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Tech Brew

Electric Grid

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

Hackers nearly taking over US energy plants. Federal cybersecurity groups thwarting the attacks. These alarming events aren’t plot points in a geopolitical thriller—this 

 in 2022 when operators connected to Russia hacked into the US energy supply. Such an attack would have left everyday Americans without power and potentially no way to get it.

That is, unless they had distributed generation systems on or near their homes and businesses. Distributed generation is power at or near the location where it’s being consumed, like residential solar or heat pumps. It can also be solar panels on the roofs of commercial buildings that help power their business operations.

At a time when the US grid is under a lot of strain from 

, distributed generation stands to be an impactful solution, according to Richard Dovere, CEO of Dispatch Energy, which designs behind-the-meter renewable energy systems.

According to Dovere, one of the “best applications of distributed generation” is helping utilities avoid pricey infrastructure updates, by incentivizing consumers to invest in distributed generation resources like rooftop solar that increase resiliency when the grid is experiencing outages.

“Utilities are regulated monopolies, but they have an obligation to serve their customers reliably,” Dovere told Tech Brew. “And they get into a lot of trouble when they don’t, so they’re supposed to appropriately invest in a resilient infrastructure.”

And in a crisis situation like the one that nearly occurred in 2022, distributed generation could be a literal lifesaver.

“Our grid stability is a major vulnerability,” Dovere said. “If your power goes out and your grandmother’s on an oxygen machine, I don’t think you care about the [internal rate of return] of the [power] system.”

Dovere added that the Trump administration is using renewable energy resources as a “punching bag” by phasing out 

 for solar energy. The administration has 

 and nuclear energy, and many Republicans in Congress have pushed for an “

Dovere told Tech Brew that regardless of price, distributed solar is the best way “to service the largest amount of people to provide them at least some modicum of power.”

“Getting rid of solar renewable tax credits makes it more expensive,” Dovere said, but “people need the power.”

Image of rooftop solar panels against a city skyline.

How ‘distributed generation’ could help in the event of a grid collapse

The nation’s grid instability is a huge vulnerability. Distributed generation can help, one stakeholder tells Tech Brew.

Charging your phone in rural Alaska is a bit more expensive than doing so in the contiguous United States—or the Lower 48, as Alaskans call them. Once you plug your charging cable into the wall, the electricity that flows into your phone comes from a diesel generator that runs a microgrid.

Almost all of rural Alaska is powered by microgrids, and not the types of 

 that regularly connect to a larger, centralized electrical grid. These are true islands, and though Alaska itself isn’t one, fuel for the generators must come by air or sea. In the winter, pricey diesel fuel, which can cost more than $15 per gallon, is flown into rural communities; in the spring and summer, once the ice has thawed, diesel arrives via river barge.

And warmer months bring an excess of sunshine, which many rural communities want to harness to 

 a portion of their high diesel bills. In June, the Department of Energy 

 that it selected 14 municipalities, nonprofits, unions, and businesses to receive shares of its new Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership, or C-MAP, funding. Twelve of the awardees are based in Alaska, and many of them are rural tribes hoping to use the money to update the generators that power their villages to be hybrid—that is, run on diesel 

One of the awardees is Kawerak Inc., a nonprofit corporation that serves the Bering Straits Native Association in western Alaska. The organization received $575,000 to integrate renewable energy—specifically solar energy and battery systems—into microgrids that power the villages of Brevig Mission, Teller, Koyuk, Elim, and Savoonga. Currently, the villages get diesel barged in once or twice a year, or have diesel flown to them in emergencies.

Under the new setup, the renewable power generated by the new systems would be owned by the villages as an Independent Power Producer (IPP) and sold to the local utility, and reduce the amount of diesel they need to use per year. Amanda Toerdal, Kawerak’s community planning and development program director, told Tech Brew the award is “about the administration and structure for how the power is run in the communities” just as much as the power generation itself.

“The ownership of a separate energy system,” Toerdal said, “means that that money is going back into the local community instead of going to a diesel fuel company far away.”

