Green Giants – Episode 41

Jason Burwen (01:02)

Yeah, I had wanted to be in energy policy really since graduate school and I was very fortunate to have a lot of support in learning about how power sector regulation works at the California Public Utility Commission. I moved over to Washington, D.C. really at the time where everyone was running away from Washington, D.C. after the failure of the Waxman-Markey effort in 2009.

I joined a think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center where I had the energy innovation portfolio. And I was at BPC for I think around three years just under. And the thing is my job was focused on the pathways forward for new energy technologies in the mission of decarbonization. And every energy technology has its own politics, but as I looked at energy storage and batteries, something that kept occurring to me was one, we absolutely need this. A world with more wind and solar is going to need gob smacking amounts of energy storage. Two, batteries are going to get cheaper faster than anyone expects because they’re small, modular, mass produced, just like solar panels and no one’s quite ready yet for that.

And then the third, and probably the most compelling to me, was that at that time, there were already batteries being deployed on the American power grid, primarily providing fast frequency regulation in places like PJM, the mid-Atlantic market, and in Texas. And it occurred to me, the trick for energy storage is not gonna be getting a tax credit necessarily. It’s about ultimately shaping how markets are designed and worked. Looking at regulations because battery storage just doesn’t look like any other thing on the system, but that its value is very clear from day one, even without any kind of incentive or subsidy with it. And that to me was a compelling political proposition for how this industry was going to advance and that it could advance in a sort of nonpartisan or bipartisan way much faster. That’s what precipitated my interest in joining the industry.

Wes Ashworth (03:18)

Yeah, absolutely. And looking back to that, so when you first started in energy storage, what was the landscape like then and how has it evolved to where we are today?

Jason Burwen (03:28)

Yeah, when I joined, which would have been July of 2015, there was, I think, south of 300 megawatts across the entire United States. Again, as I said, nearly all of that providing fast frequency regulation. And at that point in time, it was all independent power producers, folks who had some ability to take merchant risk or merchant appetite.

And also it was a time when we could see that there was great potential, but there was also, you know, everyone is kind of flying in all sorts of different directions, different technologies, different business propositions, a lot of possibilities, but also not a ton of focus because the business model had really not been proven out at any great scale yet. And now when I think about where we are today, I mean, one project is 300 megawatts, right? The scale and scope of this industry is just multiple orders of magnitude greater. 2020 was the first year that the industry achieved one gigawatt of annual installations. But right after that went to multi-gigawatt years. And now I think 2024, the numbers, I’m pretty sure we broke 10 gigawatts. So that’s a remarkable trajectory of growth across this industry and everyone’s a part of it now. Like we don’t have just IPPs, we have obviously very large utilities and load serving entities that are contracting for these assets. We have increasing interest now from large commercial industrial customers who see storage as a part of their portfolio they need in order to be able to come online and scale massive data centers, for example. It’s real, I mean, I’ve felt very fortunate to be front row seat to this tectonic shift.

Wes Ashworth (05:20)

No kidding. It’s exciting growth and it’s really amazing when you do look back at it over just a 10-year timeframe, which is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things when you look at development and just what it’s, what has come to today, how it’s really kind of the center of everything. There are not many projects out there that don’t have somehow storage tied to it in a way. I do want to put a little bit of this out there. So, for those who may not be as familiar, can you break down the role energy storage plays in the renewable energy ecosystem?

Why is it so crucial as we transition to cleaner energy?

Jason Burwen (05:52)

Yeah, happy to do at its fundamentals, battery storage is about flexibility. And that’s really important in energy systems that have higher degrees of complexity. So, when you add lots of wind and solar to the system, for sure, the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. And so in a very simple way, batteries or energy storage technologies generally are a means of making sure that you’re decoupling the time of delivery of those assets from what the load needs, right? You’re basically saying, I can now move energy across time using batteries to exactly when it’s most valuable or most needed. The thing that I think folks also sometimes forget is that it’s not just about the renewables, it’s also about complexity in the system.

So, you have forecasting challenges associated with those assets. You have different interactions across the fleet as other resources need to ramp down or deal with that inflexibility in some way. And how you do that is very challenging when supply has to match demand at literally every moment, millisecond to millisecond, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. What battery storage does is because you can sort of relax that constraint around matching exactly every given moment because you have this great medium to store electricity, it allows you just a much wider range of operational possibilities and efficiencies on that power system.

And so, I think that’s ultimately sort of at a philosophical level what battery storage is doing in terms of what that looks like in the market. Initially, when batteries were much more expensive, they were providing very high value short duration services. I mentioned frequency regulation, that kind of ancillary service that has a very short time frame. And they still do in many grids because they are faster responding than anything out there. You can respond to a frequency deviation in a quarter of a second. And that’s real value, right? That actually is incredibly valuable on a grid, particularly a grid with much higher levels of inverter-based resources.

