Energy Changemakers Podcast

The US grid is under pressure — surging demand from data centers, EVs, and industrial expansion is forcing expensive infrastructure upgrades. But what if a significant share of that relief could come for free? In this bonus episode, Elisa Wood sits down with Vincent Petit, SVP of Climate and Energy Transition Research at the Schneider Electric Sustainability Research Institute (SRI), to explore a provocative finding from the institute's latest research: when building owners invest in microgrids to optimize their own financial returns, the grid benefits as a byproduct — at zero marginal cost to grid operators.
The research, spanning five commercial building types and 13 geographies worldwide, finds that microgrids can deliver 20–40% power headroom recovery on average, with some configurations reaching 60%. And in 80% of modeled scenarios, the building owner achieves payback in under ten years — meaning the grid gets relief without spending a dollar.
This conversation reframes microgrids not as niche resilience tools, but as a scalable, privately financed mechanism for managing the coming demand surge — if the price signals are right.

Montgomery County, Maryland — located just outside Washington, D.C. — has emerged as one of the most ambitious local governments in the United States when it comes to distributed energy, microgrids, and clean power resilience. Since its first microgrid went online in 2018, the county has built out a portfolio of advanced installations at public safety facilities, a correctional facility, electric bus depots, and smaller community sites. Now, with 23 “resilient hub” microgrids under development and plans to produce on-site green hydrogen for its transit fleet, Montgomery County is redefining what local energy leadership looks like.
In this conversation, host Elisa Wood sits down with two key architects of this vision: Michael Yambrach, Chief of Montgomery County’s Office of Energy and Sustainability, who has overseen the county’s energy evolution since 2014; and Khaled Fakhuri, Senior Vice President of Schneider Electric’s Microgrid Business, the county’s long-term development partner. Together, they unpack how the county got here, how the public-private partnership model works, and what the future of microgrids looks like at local, national, and even data-center scale

For years, utilities and the distributed energy industry fought bitter battles over net metering, revenue erosion, and who controls the grid. Now, something has shifted. In this episode of the Energy Changemakers Podcast, host Elisa Wood sits down with Marco Krapels, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Enphase Energy, to explore a striking reversal: utilities that once viewed rooftop solar as a threat are now actively seeking out DER companies as partners.
The catalyst? Data centers. The explosive growth of AI and digital infrastructure is driving electricity demand at a scale that centralized generation simply cannot meet fast enough — and utilities are starting to realize that 80 million untapped American rooftops may be part of the answer.
Krapels brings both battle scars and optimism to this conversation. A former investment banker turned clean energy executive, he helped build SolarCity into the country's largest solar company and fought landmark net-metering wars in Nevada. Now, from Enphase — which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year — he describes a world where bundled, flexible distributed energy resources (solar + battery + bidirectional EV charger + smart home management) form dispatchable virtual power plants that utilities can actually rely on. And he argues it's not a future scenario. It's already happening.

Distributed wind has long played third wheel to solar and storage — but new market conditions may be opening the door to a comeback.
In this bonus episode, Elisa Wood speaks with analyst Peter Asmus about whether distributed wind can find new life in microgrids, virtual power plants (VPPs), and rural energy systems. They explore wind’s surprising early dominance in microgrids, why it lost ground to solar, and how rural co-ops, farm policy, and complementary generation profiles could bring it back into the mix.
While unlikely to compete head-to-head with solar, distributed wind may play a valuable supporting role in hybrid, distributed energy systems.

According to Markus Virta, Co-Founder of Cascadia Renewables, the answer has almost nothing to do with solar panels and batteries—and everything to do with listening.
In this episode, Markus—who has spent 16 years at the intersection of clean energy and Pacific Northwest policy—explains why microgrids fail when engineers lead and communities follow, and how inverting that paradigm leads to faster projects, fewer change orders, and infrastructure that communities actually use.
Markus offers a template for community microgrid development and provides examples of how it has worked in real-world projects. He tells the story of the Orcas Center Microgrid (Solar Builder Magazine’s Microgrid Project of the Year): a solar-plus-storage system built for a performing arts center on Orcas Island that turned out to be the community’s real resilience hub—not the fire station, not the school, but the place where people actually gather when things go wrong.
You’ll also hear about: a tribal nation moving to higher ground ahead of a looming earthquake, a rural fire district running almost entirely on diesel for 30 years, and a national museum doubling as an emergency medical equipment hub. Each project started with a community conversation, not a technical spec.
Markus also breaks down Washington State’s unique policy and funding ecosystem, including its cap-and-invest program, Commerce technical assistance grants, and the emerging day-ahead market that could finally make community microgrids economically self-sustaining. And he makes the case for FERC Order 2222 as the regulatory lever that could unlock real revenue for community-owned energy assets.
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