Summary
Hop in with James, Pam, and Ben as they take a journey through the confusing, wonky and brilliantly exciting world of today’s clean energy landscape. The trio kick-starts with some personal tales of how they learn about energy themselves including diving head-first into the complexities of energy law reviews and DER aggregation or building home solar + battery storage + EV systems to truly learn how things work!
From hitting up energy industry conferences and writing extensive papers to discussing funding opportunities and mainstream adoption of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), they cover it all with a friendly and engaging chat. They even dive into the world of equitable clean energy and the exciting transition to customer-led energy revolution.
So if you're keen to know about the growth and opportunities in the energy industry, electric vehicles, or just how everyone can join in the clean energy wave, this episode's got something for you.
Help us out!
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Music
Our incredible intro/outro music is the song Ticking, by artist TIN
You can stream the whole song and the rest of their catalog here:
Episode transcript
Welcome to the intermediate podcast. This is the show to
easily get the knowledge you need to work in clean energy
beyond the obvious.
Don't sound so excited about it.
I need to do better. Huh? Not excited.
Don't be like too hype though.
Welcome to the intermediate podcast. This is the show to
easily get the energy knowledge you need to work in
clean energy beyond the obvious. My name is James
Gordey, co-host of the show.
I'm Ben Hillborn.
I'm Pamela Wildstein.
OK, maybe to get things kicked off,
should we all introduce ourselves?
Yeah.
Most interesting person in the room.
Not even close.
My name is Pamela Wildstein.
I am a dual PhD student at the University of Michigan,
studying environment and sustainability
and urban and regional planning.
I study energy geography and power systems planning.
I had no idea you were a dual PhD.
That sounds like torture.
It's not particularly,
it just means you have to do some extra paperwork.
I just don't suggest it.
Two hands, two PhDs.
No, no, it's one PhD.
One PhD with two departments
and one department is on North Campus
and the other department's on Central Campus,
meaning they're like four miles apart.
So I have to bus back and forth between them
for advising meetings, which is just amazing.
Yeah, that sounds like a good time.
Maybe one thing that's interesting,
they talk about this on the DER Task Force podcast.
How did you get into clean energy, right?
Like they say, how'd you get DER-pilled?
When'd you get DER-pilled, right?
Like, what's the like genesis
of your clean energy journey, Pam?
I was studying environment sustainability
and climate change in undergrad.
And when I was a sophomore, I clicked on the wrong,
I had already had a general interest in energy
and taken a couple of classes.
Um, but one day I clicked on the wrong podcast and, uh, it was the interchange,
which back when it was run by green tech media and I just thought it was really
interesting and I kept, uh, listening and I got really into wholesale markets
specifically in the intricacies of, um, like federal policies for energy.
And I just kept self teaching until I got to a point where I could take,
uh, like energy law and then, uh, I got really interested in D U R
aggregation, participation, wholesale markets, wrote my undergrad thesis on
that. And now I'm a PhD student studying, um, distributed energy resources.
Amazing. That's a fantastic story that you clicked on the wrong podcast.
And now here you are recording a podcast. It's, it's come full circle.
Someone is going to make the wrong click.
They're going to click on intermediate and that's going to be the genesis of
their journey.
I hope so. And I hope just like me, I hope just like me,
they were so bored during their biology courses that they would listen to the
energy podcasts and the background of the biology homework to make it
bearable.
That's how you know you're in the wrong class.
It's meant to be.
Yeah.
So James Gordey, I started my career in actually in oil and gas as an
engineer and so like energy, but fully 180 from where we're at today on
the clean energy side, made the jump over to regular startups and then
right around when COVID started, I was just looking at like what I
to do next. I'm very quickly gravitated towards climate and clean energy. It's like the thing
I wanted to work on for the next however long, right? And so really just poured everything I
could into learning about clean energy to try and make the shift from general tech
and have been lucky enough to kind of come up the learning curve the hard way,
which we can talk about in more detail. I live in Seattle and I self-identify as a
person in startup line very nice I'm a stone's throw from well a very long
stone's throw from from James in Victoria BC you know just up here in the
Pacific Northwest and my my journey kind of started it in a somewhat similar
way my backgrounds in electrical engineering and I I have only ever
worked in startups I've never worked in a company larger than like 120
people. And that was like, that was a peak number for sure. COVID came around and the timing was
just enough that my startup that I was running then, we ran out of money and everyone was
just scared for the world falling apart. And, you know, that kind of spelled the end of it
for us and I was just working in IOT stuff at that point.
