Energy Changemakers Podcast

What if the model to solve many of our biggest electricity problems already exists—we've just never used it to its full capacity? In this episode, Keith Taylor, a UC Davis  institutional economist, makes the case that America's 800-plus co-ops are a form of "latent community capacity" hiding in plain sight. Keith proposes federating cooperatives so that they compete in the microgrid era, and what a Lake Tahoe utility crisis reveals about who really gets served when data centers come knocking. It's a hopeful, practical conversation about doing "policy from below."
Look beyond the market and the state. Drawing on Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's insight that "there are no panaceas," Keith argues we systematically overlook the civic economy — a third leg of the stool alongside the market and government — where cooperatives operate on logics of service at cost rather than profit.

We already have energy democracy. The U.S. has more than 800 electric cooperatives serving roughly 42 million Americans, generating about $42 billion a year in revenue. Of those members, some 8,000 serve as elected board directors — a political economy of its own that's ready to be leveraged, not built from scratch.

Co-ops are often more efficient, not less. Investor-owned utilities serve about 30 households per mile of line; the average co-op serves about 7 — yet co-ops deliver comparable rates. In the 1930s, IOUs claimed lines would cost $2,000/mile; co-ops innovated the cost down to under $650/mile. Keith sees the same pattern today in broadband, where a South Carolina co-op (Carolina Connect) is stringing fiber for ~$15,000/mile against incumbent telco estimates of $200,000–$300,000/mile.

Small doesn't mean weak — they federate. Individual co-ops stay locally controlled but pool into federations for financing (CoBank, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation, and USDA's Rural Utilities Service together hold over $300 billion in assets), insurance (Federated Insurance), and white-label marketing (Touchstone). Keith's vision: a "microgrid federation" that makes co-ops a trusted vendor for communities building distributed energy.

The Tahoe warning. A pocket of ~50,000 Californians around Lake Tahoe is served by the Nevada grid — and as Nevada's data-center demand grows, that region may be dropped in about 18 months, facing spot-market rates and rolling blackouts. It's a concrete example of customers losing out to data centers, and of why platforming alternative institutional models matters.

Policy parity works. Co-ops have lagged on renewables largely because of incentive structures — they were historically excluded from renewable subsidies and often exempt from state renewable portfolio standards. When the Inflation Reduction Act's "direct pay" provision finally gave them parity with IOUs, co-ops rapidly expanded their renewable and distributed-energy portfolios.

Start local, start now. Keith's call to action is bottom-up: engage your co-op's board and member-relations staff, join a member advisory committee, or run for the board. Where there's no co-op, look to public utility districts, community choice aggregators, or form a new association. As Ostrom put it: "We can, so we must."

Most people in solar assume the industry started with the trade-show boom of 2006–2007. It didn't. It started decades earlier, in the logged-over hills of Humboldt County, California, where back-to-the-land hippies were hacking a self-sufficient life out of the wilderness — powering their homes off car batteries, micro-hydro, and windmills just so they could keep the lights on and play a little music.
Host Elisa Wood sits down with filmmakers Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, whose two-hour documentary Solar Roots: The Pioneers of PV traces how an expensive military, space, and petrochemical technology found its way into the hands of ordinary people — and, in doing so, became a real industry. It's a story of catalog salesmen, off-grid homesteaders, cannabis-funded land deals, conservative ranchers won over one panel at a time, and a scrappy magazine that connected them all. Along the way, Jeff and Jason make the case for why solar has already won the price war, why the remaining fight is cultural, and why this history had to be captured now, while its pioneers are still here to tell it.

From homeowners to businesses to AI data centers, customers are investing in distributed energy for their own reasons — and collectively rewiring how the entire electric system evolves. Recorded live to open The Great Transformation conference in Bend, Oregon, host Elisa Wood sits down with three people who aren’t just watching this shift — they’re shaping it: Cameron Brooks of Think Microgrid, Greg Castle of Schneider Electric, and Mike Grenier of Elexity.
The panel digs into the data center power boom (a reported 114 GW of behind-the-meter generation in the pipeline — roughly 20% of U.S. peak load), why falling battery prices are flipping "two yeses out of ten" into "eight," the "Frankenstein microgrid" phenomenon, and how flexible interconnection deals in New Jersey and the Google–Voltus capacity agreement point toward a grid that’s built from the outside in. It’s a candid, optimistic conversation about ownership, resilience, and scaling what already works.

Wildfires, record heat, and a grid under more strain than ever have turned “resilience” from a buzzword into one of the fastest-growing categories in energy technology. Host Elisa Wood talks with Julia Hamm — who spent nearly 20 years growing the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) before becoming a partner at The Ad Hoc Group — about how resilience became its own market, the AI cameras and wildfire-spread software utilities are deploying today, why microgrids are still an emerging (not mainstream) resilience play, and why the length of the utility sales cycle remains startups' biggest obstacle. They also discuss why Julia launched the Power Resilience Forum to keep this conversation from being crowded out by the AI and data-center load-growth story dominating the industry right now.

Plug-in solar — widely known as “balcony solar” — is one of the fastest-growing entry points into clean energy, and it is finally gaining a legal foothold in the United States. In this episode, host Elisa Wood talks with Stephan Scherer, co-founder and CEO of CraftStrom, who spent roughly a decade in the European plug-in solar market before bringing the technology to the U.S.
The conversation unpacks what plug-in solar actually is, how small systems can offset a meaningful chunk of a household's electricity bill for a fraction of rooftop-solar costs, and why the technology sidesteps the interconnection agreements and “soft costs” that make traditional residential solar expensive. Scherer addresses the two big safety debates head-on — line-worker protection and grid export — and explains the certifications, anti-islanding shutoffs, and “zero-export” approaches that underpin safe deployment.
They also explore the technical breakthroughs that made plug-in solar practical (lightweight bendable panels, integrated Wi-Fi monitoring, simplified installation), the economics and payback math, the addition of plug-in batteries and virtual power plants, and the wave of state laws — now five enacted — reshaping access for homeowners and renters alike.