But also right now, the main value that folks are providing and selling battery storage on is to provide resource adequacy. That is to say, you are a part of the set of resources that are there to ensure that the grid has power every day, even the most high demand days of the year. And that the lights will always remain on at least at the sort of bulk system level. And those are typically right now in the United States, obviously this is a changing environment, but right now the convention is about four hours of duration at rated capacity. So, we will see continued evolution, but really, I think that gives you a sense of what batteries are doing in the power system.

Wes Ashworth (08:48)

Yeah, great overview, just thinking about it. So, shifting gears a little bit to some of the impact in policy and market design and the roles that you played there. So, you’ve had a major influence on shaping energy storage policy, especially during time with the Energy Storage Association. How have wholesale electricity markets and power sector regulations impacted the growth of this industry?

Jason Burwen (09:09)

Yeah, I think that when you look at where storage took off initially, it was places where you could sign long-term contracts, right, by and large. Maybe I should say, first it took off in places where the market design was modified to value the fast response of the assets. So that was the fast frequency regulation markets of PJM and in Texas in the ERCOT market, right?

The next markets were really these sorts of long-term bilateral contracts with utility off-takers where these assets were being presented as a part of system reliability. And so, the California utilities certainly signed a lot of those contracts in large part because they were mandated to do so by California state policy. You saw, I think we’re right now at 11 states, maybe it’s 12 states that have state policy goals or mandates for storage procurement of their utilities. And we can argue about how much that exactly drove the market, but I think it created long-term demand signals that allowed a lot of businesses to invest in building teams and getting assets into interconnection queues and being ready to be built.

And that’s very impactful because these things take many years to come from conception to ultimate operations. But a third thing that I think is important is that market designs certainly were shifted in the wake of Order 841, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark order that required sort of the mainstreaming of energy storage into how markets work. And yet I think that when you look at current markets right now, you still see very sort of low levels of takeoff in the Eastern markets that have centralized capacity markets. And it’s modest and growing in the central markets like MISO and the Southwest Power Pool, where a lot of those assets are showing up paired and co-located, not as much standalone. In Texas, certainly, I think you’ve seen a massive growth recently. And that should be an important signal for everyone that what’s happening in Texas is that you have now a price point for offering batteries and price signals that are telling folks to show up and invest in capacity, including battery storage, so that it can meet the periods of greatest demand as signaled by market prices.

So ERCOT didn’t change its market to do that, right? It’s always been an energy only market with this kind of a pricing action. It’s changed around the edges. But what happened in Texas and the reason why batteries have taken off there is in part because the cost side of the equation has gotten low enough and investors have really become much more comfortable with merchant risk and the ability to also get potential upside from offering these assets into merchant markets. So, it’s kind of a roving sense of what’s been happening in the markets. But I think to sort of bring it all back together, you’ve always had to have some element of working on improving or updating market rules, market designs, regulations, because we still have a long way to go in this industry to really fully utilize the capabilities that energy storage has to offer.

Wes Ashworth (12:33)

Yeah, without a doubt. And something you briefly touched on there were some of the challenges around deploying standalone battery storage projects. What are some of those biggest hurdles you’ve encountered right now, whether regulatory or technical?

Jason Burwen (12:45)

For standalone storage, it’s a different thing than when you pair it with generation at the same site. When you pair it with generation at the same site, it’s basically still generation with some greater degree of dispatchability. It doesn’t need necessarily a whole lot more complexity around it. Although we can talk about how it will get more complex. For standalone storage, because it’s not a generator, you are going to be withdrawing energy off the grid and then resupplying it. You know, at the outset, there are some grid operators for whom they see this is certainly valuable because they have grids that have periods of excess energy, and it will be really important to have that energy on hand when it’s more valuable. Certainly, grids with large amounts of solar in them. The grid operators there see extraordinary value in doing this.

There are other good operators though, particularly grids that don’t necessarily have a lot of that sort of excess energy laying around for whom they see that charging as being something that’s a complicating factor, right? Because prior to storage, you have load, which takes energy in, and you have generators which sends energy out and never think how those meet. And battery storage looks like both of those in one resource, right?

And so the way in which you look at the charging behavior of storage is really a big part of how a lot of grid operators are thinking about storage, shaping rules around storage, and will ultimately affect the ability to deploy storage at scale in those regions where, for example, the rules are made much more stringent or unworkable in ways that have not been the case, for example, in the first markets, California and Texas, where battery storage has taken off.