And that was a huge shakeup for me
in not only just like having to wind down a company,
but also just like what, why am I doing what I do?
Like why, what is giving the work
that I'm putting out into the world meaning?
And, you know, part of this is compounded by the fact that at the time I had I had one young kid. I have two now
and
just
this search for
meaning in in what I'm doing as well as a
just kind of growing sense of responsibility to
while I really do need to leave like if I if I care about
my child the way that I think I do and the way that I tell people I do, I really do need to leave the Earth a better place than it was when I came to it.
How am I going to do that if I'm not working on that every day?
And so that was that was the start of my journey was, and at the time I had no idea what a DER was.
the, I just, I knew that, okay, batteries are cool. Solar is cool. EVs are cool. All these things,
like they're making impact and the energy transition is super cool. I didn't, I had no
idea that there was this umbrella term for all of this and that these things were at a much
deeper level than many people think, you know, interrelated and going to be even more
interrelated, but the day that I, the day that I learned the term distributed
energy was that like light bulb moment doesn't describe it, uh, it doesn't
even come close to like, Oh my goodness, this makes sense.
And this is where I need to be.
I, I understand my calling now.
And that was, yeah, ever since then it's just been, how do I, how do
I build things that matter in distributed energy?
Shout out to Ben Atoson, it's a major climate popper. Energy coming in right
there with the purpose. I guess we didn't cover this on the top but like
Indermediate of course is a pun for distributed energy resources so we're
just gonna lean fully into that and stay on brand. Maybe shifting over then
Ben you kind of touched on this already. I think it's helpful for all
of us to kind of talk about like our why and how we got to being people
I kind of like loosely met through a long line community
to recording a podcast here.
I think like for me, the why is very much tied
with my own like experience in climate journey.
And so I thought I came up with the idea for the show,
but Pam actually did, and she can touch on that later.
I kind of very quickly was looking at climate
from like a first principles discipline, right?
Like IPCC and working backwards,
all like realistic paths to solving climate
involve abundant clean energy, even if we're
going to do tons of carbon capture,
you need to power that with clean energy, et cetera,
et cetera.
And so I kind of picked that as my segment of climate,
as many people do.
Maybe you have if you're listening.
And what I've learned is that there's
really great introductory resources, which
go to a decent level of depth.
Just to name a few, Rewiring America,
I really, really enjoyed that book.
That was a really profound moment for me to like,
I'm focusing on clean energy or the MCJ podcast or the interchange and the green tech media shows
those are really like impactful for me and they really helped me like start to come up the
learning curve and learn what is solar what are batteries what is demand response kind of these
kind of like concepts loosely but then like you very quickly realize that if you want to
move beyond like what is the stuff to how does the stuff actually work how does it work
together, what are all the details in it,
you're kind of left with a really tricky choice.
You're probably on energy Twitter following people,
and they're tweeting really wonky things
that you don't understand.
And if you try, it's really hard to understand.
Or if they link to something, it's a 1,000-page PDF
document from a utility or a regulatory filing.
And so you're kind of having to wade
into this advanced-level content, which is just
extremely, extremely intimidating.
And so if we need thousands of people working on clean energy in this problem to really like
lay the foundation for all viable paths to solving climate, like we've got to lower
the barriers.
We've got to help people come up with that learning curve.
And so that's very much like the why for me is, you know, people have come before
me and really helped me out and, you know, on one-on-one Zoom calls, like educated me
about stuff or, you know, waded through different documents and do different deep
I think we all do, how can we help people go up that learning curve more quickly and
efficiently so that we can all work together because the clock is ticking on climate and
we need to go as fast as we can and we need as many people working on this problem as
possible.
Yeah, there's definitely, it's definitely a case of kind of solve your own problem
for me.
I will, every minute I spend with you guys, I'm learning something.
