Energy Changemakers Podcast

Autonomous vehicles are more than cars without drivers. They’re “robots on wheels” — and they will need enormous amounts of electricity at the grid edge.
In this episode of the Energy Changemakers Podcast, host Elisa Wood talks with Mike Calise, CEO of EV charging company Tellus Power, about why the rise of autonomous fleets could make microgrids and distributed energy a strategic necessity.
Calise sees two massive transformations colliding: the electrification and automation of transportation, and a power system already confronting soaring demand from AI and data centers. Microgrids could help bridge the two by generating and managing electricity close to where autonomous vehicles operate — while bidirectional charging allows the batteries inside those vehicles to become grid assets rather than simply new loads.
The conversation explores a real-world example at Oakland Unified School District, where 74 electric school buses can act as dispatchable batteries, returning energy to buildings or the grid when the buses are sitting idle. It also looks ahead to robotaxis, delivery vehicles, drones and other forms of “physical AI” — and what it will take to power them as they scale.
Calise calls it a collision between the multi-trillion-dollar energy and transportation industries. At the center of that collision may be one of distributed energy’s biggest opportunities yet: using microgrids, storage and vehicle-to-grid technology to power the machines emerging at the edge.

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.