Transcript
Jigar Shah: Hello, my name is Jigar Shah and I'm a clean energy entrepreneur.
Jamie Nolan: And I'm Jamie Nolan, a clean energy communications consultant, and this is Energy Empire.
Jigar Shah: Today, I guess we're going to try to figure out the whole EV thing. It just feels like everyone has been dumping on electric vehicles since the new administration came in, right? We canceled EV tax credits and the big auto companies are transitioning some of their EV battery manufacturing facilities to making grid batteries.
Jamie Nolan: I feel like there's so much to unpack when it comes to EVs. And this is our first EV-specific episode after we previously spoke to our friend Adam Browning about electric freight, which was really cool. This guest is more about traditional EVs. He has a really cool and unexpected story around his old Tesla and what happened to it after it was totaled. It was really unexpected. So I think it will be really fun for our listeners to think about a different future prospect for how we could consider second lives for our EVs after they leave our driveways.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, as you know, I've been thinking about this for a long time. So it'll be really good to talk to Philippe about his point of view. He's the top consultant in Canada to help utilities with change management and figuring out how to get a lot of these new technologies really into the hands of consumers. So it'll be good to see his point of view.
Interview: Philippe Dunsky
Georgia Is Charging in Ukraine
Jigar Shah: Philippe, how are you?
Philippe Dunsky: Very well, how are you, Jigar?
Jigar Shah: Well, you and I have known each other for a long time. I'm helping you out on some projects here and there. But we called you because you have the craziest story. Do you want to go through it with us?
Philippe Dunsky: You're right. So a little bit of background. 2016, I decided to get an EV — lead by example — and the only ones available then were a Tesla Model S. So I got a Tesla Model S, had it for eight years, it was great. And then last year, my ex had a freak accident and the car was totaled. Everyone was fine. The car was totaled. Insurance paid up. Everything's good. The car is gone. I went and got a new Tesla Model Y this time.
So I've been driving my new car for about a year and then over Christmas this year, my daughter, who's 18 — she drives my car — she texts me and she says, "Papa, what is Georgia doing in Ukraine?"
So I'm like, what are you talking about? And she reminds me — our old car, we named it Georgia.
It turns out anyone who has a Tesla knows this because you have an app and on the app you can see where the car is. And it turns out she's got a notification a year after my car's accident and presumed death that Georgia is now charging in Ukraine.
So she sends me the link and I go on the app and there it is. I see exactly where it is, exactly the lot that it's in, in this rural town in western Ukraine near the Polish border.
Jamie Nolan: That's wild. So what did you do from there? Did you track her down?
Philippe Dunsky: I did my best to track her down, yeah, and to kind of understand what happened. There's no way of knowing with 100% certainty, but it seems in all likelihood what happened was that someone realized that the carcass of the car might be totaled, but there's a really valuable battery in there. And they salvaged it, and somehow it made its way over to Ukraine. I'm guessing that's — you know, it's wartime and this is what happens in wartime, right? Suddenly the stuff that you took for granted before that you didn't care about, suddenly you're looking for every possible resource and this is a resource. So it was salvaged and someone managed to take the battery and repurpose it. And in all likelihood it's being repurposed for electricity, for homes, maybe a business, but something like that.
In Ukraine, especially in wartime right now — especially as I'm sure you know — Russia is bombing in particular electricity infrastructure. And so it's just a constant series of blackouts in a country where it's a winter country and a third of the population heats with electricity. This is serious stuff.
So my old car now is presumably keeping people warm in the winter, keeping the lights on as well.
Jamie Nolan: So you did a newsletter post on this and I'm hoping that it's going to be one of those missed connections or a dog with a chip. The owners of Georgia, please stand up, come forward.
Philippe Dunsky: I have a feeling that the owners of Georgia — the owners in Ukraine — would have more pressing things on their mind right now. So I haven't managed to connect with them yet, but I can still see exactly where it is. I pick up my phone and I can look at it anytime, see the current charge state of the old battery. It's at 54% right now.
Jigar Shah: So how often do they charge the battery?
