day-after-Earth-Day **thread** below Wanted to share my thoughts on what's working and what needs improvement as we shift into a new gear for decarbonization of the built environment

Energy transition is here! Infrastructure, mkts, behaviors are more networked, siloed industries are intertwining, new entrants are making an impact. It’s thrilling and so much is happening right now that I want to share some thoughts on what’s working and what still needs work

My corner of the transition is distributed energy networks, making buildings become grid-interactive and able to use, store and sell power. This helps the grid (ie, everyone) but also generates $$$ for those buildings and shrinks their emissions

Start with what’s working. #1: DERs getting commercialized. Solar’s cheap, batteries getting cheaper. Global supply chains did this for PV already and are doing it again for new climate technologies

#2: Demand! Real estate cos, homeowners, builders, tenants want more energy transition infrastructure. Clean energy has gone mainstream

#3: Capital is there to meet it. Billions (trillions?) of private and public $$$ are looking for projects to finance

#4: Policy is getting behind net-zero. President Biden’s new 50-by-‘30 target (backed by infrastructure $$$) is hugely ambitious. But don’t forget the states and cities are heading down this path already (shout out to NY!)

OK, now for what needs work. Mostly, this can be summed up as joining some very helpful but highly dispersed dots.

First things first: With new stakeholders showing up (which is great) everyone has different jargon: heat rates, roundtrip efficiencies, carbon coefficients. We need to speak the same language

Policy support is rising, but it tends to be disjointed in these United States. We need to knit together city, state and federal incentives and decision makers to accelerate the deployment of $$$ into DERs

Permitting and interconnection remain a problem in a system built around hubs (power plants) and spokes (homes & workplaces). Solar devs have done a lot to smooth out friction state by state, but it’s even harder with DERs: Multiple assets, multiple techs, multi-directional flows

The big one: Market design. Wholesale power, utility tariffs, demand response etc. They all need to make space for innovation and reward new services fairly. How to price elegantly for CO2 cuts, local congestion, reliability etc?

This isn’t an exhaustive list. But I get a lot of requests from a diverse range of people looking to get into climate tech. If you can figure out any of the above, you will be in high demand! (and of course @BlueprintPower will want to talk to you so drop me a line!)