Use the force, Luke: there's power all around us

A simple three-step strategy for saving money that also happens to apply to maximizing our energy infrastructure and incentivizing the energy transition! I'm so proud of myself.

This week on Everybody in the Pool

This week, I’m going with one big essay to try to pull all of these energy efficiency and VPP threads and whatnot together into one big vision of a better future.

As regular listeners know, we’ve been circling around versions of a theme since the beginning of the year: how to meet surging electricity demand without slow, expensive, and, heaven forbid, fossil fuel-powered infrastructure buildouts. I’m going to illustrate this with a metaphor — you’re trying to increase your household savings. Stay with me, this might be imperfect, but I think it’s going to work. We’ve got three big steps, here.

Step 1: Cut spending

So the first step in your plan is to just save money, right? Not spend so much. Maybe you do a better job shopping your closet or renting clothes instead of buying new ones, keeping your car longer, eating all the food you buy, cooking instead of going out.

In energy terms, this means making our existing infrastructure more efficient with more strategic use of the resources we have.

That can include PG&E and the Building Decarbonization Coalition’s efforts to electrify one neighborhood and city at a time, to reduce the need for adding or replacing aging gas pipes and equipment. If you’re a utility, you put in advanced power flow control systems to better balance the power you have. You use demand-response programs to incentivize customers to turn down the heat or air conditioning at peak times, or charge their cars a little slower overnight, the way your iPhone does. Smarter management of these resources means we can meet peak demand moments without fossil-fuel powered peaker plants, and we can extend the use of the infrastructure we have.

Step 2: Invest to save more

Cool, so we’re starting to save. But with a few smart changes and investments, we can save even more. You pay off your car so you’re not making a car payment and accruing interest. You refinance your mortgage to a lower rate (ok, maybe not today, but in theory, interest rates willing). You insulate your house so you stop heating the outdoors all winter. You cancel the three streaming services you forgot you were paying for. Suddenly you’re starting to return real money to the bottom line. Retirement feels real(er)!

In energy infrastructure terms, this starts to look like utilities and programs that don’t just save energy. They actually harness and redistribute the excess. Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of heat pumps in a neighborhood that are smart and Internet-connected, like the ones from Quilt. You’re piloting a program to put Copper’s battery-powered induction stoves into homes. You’re talking to a network of homes equipped with solar and backup batteries, and you’re using even more sophisticated demand-response programs that pay customers for using what they need, and offering the rest up to the grid when the grid needs it. Right now, this is mostly happening at a small scale, wherever these assets happen to be installed or incentivized. But this is where the future potential lies.

Step 3: Monetize your assets

Back to the budget. Now we’re saving money like a boss. But we’re also looking around the house being like, huh. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I could probably sell. I’m not going to go out and get another job or anything, but I can actually start to generate money off of the stuff I already have. So you get on eBay and DePop and Nextdoor and you start selling things — and this is just stuff around the house, you know? You’re not taking up a new hobby and selling your knitwear on Etsy. You’re just making money off your pile of stuff.

Now we’re talking VPPs, people.

Last week, with Budderfly, we expanded into the idea that a whole, connected network of maximally efficient and centrally controlled buildings can start to act like a virtual power plant. It’s not new power generation, no. But harnessing together what would otherwise be idle capacity, delivering it to the grid when needed in a coordinated and intelligent way? That’s still a little like creating something from nothing.

And all of this gets me to this week’s episode with Marco Krapels from Enphase, which kind of gets us to the holy grail version of this theme we’ve been working on. Because Enphase started as the microinverter behind your solar panel, and then moved into home batteries, and is now realizing, oh hey, holy crap, we’ve got tons of batteries in a bunch of houses all over the country, and soon we’re launching a bidirectional EV charger that so cars in driveways can help power the home and eventually sent power back to the grid, and that, sweet baby child, is now a pretty big decent-sized power plant, come to think of it.

Here’s where your budget and efficient energy usage and deployment actually converge. Because if your next investment is solar, a whole-home battery, and an EV, then you can lower your own costs, keep your lights on when the grid fails, and also let a utility or aggregator tap a slice of that capacity when the grid needs it most — and as these programs evolve, you can and should get paid for the power your little house-plant is generating.

Basically, if we treat data centers and even electrification as “new load equals new gas,” we lock in fossil infrastructure for decades. But if we can meet a meaningful slice of peak demand with orchestrated flexibility—batteries, EVs, buildings—we give the grid a different option.

And then there’s my favorite topic: bidirectional EV charging! The long-awaited moment when the battery sitting in your driveway stops being idle “storage” and starts being a flexible grid asset. Enphase is soon to launch a true bidirectional EV charger (ball’s in your court, automakers). Say your car battery is multiple times larger than a typical home battery, and many are, and software can ensure you still wake up with the range you need, then a whole new kind of capacity shows up much faster than traditional infrastructure.

What I love is the virtuous future flywheel. Electrification isn’t a drain, it’s the future of the grid. It creates more tools, and incentivizes more renewable energy installation instead of less. Homes and buildings become genuinely more resilient, thanks to battery backups and renewable energy that isn’t dependent on the price or availability of oil or natural gas.

Our install base is already pretty solid: according to SEIA, US homes and businesses have already installed 28 gigawatt-hours of behind-the-meter battery storage (meaning it’s kind of like the stuff sitting around your house that you could sell on DePop). Without draining everybody’s battery to zero, you could still dispatch gigawatts of capacity during peak demand, and certainly enough to offset multiple large peaker plants’ worth.

Oh and as of 2025, residential battery installations in the US are growing roughly 50% year over year.

So. I mean. Pretty cool, right? This is not going to single-handedly solve America’s load growth issues, and there are a lot of complexities I’m skipping in order to get to the bigger vision, but it’s still a directionally correct illustration of the concept. Squint and we get to a cleaner, more resilient, more decentralized power system where data centers don’t force the grid into building a bunch of new capacity just to cover a few peak hours a year. And one where consumers don’t just pay for power. We can actually get paid for flexibility, too.

Boom. Step 4: retire.

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