Philippe Dunsky: It seems to be like every — I don't know — maybe every week or so, something like that, roughly speaking.
Jigar Shah: So have you concocted a story in your mind? You're like, all right, they're charging every week. It goes from 100% of a charge down to — or do they actually only charge it to like 80 or 90%?
Philippe Dunsky: I mean, I'm not following it day by day, hour by hour. So I don't know what they're doing with it. I'm just assuming that it's doing what a backup battery does best, which is just sit there and do nothing until you need it. And then every once in a while, you need it. In Ukraine, there's this constant, constant bombing of the electricity infrastructure. And it turns out that when they bomb local transformer stations, on average it takes Ukraine something like two days to fix it all and get the power back up. And it's an average of really widespread, right? But something like two days on average. So it's two days without heat for the third of the country that heats with electricity in the dead of winter.
I did quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, and it's probably providing enough heat easily for a home for two days, depending on how they heat. If they heat with heat pumps, it could be six to eight days for that same home. So this will get them through a lot of those bombardments and terror tactics.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, it's a large battery. This is 90 kilowatt hours — that would be like seven Powerwalls on somebody's house. Most people have like one or two Powerwalls. So it's a lot of power.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, it is indeed. It's a lot of power, it's a lot of value, and it would be serving no purpose otherwise. So I'm really glad to know that it's still alive — kind of resurrected.
The Second Life of EV Batteries
Jigar Shah: So Georgia is on your mind. Sorry, pun intended. I'm just curious how you and your daughter think about this now. Folks have talked about how you can back up an entire house with a car. Ford had that in a Super Bowl ad a few years ago for their F-150 Lightning. Have you thought more about this use case?
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, for sure. I'll be honest with you — I would love to say the story is this happened and then a light bulb went off. The truth is, I've been working on this. My firm's been working on this for the longest time now. Nearing on 10 years, we've been working on what we call V2G — vehicle to grid — or vehicle grid integration. We have about 70 people in our team and I have a clean mobility practice area.
So that stuff was already on my mind, probably what led me to have an idea of what might have happened to the battery here. But yeah, it's a huge opportunity. It's the sort of thing that maybe a wartime country is going to put that extra effort to get that value right now. And hopefully we're just a few years behind.
The Untold Story of Europe's Energy Response
Jamie Nolan: Jigar, when the Ukraine war started, it seemed like the story in Washington was LNG, LNG — that's going to be what saves us. And I know that when we were at LPO, you called Bill McKibben and asked him to personally get an article written pushing the White House towards heat pumps. What was the resistance like inside the White House?
Jigar Shah: Well, it's one of those things where, as Philippe was suggesting, we've been working on these solutions for 15 years. It's not like this is new stuff — whether it's insulation in homes or heat pumps or energy-efficient appliances. And so when the war in Ukraine broke out, everyone at the National Security Council was only talking about LNG. And I was like, what the hell? What about all these other solutions that we've been working on? Can't we scale this stuff up? And they were like, "Jigar, you're so cute. That's such a great idea, but we're never going to work on it."
So it was pretty obvious that going through normal channels wasn't going to work. I was like, they need to hear this from a news publication and they need to hear outside pressure. I called up Bill, who I've known for years, and said, hey, this is what's happening — what do you want to do about it? And he's like, well, let's write an article about how big this could become. And I remember I was taking my son skiing at Whitetail with all the other dads — he was like five, and he hates skiing, so it was a hot mess — trying to juggle that with Bill and figure it out.
And then the article came out and it was fascinating because our good friend Michael Liebreich came out swinging and was like, Europe doesn't need your stinking heat pumps from the United States. We can make our own heat pumps. We don't need to have them exported to Europe. But lo and behold, Europe took it up in a big way. They installed so many heat pumps that they actually did need to import heat pumps from the United States because they didn't have enough production domestically.
And they did end up reducing total natural gas consumption from Russia by like 45 to 50% just through energy efficiency and heat pumps. Obviously, people turned down their thermostat in the winter to 66 instead of keeping it at 70. Some of that was behavioral. But it was super important in the response to losing Russian gas.