And it's also the same thing of, yeah,
like getting super interested in energy
and coming up against this wall of, okay,
like there's a bit of a slow ramp of, okay,
you can understand kind of what solar is
and how it works and you like EVs
and you might understand some things about that.
But then there's just this cliff of knowledge
that you have to climb if you wanna get really into it
actually participate in the space and one of the just a personal philosophy of mine is I don't care
to ever to be the smartest person in the room I'm just not important to me what I do care about is
being able to hang out in the room where the smartest people are and so if we can do that
with the intermediate podcast of you know just arming you the listeners with you know just
letting you hang in the room where the smartest people are
and having just enough that you can understand
what the conversation's about
and then from there build your own deeper understanding.
You know, I think we'll have done our job.
Yeah, I think it's like, you know,
hopefully we're a more eloquent fly on the wall,
but if the fly could ask questions
we don't quite understand
what's being talked about in the room, right?
Not to say we're, yeah, just,
not to say that we're the smartest people in the room,
but we have like taken our lumps
learned a decent bit, but you know, we hope to bring in folks that can kind of have these
interesting conversations that we can all learn from. Yeah, I am so grateful to all the smartest
people in the room that over the years have helped me because I remember like the minute
that I hit that cliff and I realized like, wow, there is no more materials that are easily
accessible for me to understand this topic. I have to go talk to people, I have to cold
email people, I have to like go to FERC hearings and watch them
myself or, you know, go start reading academic material that
I'm not ready to read or read law reviews. And I just,
whenever I think about that, I never want anyone to be in
that position that I was in, like, I want to make those
materials for people. And when I think about specifically
why I want to do this, the other day, someone in my lab
was at a conference, and she was asked, you know, how do
balance your work and your public engagement because academics have like a certain amount of public engagement that they're like kind of obligated to do, and you know a lot of people apparently on the panel were like yeah you know I tweeted my paper where
you know I talked to lots of people about my paper and I helped the community understand you know I helped other people understand, you know what my research and findings were.
And at my core, my dissertation is really about this question of how do people interact with the electric grid?
What happens when we expect more of them? And what happens when they have more agency within the system?
And how do we encourage this and adjust in an equitable way and make sure that we have good outcomes?
um and instead of just you know researching that and coming up with like those answers
i want to like make sure that that can happen i want to help people have more agency i want to
give them the materials and the resources that they need to be more active players in the system
and to get more benefits out of it i hope as a side effect of all this we drive your
tiktok viewership up it's a it's a private account i'm sorry i don't have time to make
Publish, publish or perish.
Speaking of, that's a great segue.
God, you're just like, queuing us up so well.
Speaking of publishing, you got a ship.
Ben, do you want to kind of speak to the release schedule?
So as much to give some regularity for those people
that really enjoy what we do
and want to keep up to date with the podcast,
as well as to keep ourselves accountable
Um, and on some kind of reasonable schedule, that's, that's why the, um, the
every month and why the first Monday, um, I think we've all been in a position
where it's really nice to just settle into your morning commute and listen to
something that gets you, uh, excited or informed or just generally into the
material that you might be working on this week.
And so we hope this can be your introductory podcast to kind of
get you ready for July, 2023.
Hopefully you've had, you know.
We would be honored to be the,
to be what you put in your ears on a Monday morning.
Ben's words, not mine.
Do not associate me with that.
Ben's words, not ours.
Everyone is speaking their own.
Yeah, so a bit about where to find the content.
You've already found it somehow,
and thanks for, you know,
listening and making it this far. Surprisingly, not so surprisingly, maybe Intermediate,
not Intermediate as a DER pun, was widely available on the internet. And so you can
find us at Indermediate.com. That's right. We'll be posting out the content and substack. And
then of course, wherever you get your podcasts, Apple and Spotify, I myself like to be a
professed that I'm a cool kid and get my podcast on overcast.
So that pulls in the Apple feed as well.
So wherever you get your podcasts, but at the very least,
Substack, Apple, and Spotify on the first Monday of every month.
Pam, what are we going to talk about?
Ah, the syllabus.
Yes, Professor Pam on the mic.
Please God, no.