Another awardee is the Kuskokwim Corporation, an organization of 10 villages along the Kuskokwim River. The corporation stewards the land, development, and conservation efforts of the villages, and received nearly $300,000 in C-MAP funding to update a microgrid that serves two of the villages to include a solar power and battery system. The villages, Upper and Lower Kalskag, are the only two communities in the Kuskokwim Corporation that are connected by a road.

Andrea Gusty, CEO of the Kuskokwim Corporation, told Tech Brew that the C-MAP project will offset around 25,000 gallons of diesel every year, thereby bringing down energy costs for residents and making village power more reliable. The new system will be owned by the corporation’s nonprofit arm, TKC Fish Wheel, which will act as the IPP.

An important part of the project is also about workforce development and ensuring that Upper and Lower Kalskag locals are trained to operate and maintain the technology, Gusty said.

“In rural Alaska, there seems to be a history of an influx of funding, or a project is created, but the maintenance of that project is—for whatever reason—outside of the community’s ability to maintain,” Gusty said. “We’re deeply committed to ensuring that we bring that training to the people whose projects are in their backyard. Because they’re the ones who are going to live there…and ultimately the ones benefiting from it.”

The Kuskokwim Corporation’s ethos of building a system the community can maintain is in line with the DOE’s conception of the project. Dan Ton, the DOE program manager of smart grid R&D and lead on the C-MAP funding, told Tech Brew in a statement that the DOE has not made “specific commitments” to provide further funding to awardees, as the program was “built on an understanding‬ that long-term maintenance and operational sustainability must be built into any new‬‭ project.”

According to Ton, the funding is really about getting these innovative, highly customized, and expensive projects off the ground by “improving interoperability and standardization,” as local utilities usually don’t want to take on microgrids because they’re so complex. Insights from the projects will then be shared on a new DOE web portal to be used by future rural microgrid developers to help them “reduce some of the hardships and delays that the early adopters faced.”

And that “role modeling” for future microgrid projects will have the most lasting impact, Brian Hirsch, CEO of Alaska energy engineering company DeerStone Consulting, told Tech Brew. DeerStone is a partner in both the Kawerak and Kuskokwim awards. He said because awardees’ “needs are extreme,” the grants won’t be able to entirely solve many of the issues—or “even come close.” But C-MAP can jump-start momentum.

“The reality oftentimes is you do what you can with the money you’re allocated,” Hirsch said. “There’s still a very long way to go.”

The Teller Power Plant, a diesel power plant in Alaska.

New DOE microgrid fund aims to wean remote Alaskan villages off diesel

Federal funding will allow rural microgrids to be fueled by renewables and bring revenue back to local communities.

Jordyn Grzelewski

The leaders of a new EV charging program at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) envision a future where, in the case of a blackout, an 

 discharges its battery and keeps the lights on and air conditioning running at school.

To figure out exactly how to make this a reality, MassCEC is launching a “V2X Demonstration Program”—that’s “vehicle to everything”—in which it’ll set up 100 households, businesses, and schools with charging equipment and software to take advantage of technology that enables EVs to 

“As we expect an increasing demand for electricity in the coming years, this could really be a silver-bullet solution,” Elijah Sinclair, senior program manager of clean transportation at MassCEC, told Tech Brew.

 is a quasi-governmental economic development agency whose mission is to speed up clean energy growth amid 

 to be “the global leader in climate tech.”

MassCEC has a team dedicated to accelerating decarbonization, with a subset focused on transportation. Sinclair said the teams “find technologies that are market-ready but haven’t quite taken off.”

The V2X program, he explained, is one of four programs focused on EV charging as part of a broader state effort “to figure out how we’re going to deploy EV charging equitably across the state.” State leaders’ goal is to have 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030.

“We’re really trying to tackle some of the biggest barriers with electric vehicle charging across the state,” Sinclair said. Vehicle-to-grid tech “can make electric vehicles an asset that are profitable for the owners and also provide resilience in case the grid goes down. I think that’s a pretty exciting proposition on both ends that can really help spur adoption across the state and potentially the country.”

The program is backed by federal funding that Sinclair said MassCEC must use by the end of 2026. The goal is to get the infrastructure ready to go by the end of this winter so the team can collect data throughout 2026.