Part of what's on my mind is it does seem like Europe was this canary in the coal mine for all of us. They had to think about this in a way that was frankly very sophisticated. They had 27 member countries which speak different languages. They had to convince them all that this was actually a plan that they should pursue — not just importing U.S. LNG, but also demand response and electrification and some of these other things. I'm trying to understand how you think about it with your experience base, because now we're sitting in the Iran crisis, the Strait of Hormuz crisis. What are the lessons of Europe's efforts on the Ukraine crisis?
Philippe Dunsky: It does to a degree. I'll tell you, the real lesson that comes to my mind is funny because I remember when I started in this — it was like 1990, 1991 — and the previous oil crises were not that far behind us. And so when I started out, part of the conversation was energy security. And it was valuing the energy security benefits that come from energy efficiency, from demand management. This is 35 years ago. And I remember I was new to it and thinking to myself, yeah, energy security — I'm not really seeing the tangible benefit.
Okay, now I am. So now we have an opportunity where there's this kind of awakening of one of the streams of benefits that come from better demand management and energy efficiency, which is national security. I think that's going to factor back into the conversation in a way that it hasn't over the past two to three decades.
But that aside, I think what Europe has shown us here is just a reminder that there are all these $20 bills lying on the ground. There are all these opportunities that we always somehow convince ourselves are not real, they're not tangible. We can't really count on them. But actually, you can — if it matters enough and you organize enough to get at them. That being said, it's a lot easier when your prices are absolutely through the roof because your gas has been cut off and you're in the midst of a war. So the context is a lot different. But I think this reminder is going to help a lot from a policy perspective to bring this back to the fore.
Why Does the Demand Side Story Keep Getting Buried?
Jamie Nolan: Jigar, you've talked a lot about how energy efficiency ended up replacing roughly 55% of Europe's Russian gas volume and LNG made up the remaining 45%. And that's almost the exact inverse of the way that this story has been covered largely in mainstream media. So why does that demand side story keep getting buried?
Jigar Shah: Well, I would love your opinion since you're the expert here. My sense is that it feels very weak, right? LNG feels more masculine. It feels like the robust way of solving something. Germany signed a contract with an American LNG provider, the LNG provider raced to build their LNG export terminal in record time. Germany magically figured out how to build an LNG import terminal in eight months and look how awesome we are.
I just feel like it's an easier visual than millions of households turning down their thermostat, millions of households hiring someone to do insulation in their homes, replacing windows, installing heat pumps, doing all of the necessary things to make their bills go down — to make energy a smaller percentage of their overall household budget. I feel like that narrative is constantly couched in sacrifice instead of in a robust response to a crisis.
Philippe Dunsky: That's funny, because you would think that instead of the sacrifice narrative, the efficiency narrative, the productivity narrative would somehow win. But I'm with you on this. There's something that just doesn't feel tangible.
You can't touch it. You can't cut a ribbon. A politician can't cut a ribbon. I don't say that to bemoan politicians, but they need to make big announcements. You make a big announcement around a plant. You don't make a big announcement around 10,000 solar panels being distributed on roofs around a city or a province or a state. It's harder. It's like diffusion versus concentration. The big infrastructure stuff is concentrated and the stuff that we're talking about here is diffused, and it doesn't play as well for sure. That's been the story for as long as I've been in this.
Jigar Shah: Set us straight, Jamie. What do you think?
Jamie Nolan: Well, also when people are turning their thermostats down, nobody's making money. I think it has to do with capitalism and spending. People cutting their energy use is just not as sexy in our capitalist economy as people buying more natural gas, whether that be American imported LNG or Russian gas out of a pipeline.
I will say energy efficiency is like long-lined in our sector. At the DOE, it was the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, but we all know the focus was on the renewable energy part of that acronym. So much respect to folks who have been fighting the good fight and trying to raise the profile of energy efficiency for a long time. I do think that now, as we're talking about ideas like grid utilization — kind of like efficiency, but we've rebranded it — maybe we just need to try new language to talk about some of these things.