Yeah, I guess for like a syllabus of the podcast as we currently have it
envisioned, we really wanted to start with just like the basic
technologies and resources themselves,
because the institutional landscape and whatnot
doesn't make sense unless you actually know what's in it.
So talking about distributed energy resources
like solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps,
demand response, whatnot, all those type of technologies.
And then once we have that base level knowledge
to work off of, then going into the different types
of markets, the different type of institutions,
the policies, the resource adequacy of the system,
How does it function and how all of that plays within it?
And I could see this keeping us honest to other things, like, let's say
the equivalent of FERC 2222, but whatever the next one's going to be drops.
There might need to be an emergency intermediate episode
where we figure out what it says and then try and update folks about it.
Those things do not just drop.
I will let you know more than 90 days before it will see the light of day.
Like these they take years and years.
We knew about 22, 22, like six years before it happened.
Yeah, that's good though.
That's own brand for energy, right?
Like it's emergency, it's happening fast,
but it's like 90 days, you know, that's the time.
90 days for public comment.
Yeah, so I think that the takeaway, right?
Is like, we're not gonna shy away from the details.
We're trying to learn this stuff just like you are
and learn from all the really, really kind,
generous, like but also incredibly like talented and smart people working in
this industry and try to help you kind of get up to speed just like we are.
It's important to call out that it's not possible for us to, to be
experts on, on everything.
You know, look at, uh, saw a great article a couple of weeks ago about a
totally new type of heat pump that relies on acoustic resonance, uh, as
the pump did not exist before, before now.
There's no way we could have talked about it.
But now we can roll it into an episode about heat pumps
and now we can talk about it.
Yeah, and I think on that, right?
Some episodes will be with this core team
and sometimes we'll have guests
and we've already recorded a few episodes
with some really, really talented and knowledgeable guests
and we're excited to share with you all.
So very much a mix of us,
but also leveling up our own knowledge with guests as well.
Now you're breaking the timeline,
letting people know that we've already recorded
actual episodes more than just the intro.
Time is a relative spectrum, Ben.
And I think another thing to highlight,
we're all in this together, we're all learning together,
and so we want your feedback and participation.
Ben, I know you had some ideas about this
and how I might be able to engage the audience.
Yes, okay, so one of the things that I've always wanted to do, all my favorite podcasts,
not only do I find the hosts extremely charismatic and I want to speak with them and hopefully
people find that about us too.
But you know, the podcast will get deep into a topic and there will be just an element
of it that I didn't quite get the answer that I wanted out of it, where they didn't
go deep enough into detail or they there was some tangent that I wish they would
have drawn a little bit further or even there's something where okay I have
this kind of question that's relevant to the to the the topic at hand but I
don't have any way of reaching these people I don't I don't know how to do
this so what we're going to do is every few episodes not not putting
anything in Estonia but every few episodes we're going to have a Q&A
episode and what we'll do is on the near the end of the previous episode we'll
let you know hey our next episode is going to be Q&A please send us your
questions and I'll let you know now we'll let you know then that questions
can be sent to intermediate at gmail.com again der not ter and we'll
We'll pick some of the the best ones if we don't know the answers. We'll go out and research them
We may bring in a guest. We'll figure out how to how to bring these answers
to your questions back to the show
and um
And yeah, get them get them answered right here. And this is uh, you know, it's a perfect time to plug
Make sure that you're subscribed. Uh, the the only way you're going to be able to
uh
to get one of your questions answered is if you know when we're
when we're going to be doing a Q&A episode.
And being subscribed and listening to the podcast
soon after it drops is one of the best ways
to get that chance.
Pam, give us some icebreakers.
How do you learn about DER, no, sorry, okay.
How do you learn about DERs and energy topics?
Wait, is this how do they or how did we?
I think that was my question.
How do we learn?
How did we?
How did we learn?
How did we?
How do we?
God, we're a mess.
I'm happy to talk.
So, I mean, I think I started with podcasts and that's like how I engage, but like
you can only get so much given the content that was out there.
