Jason Badeaux

By bringing demand more under grid operators’ control, DERs virtually eliminate curtailment, or discarding of renewable energy due to temporary oversupply, through 2045. Just as they allow transmission to be used more effectively, they allow us to consume more of the energy generated by existing utility-scale renewables.

The cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.The... See more

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always... See more

These teams are taking their innovations straight to consumers and enterprises who may not vote for the same people nor share the same climate values, but who buy their products and services because they are just simply cheaper and better.  

The key to the value of DERs is that they make electricity demand more controllable. With energy generation and storage scattered throughout distribution grids, grid operators have a way to move energy around, both geographically and temporally, without firing up more power plants. They can absorb extra energy if there’s a dip in demand or produce... See more