But yeah, I think that energy efficiency was an unsung hero in Ukraine's energy story in the face of war. I know that the folks over there are still dealing with significant long-term power outages and a lot of those "energy efficiency" moments are maybe not even chosen by them. They just have no choice but to cut their power use. So anyway, our heart goes out to them. And I hope that the story of the sacrifice that they have made in order to cut their energy use and reduce their reliance on Russian gas — I hope that story gets told.
Philippe Dunsky: And by the way, if I can add — I think that Ukraine is a great example of, we don't want that to be the reason. We don't want to have to put on sweaters and cut our usage and sacrifice. And that's one of the reasons why we want to use heat pumps more and get more efficient appliances and insulate our homes and businesses better. So that we're being more productive and can actually squeeze more juice out of the fruit that we have, and not need to go into sacrifice mode for whatever reason — be it war or just not enough resources.
Jigar Shah: Well, Jamie wears a sweater just because she runs cold.
Jamie Nolan: I'm always cold. I do have to say though — because I have an electric heat pump powering half of my house, my top floor of my house, and I have rooftop solar panels, my power bills are usually negligible. And so it still feels like a big luxury when I'm like, I'm freezing, I'm going to treat myself and turn the thermostat up two degrees because I know that I've got that solar on my roof. So I feel good about that.
But I mean, I love energy efficiency. Obviously I'm all bought in over here. I've got the EV in the driveway and the panels on the roof, the extra insulation — you name it, I've done it.
The $20 Bills on the Ground
Jigar Shah: All right, let's go back to the $20 bills sitting on the ground. I think you and I both know that they're not actually sitting on the ground and they require a tremendous amount of work to pick up. When you think about applying this to batteries, we spent a lot of time with Redwood Materials when we were at the Loan Programs Office, because they were doing big things and still doing big things in terms of recycling EV batteries.
Most recently though, they realized that most of the battery packs that they were receiving to be recycled were actually in good condition. And so they've actually — I think they built a power plant in 20 days for Crusoe to run a data center off of, which I thought was fascinating. So they've started an entire division now to get more out of the battery packs that they are receiving instead of actually mechanically recycling them. They're giving them longer life. It does feel like that is also found money — folks are figuring out how to reuse and repurpose these 90-kilowatt-hour battery packs.
Is that your sense, Philippe?
Philippe Dunsky: It's starting, right? Honestly, the repurposing stuff is the kind of thing where yeah, it's obvious — it could be obvious to all of us at a really high level. And then you get down to the nitty-gritty and it gets a bit complicated as it always does. My understanding of the repurposing stuff — and again, I'm not the expert, I've got my team who know this stuff inside and out — is that repurposing has got to happen eventually, because eventually, with the numbers of EVs on the road and just natural rates of attrition, you're literally looking at tens of billions of dollars in value annually — annually — from all these not end-of-life batteries, but end-of-life vehicles and their batteries.
But getting at that is really complicated, partly because you have different chemistries, partly because you have different battery designs, partly because it's really hard to take all of that and separate them right now because they're not labeled. And we don't have a process for easily, rapidly, in an automated way testing the battery health of each of the cells or each of the modules.
So that stuff is all to be developed. Right now you can do it manually — so Redwood will do that for Crusoe on a one-off basis — but ultimately we need to get to a place where we have this pretty much automated. And I think that's a ways away. And quite frankly, I think it's a ways away because we're just at the beginning. There aren't that many end-of-life EVs yet. It's still probably five, 10, 15 years down the road before we talk about really big scale. But that'll happen for sure.
In the meantime, the vehicle grid integration — to me, that is the nearer-term opportunity. The nearer-term $20 bills.
Vehicle-to-Grid: The Biggest Untapped Resource
Jamie Nolan: So let's talk more about that, because beyond emergency backup, this year Tesla unlocked the Cybertruck, which can now back up your home. And they promise that the rest of their cars will be able to do that by the end of the year, which seems pretty incredible. What do you think that change will mean for the industry?