“We fully expect to deploy the program as planned,” he said.

One of the program’s goals, Sinclair said, is to make sense of a “really confusing” market.

“There’s a lot we need to figure out, a lot of basics,” he said. “So right now we’re going to collect as much of that as we can and bring all the right people in the room, make sure it works so there’s a pathway for people to continue scaling this technology.”

MassCEC worked closely with numerous utilities across the state, as well as with nonprofits, vehicle manufacturers, and other stakeholders to get the word out to potential participants, final selections of which MassCEC is working on now.

The program got more applicants than it can accept, Sinclair said, which means program leaders were able to home in on “tricky and interesting use cases that will help us advance the market,” such as helping EV owners figure out how to best take advantage of state programs like Connected Solutions, which provides compensation to users who send power back to the grid during high demand periods.

Despite the Trump administration’s rollback of federal support for 

, Sinclair expressed confidence that MassCEC will be able to push ahead with this program and other decarbonization efforts.

“It’s been awesome having the federal support,” he said. “And whether or not we have that in the future, I think we’ll still make meaningful progress toward our goals in the next few years.”

Plug attached to school bus connecting it to the power grid

V2X: How Massachusetts is testing its V2X clean energy tech

Leaders of a new vehicle-to-everything initiative in Massachusetts see the tech as a possible “silver-bullet solution” to growing energy demand.

How Massachusetts is testing V2X tech

 amid cooling demand and the looming expiration of federal incentives.

Flexibility could be the name of the game for EV sector players in the coming months and years—and a new deal between General Motors and battery recycler Redwood Materials may point to a promising opportunity: energy storage.

In a July 16 news release, the two companies announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding “to accelerate deployment of energy storage systems using both new 

 and second-life battery packs from GM electric vehicles.”

GM touted the deal as “a significant step toward taking GM’s advanced battery technology beyond EVs.” The automaker already had been sending used EV battery materials to Redwood under an existing agreement.

GM has its own burgeoning energy business, which in October 

 a stationary energy storage unit for EVs dubbed “PowerBank.” The product allows users to transfer and store energy from the grid. Other automakers, like Tesla, also offer energy storage products.

Driving the agreement, according to GM and Redwood executives, is the surging demand for electricity, in part from a proliferation of new data centers.

“The market for grid-scale batteries and backup power isn’t just expanding, it’s becoming essential infrastructure,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of batteries, propulsion, and sustainability, said in a statement. “Electricity demand is climbing, and it’s only going to accelerate. To meet that challenge, the US needs energy storage solutions that can be deployed quickly, economically, and made right here at home.”

JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood and Tesla’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, in a statement noted that “electricity demand is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, driven by AI and the rapid electrification of everything from transportation to industry.”

 around recovering end-of-life batteries and recycling their raw materials. The company reports receiving over 20 gigawatt hours of batteries per year, or the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs, “representing about 90% of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America.” Redwood’s battery recycling customers include Lyft, Amazon, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, and Tesla and Panasonic’s battery manufacturing partnership, The Verge 

 dubbed Redwood Energy that it said would help “meet surging power demand from AI data centers and other applications.” Company leaders identified opportunities to put leftover usable capacity from used EV batteries back to work before recycling the batteries.

Redwood has established what it describes as “the largest second-life battery deployment in the world and the largest microgrid in North America,” which powers a data center for AI infrastructure company Crusoe.

In a story about Redwood’s new energy storage business, 

 noted that the company’s location east of Reno could be opportune given its relative proximity to data centers for the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

“Traditional grid expansion can’t keep up,” Redwood said in a release on its new line of business. “Renewables are intermittent. And imported, new energy storage is still too expensive to address the entire problem.”

The answer, according to the startup: “Repurposing used battery packs…into modular energy storage systems that bridge today’s infrastructure gaps with speed and scale.”

What’s driving a new energy storage partnership between GM and Redwood

Electricity demand from new data centers is expected to skyrocket in the coming years.