And so what I would do is just, I think there's so much content out there and so
things to learn about, that you just kind of like, for whatever reason it's relevant to you,
you pick something you're trying to like learn more about, and then you kind of try and double
click on it. All right, let me try and find all the knowledge that's, you know, in 20-page PDFs
or articles, you know, let me do a deep dive, let me find podcasts for those companies, let me
reach out to people that work in that part of the business, right? You know, I think a
really good example is like, Ben Laurel wanted to know about VPPs. And so he started a VPP
group and just started talking to experts in the industry and
like finding a lot of content. And so I think it's some
combination of find what's out there, take the time to consume
as much as possible for me, and then talk to people,
unfortunately, right? It's kind of what we're trying to
help level up or make more high leverage. But when in
doubt, I think people are really friendly and kind and
knowledgeable and down to talk, at least for 30 minutes
on Zoom. And so I find it super helpful to just reach
out to people.
I have a highly inefficient way of learning
and that's by, with reckless abandon,
just trying to make things.
And I'll learn when I hit the boundaries
and when people tell me, hey, like,
did you know that you're supposed to do it this way
or that's already been tried and that doesn't work?
Like, oh, okay.
That's-
What do you mean?
Like you go buy some old batteries and you hook them up
and then you start a fire and then you're like,
oh, I kind of crossed the line, or what are we talking about here?
I mean, that specific scenario hasn't happened.
But getting down the road of designing a totally behind-the-meter solar project.
And this was totally very early in my DER journey.
I knew nothing.
I had no idea that there were any sorts of regulations on what you can and can't do that,
you know, what some of the what the effect of, you know, having a local power source
connected to the grid during a power outage that how that's crossing a line, things like that,
You know full disclosure. I never did any of this. I didn't actually build
Anything it was this is purely the arrest for forgiveness not permission. Yeah. Yeah
I tend to err on that that side more often than not but yeah, that's I try to learn by
Learn by doing learn by designing and then seeing what seeing what people think
and I think a lot of people tend to be really open with
uh with feedback and resources when you come to them with hey i have an idea or hey i have uh
uh i've got this design or i'm working on this thing people get really interested
i would just uh i like before i was you know in grad school and you know had functioning
health and guidance i would just show up to stuff that there was no way i was ready to handle
like i i would i was like i just want to know about this thing okay there are webinars
these webinars are way too hard but I'll just show up and I'll write down terms and then I'll go look
up those terms later or I would just like law reviews by the way are free there are tons of
energy law reviews and they're like all really long and they're incredibly complex but you can
go read them so I would just go read them and this was like before I had taken real law
classes and I was like okay and I just wasn't scared to go to things that maybe were or read
things or interact with people that were like way smarter
than me. Or I just, I got the funding to go to some like
energy industry contract to get some energy industry
conference. And that's where I learned about DER aggregation
participation wholesale markets. And then I convinced
one of my professors to let me like spend the entire semester
writing an entire paper on it. I was nowhere near ready to
write that paper. But they were like, Yeah, go do it. So
I would say my advice when it comes to energy topics would be don't be afraid to go to
something or read something that you think might be too hard for you because you might
find that it's not, or you might get one piece from it that's exactly what you needed.
Someone in the industry once said, hey, you should check out this webinar.
And I emailed him back and I'm like, well, I can't attend that webinar.
And he said, of course you can.
It's free.
Who's going to stop you?
I love that.
But that's the kind of approach that we need to foster, we need to give people the confidence
to do it.
Like, yeah, just that this industry is here for the taking.
It is growing exponentially.
There's so much opportunity to get in there and learn and make your impact.
And, you know, don't let things hold you back.
And if we can be a part of that of,
hey, if we can arm you with just enough knowledge
that, you know, that you can sneak into that event
and not immediately be tossed out
because people know that you don't know a thing,
well, maybe we've done our job.
Yeah, I mean, I think imposter syndrome is a real thing.
Everyone pretty much, unless you're kind of a crazy person
probably struggles with it.
You know, I know I do, right?
And so it's intimidating, but know that everyone
has kind of gone through that,
is going through that actively.
And so I think go for it
and then let us know how we can help.
Yeah.
So to put a bow on that,
we're gonna ask these questions to guests
when we have them on the show as well.
We want to, you know, at the same time
while we want to make the information
easily digestible and understandable.
We also want to make sure that everybody understands
that all of these people that are experts,
they're human, that they all got their start somewhere,
that they weren't always the leading expert
in that field, right?