Jigar Shah: Well, let me just add more context to that just because I think people have a hard time wrapping their brain around this. If you look at the residential solar industry in the United States, they add solar to like five to six hundred thousand homes a year. We're selling over a million electric vehicles per year. And so when you think about it, it is at a scale that's larger than the residential solar industry is putting solar on rooftops every single year. I think this is such a huge thing. And on top of that, 15% of American households actually buy backup power for their house, whether it's batteries or a gas engine or a diesel engine or whatever. So it's clearly on people's minds that they want resiliency and they want to ride through any electrical disruptions.
It does feel like a product that American consumers want.
Jamie Nolan: I want it. I know when I got my EV charger installed — which by the way, I had that installed four or five years before I got my EV because I knew that my next vehicle would be an EV — I wanted a bi-directional charger, but they didn't sell them in the United States. It wasn't even a product that was available to me. When I asked, they were like, this is not Australia. We don't have that product available.
I'm ready. I want to be an early adopter. So please let me use my — I do not have battery backup for my solar array and nor do I have a generator. So I would love to use my EV that mostly sits in my driveway to back up my house in severe weather.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, it is this huge opportunity. We've done due diligence on bi-directional charging companies — absolutely enormous opportunity. We've actually run the numbers for a few provinces here, looking at what kind of potential this actually is. I'll give you an example. My home province, we looked at it — the question was, what does it look like by 2035? And this isn't just the theoretical sum total of all the capacity of the batteries out there. It's really how much of it can you actually count on as a utility to get when you need it from those EV drivers or EV owners. It came out to about 3,000 megawatts by 2035. So that's like a 3,000-megawatt peaking plant that'll be available — already paid for. Not the whole thing obviously, but the basic battery infrastructure paid for by customers.
Jigar Shah: That's more capacity than all four reactors that OPG is building at Darlington using the GE Hitachi 300-megawatt nuclear reactor. So it's a lot of capacity. And my sense is those reactors probably aren't going to be online by 2035.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, you talk about any 3,000-megawatt peaker plant — there isn't one, of course. It's six 500-megawatt peaker plants. It's huge. And this is in 10 years, and it just keeps growing and growing as more and more EVs come on the road. So the potential is there, absolutely.
That said, there are some real challenges.
The Coordination Problem
Jigar Shah: And what are those challenges? Because my sense is those challenges are more cultural in nature within the utility than it is technical at this point.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, it's definitely not technical. We've kind of gotten past the technical challenges now. We're into the world of coordination. That's the problem. It's not a technical problem. It's a coordination problem.
Ultimately, if you look at what's going on now, you've got automakers waiting for customer demand before investing the additional dollars to make the whole integration work, because it does require additional dollars. Tech is there, no problem, but it requires additional dollars. So automakers are waiting for customers to demand it. Customers are not demanding it because more often than not, they can't really extract the value through utility rates, because the rates weren't built to enable that. And those utility rates aren't really exposing the value because no one's really pushing that. So you have this kind of chicken-and-egg situation in terms of demand and supply.
The other part — and it's not so much technical, again, it's a coordination one — if I look at what we've been doing for the past 10 years, we've been working with clients on their pilots. Technical pilots, demonstration pilots, some slightly larger pilots — everyone's doing their own little thing. And that's on the utility side. On the automaker side, they're developing different standards. So everyone has different standards. It's like with the chargers. We wasted 10 years debating between CHAdeMO and CCS and now we're finally seeming to land on Tesla's NACS. So that's a good thing for the chargers. We need to do the same thing on the bi-directional side, which we don't have now. So everyone has got different standards. They're not currently planning on being interoperable.
Jamie, you mentioned Tesla, and when you look at the fine print of Tesla's announcements, really what they've said is the Model Y will offer this as of the end of the year, but they'll only offer it if you already have a Powerwall, a Tesla Powerwall. And they'll only offer it with their own chargers and they'll only offer it within their own ecosystem. So this is going to be the classic — everyone wants to build their moat and own the customer and keep them within the ecosystem. But if that's happening and then if I want to change my car, suddenly I need to change $10,000 of additional equipment. That's going to be a real brake on the system.