That’s one issue. Another issue that I think folks think about is capacity accreditation, which is kind of a wonky term, but it basically means how much reliability value do you get credit for when you offer that resource. Grid operators have to show a stack of resources that meet the sort of amount they need to show in order to be certified as having enough resources to keep the system reliable, resource adequacy. And what happens with storage is that its value for supplying reliability really is largely reflective of the supply mix and the load profile of the grid. It’s not one thing, it’s responsive and adaptive to that, right?

And so, as a result, the capacity accreditation of storage can move around a bit. And what we’re seeing is that as grid operators move to, there’s this modeling approach called effective load carrying capability or ELCC. It’s a dynamic measure that can change over time of the capacity contribution of energy storage resources. And I think that one of the challenges ahead is that for standalone storage, that value can change or decline with significant amounts of batteries or storage coming into the grid fairly quickly. It can also go up. I mean, this is one of the things, right, is that you add a lot more, for example, solar to a power system, the value of that storage for supplying, for being a part of the resource adequacy mix goes up. So, it’s not a single dimension here, but that change is something that’s challenging to plan around for sure as you think about, for example, whether it’s long-term contracts for the offtake of that resource or just the ability to understand what its future value might be. I think a lot of folks are responding to that, whether it’s through different deal structures or starting to think about what kind of durations they need to deploy in order to be more future proof.

Wes Ashworth (16:37)

Yeah, sticking on just storage and what’s happening today. I know there are a lot of challenges and hurdles and all of those things. Are there any recent breakthroughs or success stories you’d like to share what gives you hope or excites you about the current direction of the industry?

Jason Burwen (16:51)

I mean, the fact that we just put 10 gigs down this past year or over, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but in 2024, more gigawatts of battery storage were deployed than wind or natural gas power plants. It’s like to me, that is an incredible sign of success. And the challenges that I discussed, these are the challenges of success, right? Like these are good problems to have in a certain way.

So don’t interpret these challenges as things are bad. It’s just much more a sense that the continued expansion of the industry, it’s one thing when you’re a young upstart, gonna prove to the world that you really are valuable. Yeah, we did that. Now we’ve joined the adults table as it were, right? We’re no longer at the kids table and like, there are gonna be growing pains that come along with that. But I think the fact that we’ve gotten there, and we’ve gotten there really fast and that it’s been something that continues to have broad support, both politically and the stakeholder interest in terms of power sector stakeholders, to me is a continuing sense of motivation to work on these issues, right? This is not something that is like, “let’s put it to the side because no one cares about it.” I think this is really critical to the future of power systems everywhere still.

Wes Ashworth (18:15)

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And what I do want to take a little bit of time just address some misconceptions because they come up. There are lot of misconceptions out there about battery storage. What’s a common one I guess you encounter? How do you usually address it? For example, whether it’s concerns about whether four-hour batteries are reliable enough or any other thing that you come across.

Jason Burwen (18:34)

So indeed, it’s very obvious what the greatest constraint of a battery is, which is it runs out of power at some point, right? Or it runs out of energy. I know someone out there is gonna ding me for saying, you can’t run out of power, you run out of energy. So, to the pedantic people watching, don’t worry, I heard you. I would say that that’s probably one of the most common concerns particularly from policymakers, which is how why would I rely on a four-hour battery? I might have a longer outage and the answer that we have to sort of educate with is well, that’s you can think of that, but that’s why we have power system planning. That’s why we have whole sort of processes Whether it’s a part of integrated resource planning or other kinds of system planning models where what you do is you analytically go through and create scenarios based on the known mix of resources that you have under different stresses.

And analytically, what you derive from that is an effective valuation of different durations. And when you do that, you realize, yeah, like four-hour batteries are very valuable in most grids today because that’s all you really need from them in reference to the rest of the supply mix that they are a part of to provide reliability. Can it change over time? 100%. It can change over time. It will change over time. And the good news there also is that we’re already beginning to see folks building longer and longer durations. I think you’re seeing six- and eight-hour systems now being announced, even if they’re not yet built. But the key thing that I try to educate folks on here is that this is why we do system planning, this is why we run power system modeling. It’s about an analytical approach to a portfolio rather than thinking about, this one thing in a vacuum meets this hypothetical scenario? Like that’s not how we plan our power systems.

Wes Ashworth (20:34)

Great point. The other thing, there are some studies out there or articles out there claiming that battery storage can increase carbon emissions under certain circumstances. How do you respond to critiques like that? And what do people misunderstand about how storage interacts with the grid?

