in all those markets, and it’s going into other markets as well. But we take that strategy on the energy side, but also on the vehicle side, combine those offsets, and we can sell those into the markets.
• The other thing that we do on larger projects is that we can have waste-to-energy projects that generate what’s known as carbon negative power. That waste product could be biogas from a waste treatment plant, or it could be digestive from a dairy farm. It can even be woody biomass or even tires in some situations.
  So we’re taking that product into the systems that we use, typically pyrolysis or anaerobic digestion. What they do is they essentially heat that biomass or that product up to a certain point, and they combust it—but they’re super efficient in combustion and they don’t allow that CO2 to escape.
• So we’re essentially recirculating that exhaust gas so that it burns. It creates heat, which we utilize, it creates electricity, which we utilize, and then it actually typically creates byproducts. If it’s a pyrolysis system, it’ll create a biochar byproduct.

When you say biochar specifically, I’m imagining this black mass of stuff, because it has been burned. What do you do with the biochar?

• So it’s biochar if it’s derived from a plant material, and they can use it in the soil to help improve concentration of plant nutrients. It has a super interesting structure in that a very small piece has a very large surface area. For plants, what that means is there’s a lot of nutrients.
• Let’s think about a ton of carbon-based material and combusting it and basically capturing all that CO2 and concentrating it into about 10% of the mass. You can make, for example, 200 pounds of biochar, but that means that every pound has about 10 pounds of CO2 in it, depending on what you’re utilizing.
• That carbon, when you put it into the ground, will be sequestered into the soil permanently. They’ve done a lot of studies around it, where it’ll increase the availability of plant nutrients, because it’s got that structure. So plant nutrients are able to bond to it, you can reduce water usage and most importantly, you’re able to sequester CO2 using that.
• That’s one of the ways that it gets to that carbon negative goal, because you’re taking a fuel input, and you’re gaining energy out of it, but you’re also gaining a product that increases the health of the environment for the plant.

You’re at the forefront of so many things that people may have been talking about for a long time, but are taking much more seriously now. This is the ultimate meaning of circular economy: if we pull something out of the ground, you want to use it until there’s nothing left or you’re putting something back in in a way that’s actually very healthy to the ecosystem. But I still think we’re learning a lot about what that means, though, right?

• Yeah, yeah, we are. It’s interesting, though, because we work with a lot of companies that are bringing these technologies from the European market. So when we talk about anaerobic digestion, we’re essentially digesting biological matter, turning that into water, plant nutrients, biogas and energy.
• Now, those technologies have been in the European market for 15 to 20 years. We don’t have a lot of large-scale anaerobic digestion in the US.
• Some of the companies that are now coming in have maybe one or two locations here in the US, but the technology has been proven for 20 plus years over in Europe. The same holds true in pyrolysis.
• One of the reasons for that is Europe has less landmass, they’re more concentrated, and so they have to be more efficient. They’ve been focused more on sustainability by necessity than we have here in the US, where we have wide open space. We can go do whatever we want, we can throw it in the ground, it doesn’t matter.
• You know, I’ve seen reports in the last few weeks that say we have created something to the effect of two to three times the biomass that exists naturally on the planet out of materials. In other words, we’ve taken materials out of the ground and created garbage, essentially, and other materials at a rate of two to three times of the natural environment. If you think about it, it’s really unsustainable.
• We really do need to get to that circular type of economy. And that’s where these waste-to-energy technologies become really interesting, because you can re-input that and recreate it into another use, potentially. Ultimately, we’ve got to get to biodegradable to get rid of plastics and everything else. But we look at some of those technologies, because they can create effective 24/7 clean energy.

So it looks like your mission is to rebuild the energy grid from the outside in, with microgrids eating into the main area. And as you look at the current state of microgrids, both domestically and internationally, it just makes all the sense in the world. So what is it besides consumer adoption that is slowing down microgrids from being propagated into the marketplace today? Is it just just misinformation? Or that people just don’t know?

• Some of it is technology constricted on the energy storage side. It’s taken to this point where energy storage has started to become more cost effective. Some of the technologies are not out there.
• It’s sort of like solar was back in 2008-2009: it’s fairly new and people don’t totally understand it.
• When we were doing solar back in 2008-2009, we would go out and do five or six Walmarts in a few weeks. And then I would go talk to a commercial customer here in the Bay Area that was maybe a small manufacturer about putting in a 100 kilowatt system for his site. He’d say, “Well I don’t know if solar works”. And I’d say, “Well we just did 10 Walmarts, and it’s working for them, so I know it will work for you”. And they’d be like, “Oh, okay”. That’s how we are until we see somebody doing something, then it makes sense.

Given that solar is totally commensurate with regular energy on a cost per kilowatt hour basis, to me, it feels like more of a PR game right now to get people to adopt.

• Yeah it is. But at the same time, for example, let’s say everybody in your neighborhood put in solar and everybody got electric vehicles; great, that’s fantastic. But if we don’t put in a microgrid structure for your home, you don’t have that energy storage if the power goes down. Now, all of a sudden, you don’t have power for your home, and you can’t go anywhere with your vehicle. That’s why microgrids are really critical.
• With a microgrid you’re coupling the control, the energy storage, and the energy generation that allows you to stay online, regardless. That’s super critical when we start electrifying vehicles.
• Think about a police department. If a police department doesn’t have their own grid infrastructure and can’t charge their vehicles, if there’s an emergency, those vehicles are sitting in the parking lot.
• There’s a lot of things that need to take place to get the point that everybody’s talking about on the electrification side. We just don’t have the infrastructure to support what is coming over the next 10 to 15 years.