TBR: VPP audio embed

California has a problem: It’s producing more renewable energy than it’s able to use. Solar and wind energy production ramp up in the middle of the day, when electricity demand is low. And because that renewable energy doesn’t have anything to power, it gets 

Folks in the solar industry call the dilemma the “duck curve” because of what the difference between energy supply and demand looks like on a chart when renewables are over-contributing to the mix of power—

. And the duck curve is an issue other states will face as they bring more and more renewables online, PG&E Principal Project Manager Trevor Udwin told Tech Brew.

But excess clean energy doesn’t have to go to waste: It can be distributed to consumers and homes via virtual power plants (VPPs). That extra solar and wind energy can be taken from the grid and put into VPPs to be used at a later time or date—through projects like PG&E’s Seasonal Aggregation of Versatile Energy (SAVE) VPP, which Udwin worked to bring to life—which in turn helps stabilize the amount of energy the grid is taking in and pumping out. And that, Udwin said, transforms the duck curve from looking like mountains and valleys to smaller dips and hills.

“It’s not just about shaving the peak; it’s about filling the trough,” Udwin told Tech Brew.

A VPP is a network of batteries that pull energy from the grid at specific times based on signals from utilities or homeowners. More broadly, though, a VPP is any type of load management, so a VPP can also be a network of batteries that store renewable energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines and redistribute it to a network of homes, separate from the grid.

Though a single stationary battery can store energy, one battery alone can’t solve the duck-curve issue. Because so much renewable energy is coming into the grid from different locations at a time when demand for power is low, multiple, connected batteries are needed to soak up the excess energy.

“Different parts of energy transition call for different solutions,” Blake Richetta, the CEO of VPP provider Sonnen Inc., told Tech Brew, “sustainable solutions to handle the intermittency of renewables and the difficulty of electrification.”

 power plants is because they’re a virtual replacement for a power plant: Instead of using an extra power plant, the grid can turn to the virtually networked batteries as a power source. In this way, VPPs replace power plants (and even more importantly, 

) and other general electrical infrastructure, which the US doesn’t have enough of in an era of increasing electricity demand.

Beyond providing flexibility for where extra energy can go, VPPs also help avoid power outages by balancing the frequency of the grid and preventing electrical abnormalities. In addition to helping ensure the excess renewable energy being produced gets used, VPPs can help balance increasing amounts of renewables being added to the grid and more electric-powered products needing to charge from it—electrical loads that are 

“You have…this crazy new erratic load that’s coming out of the electrification of all things—specifically electric vehicles, heat pumps, things like this—that makes the grid even more difficult to manage. You put those things together, there is a wall that we hit,” Richetta said. “When you have a certain amount of renewable energy in the grid and a tremendous increase in load, the grid no longer can manage itself in the way that it has for a really long time.”

That’s why it’s important to use load-shifting products—like VPPs—to “

” the erratic nature of renewable energy with the grid’s needs.

“We’re going through a major energy transition,” Richetta said. “[The way] we can evolve into this kind of renewable, electrified energy system that’s fossil fuel-free is to harness renewable energy and harmonize it with the actual grid’s needs and dispatch it only in a way that serves true value to the grid.”

Correction 07/11/25: This piece has been updated to correct the title of Sonnen Inc. CEO Blake Richetta.

Three green batteries with a solar panel on one, a lightning bolt on the other, and a wind turbine on the third.

How virtual power plants help renewable energy power grid

Tech Brew spoke with battery and utility innovators about how virtual power plants store renewables and put them to good use.

How VPPs help renewable energy power the grid

The Trump administration’s Department of Energy is cutting billions in funding for some green tech maneuvers, and announcing millions for others.

Earlier this week, the DOE announced $8 million specifically for “microgrid innovation” in Alaska, Nevada, and South Dakota as part of the department’s Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership (C-MAP) program. Of the 14 municipalities, nonprofits, unions, and businesses that received shares of that funding, 12 are located in Alaska—where there are already more than 200 

. The funding will support the modernization of power systems to avoid outages and “prioritize local energy supply chains” to lower energy bills, among other things.

“Microgrids in remote Alaska are far too often dependent on flying or barging in diesel fuel, facing outages caused by extreme weather or aging conditions, and overcoming workforce shortages or logistical nightmares,” Erin Whitney, director of the DOE’s Arctic Energy Office, said in a press release. “These C-MAP investments will play an outsized role in propelling these communities forward.”