There is this really big coordination problem that ultimately is partly a policy problem that policymakers can address and partly an industry problem. We're actually — one of the things, once in a while we get a little proactive and try to make stuff happen — we're now convening utilities across Canada at least, and automakers, to sit down and figure out how can we make this happen in a way that's standardized and interoperable so we don't waste another 10 years trying to figure it out.
Why Is Your Power Bill Going Up?
Jigar Shah: So let's just try to figure out what's holding us back. In the United States, there's an entire conversation right now politically happening around affordability. People are all over whether data centers are raising rates and all this other stuff. And when you look at the math, what it says is that power generation is actually cheaper today than it was in 2010. Transmission has basically gone up by the level of inflation — not a big rise. But distribution is where things have really gone haywire.
Because the utilities believe that they have to let you, the consumer, do whatever you want. And they have to upgrade all of the substations and wires to make sure that you can do whatever you want. And largely it's an EV and heat pump problem. What you find is when five people on your block get an EV, they spend $50 million to upgrade the circuit. And you have the ability to actually just say, well, they just need to be coordinated so they're not all on at the same time, and we can get more out of the grid that we've already paid for. But that's a cultural problem.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's again — it's not a technological problem. It's a coordination problem. One of the things that we did about a year ago, very similar to the thing I was just talking about for vehicle to grid, is we created something called the Consortium for Power Efficiency. And the idea there is pulling together all sorts of different utilities and industry — like the contractor industry — to say, all right, when contractors go to a home, if they're being brought in because you want to install a heat pump or you have an EV or you want to go electric on whatever it is, the first answer cannot always be, okay, you need to upgrade your panel, and then the utility has to upgrade everything else behind it.
No — you've got splitters, you've got small energy management systems that can easily go in, save people money, but they're just not being done. It's not the rule of thumb that contractors have. That's a bit of an industry that we need to transform, a bit of practice that we need to transform, but it's absolutely doable. We're working on it right now with — I think we have something like eight or nine utilities together, pooling the resources on that. So we can solve that. We can solve it on the panel side, and we can solve it on the vehicle and grid integration side. But we need to bring these players together.
Just Give People Free Stuff
Jigar Shah: I know. I feel like we're doing this all wrong. I feel like we should just give people free stuff.
I mean, am I wrong? I feel like in the United States, I think last year we spent $178 billion on wires. Mostly just upgrading stuff that didn't need to be upgraded. I was like, if you're going to spend $178 billion on crap, why don't you just give people free stuff? Why don't you just give them a new service panel with a battery integrated in it from Span, or give them a bi-directional charger from Wallbox or HyperVolt? Why don't you just give them stuff and then say, in exchange for giving you this stuff, you have to let us use your battery and your EV when it's plugged in — up to like 10% of the capacity — and we'll manage the grid more efficiently with it. I just feel like the level of imagination is so low that I just can't help but hate the utility.
Jamie Nolan: Utility executives, you heard it here first.
Jigar Shah: But you know what I mean? They would rather cry on my shoulder and tell me why they need to upgrade my substation for $50 million. And when I said, well, why don't you just give me a piece of equipment that's $10,000 that I can put in my garage that gives you access to my EV — they're like, I don't know, we need a workshop with Dunsky. We need to have eight utilities come together around a table and work together for two years and figure out standards. We know how to fleece you with $50 million upgrades, but giving you $10,000 of free stuff? I don't know. We're going to need a meeting for that.
Philippe Dunsky: I'm going to completely disagree with you on this. Partly because those executives you're talking about, I'm working with them. And oftentimes — and I'm not saying that to defend them because they pay me — I'm saying that to defend them because oftentimes they're coming to me and saying, we want to get this stuff into people's homes. So what is it that's stopping that from happening?