And so we're gonna bring these questions up
when we have guests on
and we'll see where people got their start.
Yeah, and maybe second one, right, Pam?
Oh, yes.
Oh, what's an aspect of DER is that you still have open questions about, or what upcoming
developments are you most excited about?
I guess for me, this is the same question, but.
Yeah, I'm happy to go.
Again, I put five seconds into this.
I just thought of it as Pam was reading the question.
So, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of things I think we're all excited about.
But I think there's this banner, like, you know,
you think about the grid and the history
and like the slow kind of like move from centralized
and how things used to work to distributed
and maybe more customer driven.
And I think we're kind of been in this phase
where we've kind of just been like amassing
kind of early market share,
but not really like mainstream adoption
of a lot of these things.
And it's maybe caused some issues around the edges,
but like, hasn't really like gone full-gone
and maybe with some of the grid reliability or mainstream adoption of DERs, we're starting to
see this. But I think for me, I'm really curious as we move into the second phase of mainstream
distributed energy and adoption of it and more customer-led energy revolution, what does that
look like? What does it look like when we really need to do real actual flexibility to
keep the lights on or we have high penetration of renewables or people in West Texas who work
on the oil field or buying an electric vehicle
because it's just better.
These are things I'm really curious about
as we move into the mainstream market
and this stuff really starts to come real,
2030, 2040, 2050.
These are kind of nebulous,
far out into the future targets,
but those are starting to happen sooner than we think.
And so what does that look like
as things start to get real,
I think is what I'm really interested about.
I like that.
Something that's really important to me
you know the energy revolution is nothing if it's not equitable right like we can't have the the
haves get clean energy and the have nots don't and how do we how do we uh you know the the
people building things or uh the people designing policy or how how do we make sure that we're
we're making this across the board a win.
And when do we start to see that actually happen?
You know, the electric car revolution arguably started
with the Tesla Roadster,
which was absolutely a toy for the rich.
And that has, EVs have come down market
and you can, in some jurisdictions
with the right incentive stacking,
you can get an EV for around $30,000, sometimes even a little bit less, but that's still a
new car purchase.
And what's that going to look like as you get deeper EV penetration into the market,
you get a stronger used market, those kinds of things.
Um, and the same thing for, for solar and, uh, and distributed energy resources,
like, like batteries, um, this is, I don't know, it's something that I have
a lot of curiosity about and very little insight as to what's currently being done.
Yeah, totally agree with that.
Ben, um, like one thing that I really think about a lot, um, I'm from
Louisiana, I've spent a lot of time in the South, right?
not necessarily places where everyone's got solar
on their house and driving a Tesla
and working in clean energy jobs.
How can we really make sure that,
this is the wind for everyone, like you said,
and make sure that there's this tremendous area
of wealth and opportunity creation, job creation.
How can we let all folks in an equitable boy
participate in that?
I think it's a huge opportunity.
There's certainly challenges there,
but we have the opportunity,
as we're building a new system, to do it right.
Is it gonna be perfect?
I'm sure it won't, but we can at least try
and really have these design considerations
or inputs top of mind
as we're working through solutions, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, why don't we wrap it there?
We'll call that episode zero.
And I learned some things about you guys
that I didn't know before today, which is awesome.
And hopefully everybody listening has an idea who we are.
Well, I don't know, maybe we'll have little bios
on the sub stack or something so people
can see our faces at some point.
Who knows?
Yeah, just a reminder as we wrap this up
that we're going to be releasing these
uh, the, uh, the first Monday of every month that you can, uh, uh, you can find
us at Indermedia.com as well as if you search Indermedia on Apple podcasts and
Spotify and, you know, remember to hit the subscribe button, um, on the, on
the podcast.
So, uh, so that you, we can be, we can be the first thing you listen to,
uh every month because that's a that's my level first of the month and then i'm i'm told but you
know who knows how these things actually work reviews really help so if you like this please
share it with people you know in the clean energy community or otherwise and give us a
review um to really help us especially as an early show give us the tough feedback
yeah be honest we'll appreciate it um well i think that's probably good for now right
Um, Ben, Pam, that's a wrap until next time.
Great month.
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