While it’s unclear if the microgrids that will be supported by the influx of C-MAP funding will run in part or entirely on renewable energy, the department’s release mentions that the program will be working with Renewable Energy Alaska Project and is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

And the program seems to be something of a pilot from the DOE: Dan Ton, C-MAP’s lead for the Office of Electricity, said in a release that “microgrids come in many forms, and we have more technologies for generating and managing power than ever before. However, adoption is limited by microgrid system complexity, capital costs, and commissioning times. I believe the United States can lead the world in standardized, modular, and scalable microgrids, but this requires research-backed demonstrations that can be replicated nationwide.”

The announcement comes days after DOE Secretary Chris Wright canceled almost $4 billion in funding for decarbonization and carbon sequestration projects.

“The Trump administration is doing our due diligence to ensure we are utilizing taxpayer dollars to strengthen our national security, bolster affordable, reliable energy sources and advance projects that generate the highest possible return on investment,” Wright said in a statement.

Image conceptualizing a smart city or microgrid.

DOE pledges millions for microgrids in Alaska, South Dakota, and Nevada

The microgrids will be supported by the department’s Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership program.

In a sector where reliability and uptime tend to hog the spotlight, the top reported concern in a recent survey of EV charging industry leaders came as something of a surprise to EVolve CEO Andrew Bennett.

The “most pressing challenge for EV charging network operators in 2025” is “

 constraints,” according to a new study commissioned by Driivz, an EVolve subsidiary and software provider for charge point operators (CPOs).

“As we think about policy in the United States, whether it’s fueled by EV charging or increasing manufacturing, we’re going to need more capacity. We’re going to need more [energy] generation,” Bennett told Tech Brew. “And then we’re going to need a regulatory environment that really thinks about the distribution system.”

More than 80% of network operators said their networks “are only minimally or moderately scalable,” the Driivz study found. Respondents said their priorities are improving the charging experience for their users, “maintaining network stability and availability 24/7,” and increasing the number of charging sites and fast chargers.

 that are impacting the EV charging sector, including the Trump administration’s move to 

 from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which made $5 billion in federal grants available to states to build fast charging stations.

Despite the federal government rescinding its support for electrification, Bennett said his conversations with CPOs suggest that industry leaders are far from panicked, in part because the charging sector is still trying to catch up on demand from the EVs that are already on the road.

“It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t helpful, because I think it helped with public sentiment, more visible charging,” he said. “But I haven’t talked to a CEO of a charge point operating company in the United States who’s said that it’s a big deal, that it’s changed anything for them about their trajectories.”

 over the NEVI funding freeze. But from Bennett’s perspective, “It’s kind of a political thing, not necessarily a business thing…And something else I’ve heard several of these CEOs say is, ‘While we love federal funding and interest, you don’t want an industry to be dependent on it.’”

Despite what analysts at JD Power earlier this month described as “a cloud of uncertainty around future EV interest,” the firm’s latest US EV Consideration Study found that demand for EVs “has remained stable.”

Unchanged from a year ago, 24% of vehicle shoppers are “very likely” to consider buying an EV and 35% are “somewhat likely.”

Brent Gruber, executive director of JD Power’s EV practice, said in a press release that the industry needs to “better educate consumers about EV ownership to ease concerns—many of which, such as those related to public charging, are less problematic than they might seem when it comes to actually owning an EV.”

More than half of respondents cited “charging station availability” as a reason not to consider an EV.

Earlier this month, Hyundai announced that its MyHyundai with Bluelink app would now enable EV drivers to plug and charge, which eliminates “the need to use smartphones or physical credit cards,” per a news release.

The brand also unveiled an “in-app-charging feature” that allows users to “find and pay for charging within the MyHyundai with Bluelink app.”

“These new features not only simplify the charging process but also enhance the overall ownership experience, reinforcing our commitment to making electric vehicle charging more accessible and user-friendly,” Manish Mehrotra, VP of digital business planning and connected operations for Hyundai Motor North America, said in a statement.

A map of the US lit up by the electric grid with an EV charger plugged into the center of the map