And in the example that you were just giving there, the thing that's stopping them is the contractors who are coming to their home and who are saying, all right, before you get the EV or before you put in this heat pump, I need to upgrade your panel. And that's going to cost you thousands of dollars. And then the customer's not doing it. And the utility is not there — they're not part of the equation. No one's even asked them a single question at that point.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, but I mean, seriously — who thinks, you know who could bail me out of this jam? The utility. I should call the 1-800 number and be on hold for 47 minutes to see whether the utility is going to solve this problem. I'm just saying that for all of the warm feelings I have for the reliability and dependability of my utility, I don't view them as a customer service organization.
Philippe Dunsky: Yeah, I mean, my experience is that depends on the utility. There are utilities out there that have been monopolies for way too long and never had that customer service touch. And there are others that are working to get it and to keep it and to service their customers. But it's not as simple as just saying it, right? Because they're working in this vast ecosystem with piles of players that they don't control and piles of decisions that are never even coming to them, that they're not even aware of. And they need to influence those decisions and those actors also to be all rowing in the same direction. The utility is not like an all-powerful god out there. They can't control what the contractor says.
Jamie Nolan: Sure, I mean, it feels solvable. First of all, if you can name it, and you can define it so clearly, which you did beautifully, Philippe — it feels like something that can be resolved. And I do think that utilities are — my perception is that they are quite married to doing things in a very traditional manner. And so it's a lot more feasible and attractive for them to update a substation than it is for them to launch some type of new demand response, very customer-focused program where they insert themselves in the process of people getting smart panels.
Carrier is about to introduce an HVAC system with a battery, which sounds so rad and that's like next on my wish list. But I think we just invite them to embrace this innovation. These solutions are here and yet there still just does seem to be an emphasis on continuing to deploy these very traditional technologies to try and tackle these very modern issues.
Philippe Dunsky: I think it might be a self-selection bias thing. But I can say many, most of my clients are not that — they're desperate for demand savings. They're desperate for demand savings because they can't even get authorization to build the substations that need to be built. And so they're desperately worried about reliability and about the lights going out.
That being said — and I'm not sure if this is part of the factor — we work both in Canada and the U.S. One of the differences between them is on the Canadian side, more — not all, but more — of the utilities are government-owned, state-owned, so they're nonprofit. And that might influence a bit of a difference of view, but honestly, I think it's more cultural.
And I'm not seeing that bias as much that you're talking about that I used to see. Like 25, 30 years ago, it was always just whatever is CapEx, I want it. And whatever is demand side, I don't. I'm not seeing that as much anymore. I can't tell you how many calls I get from executives who are like, how can I get more of this demand side stuff?
Two Million Mobile Batteries
Jigar Shah: All right, final question. So if you've got a million EVs a year being sold, that's roughly 100,000 megawatt hours worth of battery capacity in those EVs. Predict a year for me where you think that capacity will be thought of as a resource by the utility instead of another load to be managed.
Philippe Dunsky: I think within the next five years, you're going to see a big chunk of the utilities — the more forward-looking ones — seriously looking at that as a resource within the next five. But you know how it is. You've got a chunk of the most forward-looking utilities, and then you've got the ones that follow afterwards, and those might be more in the five-to-10-year range.
But yeah, you can't ignore this stuff. When you've got — in my home province, we expect to have about two million EVs on the road in five years from now. You can't ignore two million mobile batteries that are unused 95% of the time of every day. $20 bills.
Takeaways
Jigar Shah: Well said. Well, Philippe Dunsky, after 35 years of service, 19 years at your firm, with an 18-year-old daughter who is so smart that you guys tracked down an old EV in Ukraine — thank you for being on the show. It's just so great to get your wisdom.
Philippe Dunsky: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Jigar Shah: Well, Jamie, my goodness, we covered a lot of ground. I mean, who would have thought that that Tesla was still connected to the app? Although I guess I'm not surprised that Starlink is going over Ukraine and collecting all this data from that old Tesla. But my goodness, the Ukrainian people are just so creative and inventive.