Let me ask an energy supply chain question. As of right now, we’ve been talking about renewables. Currently, we’ve got solar, wind, thermal, and I’m seeing a lot of stuff now with gravitational energy creation. It’s probably too science fiction-y for a lot of people, but I think you get it. So the question is, what other renewable energies are on the horizon that you’re seeing that are interesting?

• I think gravitational is interesting. There’s one company that’s essentially building large towers and during the day they’re lifting the weight in those towers up to the top and then during the evening, they release it slowly and that generates electricity.
• I’ve seen another one recently that is using a rail car type system, where during the day they’re pulling these rail cars up the hill. At night, they release them, and then they generate electricity slowly as the cars come down the hill.
• A couple of years ago, Caterpillar came out with a very large truck for the mining industry. I think it takes one megawatt of electricity to go up the hill but then generates seven megawatts as it comes down. So they’re basically mining at the top, loading up the vehicle, and as it comes down, it’s generating the electricity that provides power to the site. There’s a lot of things going on like that.
• We’re working with a company that has a small wind turbine that can generate up to 15 kilowatt hours of electricity. It’s about eight feet tall, and they have some proprietary technology around the generator at the bottom, which is really a sophisticated alternator. It can operate in low as five to 10 mile an hour winds, and in up to 70 to 80 miles an hour winds without an issue.
• There’s some similar technologies that we’re seeing when we look at electrified vehicles, they’re super efficient as far as usage.
• You know, when you look at electric vehicles versus combustion, there’s no contest. With combusting fuel, most of the energy in that process is actually going out through heat from the car, so you’re not really generating a lot of momentum. In an electric vehicle, it’s going from the battery to the motor to the wheel. There’s not there’s not a lot of waste there.
• Micro grids are the same as well. When we look at the centralized grid structure, you have a big power plant in one location that’s pushing energy miles and miles and miles down the road. There, the loss of energy can be up to 60% by the time it gets to the customer. Because what happens is you’re pushing electricity through that wire, there’s resistance in that wire, and so you lose energy in that process.
• When we generate electricity at the site, it’s being used at the site. We’re not losing it through transmission. It’s much more efficient to be able to do that.

One of the energies that I’d like to get your opinion on is nuclear power. People get a little bit nervous about it, but it’s changed a lot over 30 to 50 years. It’s gotten a bad rap, in my opinion. Do you think it will come back into the portfolio?

• I know that Bill Gates and a lot of other people have been looking at that space. My thought is that if they could figure out how to neutralize it at the end of its life cycle then I’m all for it. If we have to store it for 5 million years, or whatever, then it’s not really a sustainable process.
• I know that there’s some companies working on technologies that are thorium-based where it has a much lower radiation level, and it’s a much shorter life cycle. You know, I think that definitely has a future.
• Here in California, we have the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, and they’ve been talking about shutting it down for years and it was scheduled to be decommissioned. Well, now they’re talking about keeping it online because we don’t have the ability right now to replace that energy. If everybody started putting solar on their home and storage in their home over the next five years, we still wouldn’t be able to get the capacity that Diablo creates right now. So we need to have the strategies around how to do what we need to do.
• There’s a lot of technologies out there on the energy generation side that are being worked on, there’s also a lot of technologies on the energy storage side that are being worked on.
• When I started installing solar in 2008-2009, the average watt panel was like 185 to 190 watts per panel. Ten years later, we’re at 400 to 500 watts per panel, so the efficiency and the density of energy that we’re generating from these panels has gotten much more efficient over time. We’re gonna see the same thing in battery technology.
• We’re going to probably see some technologies in the next, you know, five to 10 years that have not even been thought of, really. There’s one company that we’re talking to from Australia, and they have a technology that you can use to retrofit a coal fired power plant and make it burn hydrogen. Basically they replace the boilers within the power plant with a hydrogen based boiler, and you can run that power plant now on carbon neutral energy.
• So there’s some things taking place in the space that are super, super interesting.
• We need to get to decarbonized energy as quickly as possible. You know, it was 80 degrees three or four days ago, here in Santa Cruz. It’s December, it’s relatively nice typically, but it shouldn’t be 80 degrees.

In terms of parting thoughts, is there anything else that you see coming up in the future?

• I think in five or six years, the microgrid space and the virtual power plant space are going to be in the same place that solar and storage are perceived to be right now. It will be much more scalable and many more companies will be doing it. It’s going to be more of a plug and play type of a scenario.
• I think that it’s super interesting that power can be democratized right now, the reason being, as we talked about, in some cases we’re producing more solar than we can use. When you get to a massive scale, you can sell power super cost effectively, and very low cost.
• One of the groups that we’re working with is doing microgrids in Africa. They’re going into communities where there’s no power infrastructure, and they’re starting to set up microgrids. It’s following the same path that cellular did with telecom: they’re going to leapfrog the traditional utilities, and just skip the traditional infrastructure that’s been built over time. You’re going to see microgrids in all these different markets.

Well, Bill, an hour has just flown by! Thanks for an incredible conversation, and the work you’re doing in the microgrid space is super interesting. Where do people find out what you’re up to besides on LinkedIn?

• You can go to Mavericks dot energy and check us out. We just have a landing page there right now. You can also find me on LinkedIn; I’m happy to talk to anybody. I really appreciate your time, Richard, and what you’re doing; making people aware of all these different issues is important.

I think bringing thought leaders like yourself into the space has a huge impact. I’ve seen it personally in the area of data centers and what we were able to do with the efficiency gains that we had there. And now we’re just trying to bring this into the supply chain energy kind of space as well. Thank you so much.

• You too. Thanks, Richard.