Jamie Nolan: So creative. I have to admit that I was really hoping that that story was going to go in the direction of a quest where he and his daughter went to Ukraine to track down Georgia and find out what small village she was powering and all the children she was helping to feed. I still think, Philippe, you should do it. Hire a film crew and go and track down Georgia. I think it would be great. We would love to put it on our feed. Think about it.
Jigar Shah: You know who we should pitch is our friend from Semafor, right? Isn't Tim in Kyiv?
Jamie Nolan: Tim! Yes, amazing energy reporter Tim McDonald — his wife is a war correspondent. So I do think about them. It does make it a little bit more personal. Knowing someone there makes it seem more real. But hey, Tim — if you want to go and locate Georgia, I feel like it could be a really cool story.
Jigar Shah: My goodness, look at that. We're just making connections all over the place. I see an Oscar in your future.
Jamie Nolan: In my future? I mean, the storytelling is in my veins. So I can't help but take it that way. I wanted a dramatization of the story — that's what I was going for. Philippe, very much a straight shooter, but it's kind of like the dynamic with my husband where when he's telling a story, I'll periodically jump in to make it more exciting.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I think had we got his daughter on, it would have been instant TikTok videos ready for posting.
Well, look, I think I found it interesting that the electric utilities are almost there, but not quite there. Philippe had talked about a five-year window for this stuff to really get integrated. I think that's far too long. As you know, our friend Apoorv at WeaveGrid is already fully integrating EV capacity into the grids here — Baltimore Gas and Electric, Pepco, DTE and Detroit Edison. So I think the U.S. utilities are already fully integrating EVs into their grid management plans for distribution circuits.
Jamie Nolan: I mean, I hope that's the case. I will say in 2022, when I had my EV charger installed in my driveway, a two-way charger was not even on the market, as I mentioned in our interview with Philippe. But I'm ready for Dominion Virginia Power to reach out to me to upgrade. I am very happy to upgrade my charger in exchange for giving you access to my EV battery, please. But I don't know — on the ground, are those programs really rolling out here in the U.S. in a major way?
Jigar Shah: Well, I already get a $10 discount on my bill every month for charging my EV when the grid has more capacity. And the next stage of the DRIVE Act is supposed to get implemented next year. So that's going to give me even more incentives to allow the utility to charge my car when it needs the load.
I think we're heading in that direction, but the bigger thing is — as you and I know — this is all about grid utilization. Our distribution grid costs have doubled and figuring out how to charge all this stuff when there's excess capacity reduces electricity bills for everybody.
Jamie Nolan: Absolutely. It's just common sense. But this is very common across our very fractured utility landscape in the United States. When you have 2,500 different utility service territories, all of these things roll out very unevenly. And so that's why even though you live in Maryland and I live in Virginia, I don't have access to a program like that in Virginia. So I really do hope that the belief is right and that at least some of them are really chomping at the bit to try and integrate more of these types of programs. I know, of course, Virginia just passed the first-in-the-nation grid utilization bill and Dominion supported that bill — at least they didn't oppose it. So hopefully we're going to see additional programs like this roll out nationwide.
Jigar Shah: Well, kudos to our friends Arnab Pal and Kyle Winslow who played critical roles there.
Jamie Nolan: Yes. And also our friends at the Utilize coalition, which is finally public. They announced that coalition this week and they were also behind the scenes helping to make that a reality. So really excited to see how that program rolls out. And I think Governor Spanberger should be signing that legislation here in a couple of weeks.
Jigar Shah: All right. Well, with that, thank you so much everyone for sticking around. This episode was a lot of fun. And I really want to thank Simon and our team that is making us look good on a pretty regular basis. Please let people know that you love the podcast by giving us five stars. Ratings really allow people to help find us. Tell people about it. It's been a lot of fun. Our numbers are going up every week. So thank you everybody for coming in and enjoy our back catalog. It's been fun to build it. And subscribe to our YouTube channel — that's what people do these days from what I can gather. Although I still listen to everything on the audio-only podcast version. And thank you to our sponsors. S2G has been amazing and we really appreciate all of your support. Thanks everybody.