Jason Burwen (20:55)

Yeah, we get like every six months, someone usually from an academic unit will publish research, storage increases carbon emissions based on my models. And, so again, let us remind folks what these studies are typically finding is one of two things. Number one, battery storage has round trip losses, right? The amount of energy you put in is not the amount of energy that you get out because in this world we obey the laws of thermodynamics. And so, from that alone, an analysis would say, you’re using more energy than you’re delivering. And that loss can have a carbon emission associated with it.

The other thing that these studies will typically find is, know, these batteries might be charging at a time of day when carbon intensive resources are dominating the mix. And then they’re discharging at a time when they’re competing with less carbon intensive resources like charging from let’s say coal in the supply mix and then discharging at times when say gas is on the margin, right? And so, they take sort of these two things together. They’ll also usually show these batteries cycling in ways that are not typically done by market participants, and they’ll come up with an analysis that says this many this much carbon emissions come from these batteries.

And the thing to remember is a few things. One, like the whole round trip efficiency piece, this is known and understood, and I don’t think that that’s in any way controversial. What is important to understand, particularly on the second piece, but it also implicates the first, is that battery storage or energy storage reflects the grid that it’s in. As that grid becomes lower and lower carbon, the battery storage itself will in fact, not only become lower carbon, but it’ll amplify the reductions that are possible in that system, right? As for example, you pull coal out of a system, well, the battery storage is no longer charging off of say, a coal on the margin, it goes to a different resource that is maybe lower carbon, whether that’s gas or renewables. And so, you know, that’s something to bear in mind here is that the whole point of this is that when you look at these models, as you clean up the rest of the supply mix, the battery storage goes from being something that might entail carbon emissions to something that actually contributes to carbon reductions. And that’s the whole point. We don’t live in a static grid. Our grid is evolving and growing more and more decarbonized every year. And so long as that trajectory remains, what batteries are doing is they’re helping to integrate particularly large amounts of wind and solar, but more decarbonized resources.

So, it’s fundamentally a part of the transition pathway to get to those resources. You need to have it on that system and just recognize that over the lifetime of those assets, we will expect them to be net decreases in carbon. I think I can remember, there was an analysis back in 2017 by Eric Hittinger where he did an analysis that showed that, for every, I’m going to mess it up, but basically you only need a small amount of additional new renewables deployed to effectively net out the small amount of carbon that would come from the deployment of those batteries in an existing system with some amount of fossil capacity on it. So don’t worry, we will continue to clean up our grid and that will take care of a lot of the problem with battery storage.

Wes Ashworth (24:34)

Yeah, so well said. Such great points there. Transitioning a little bit to think about the future trends outlook of the industry as we’ve already covered. The energy storage market is growing rapidly and quickly. What do you see coming over the next decade? Are there trends or shifts that the industry should be preparing for?

Jason Burwen (24:53)

You know, I think that over the next decade, okay, a couple of things that occurred to me. First is that we’re going to see some of these technology pathways really succeed or not. So obviously lithium-ion batteries have become the dominant technology and will remain so for some time. They’re highly understood, reliable, perform the way they should. Everyone in the sort of financing and insurance ecosystem is familiar with them. That’s surely the case, at least through the end of this decade and probably into the next. The question that I think is on a lot of folks’ minds is, do we think that there are other technologies, competitor technologies to lithium-ion batteries, things like sodium ion batteries, right, which are now being produced?

At scale probably for the first time in China Will that technology ultimately take off and supplant lithium-ion batteries? There are technologies that are longer durations they not intended to compete with lithium-ion batteries. So, your listeners are probably very familiar with names like Form Energy which is creating a sort of iron air battery.

And there are a lot of other sorts of technologies in the long duration landscape that seek to do sort of multi-day or at least many, many, hours of duration. So, it’ll be interesting to see if those can get a runway and actually take off both technologically proving themselves but also having a business model that can in fact allow them to scale. I think that’s very exciting. I think that, as I mentioned, Texas has now got an enormous amount of batteries on its grid and it’s an energy only market, we are seeing now the arrival of structured offtake in that market because heretofore, like the resource that provided hedges and various kinds of structured offtake were gas plants by and large. And now we have got all these batteries. And so, a lot of retailers and other entities are coming to battery operators saying, you know, can we buy a hedge? Can we do some sort of structured offtake? And that’s going to be a source of some real innovation. And I hope that what we see out of that is a much more track record of performance that allows folks to then use these kinds of mechanisms to continue financing and getting storage built without just doing a full 100% long-term contract, which those are good too, to be clear, but we wanna see a diversity of business models in this industry.

And then, I think that there’s going to be obviously a lot that needs to be done that’s not specific to storage, things like interconnection and siting and permitting and just other matters that affect all of the various power sectors, power sector industries. But the reason a lot of that matters for storage is because right now this is when storage has matured and hitting its stride. And the challenges that we face today in things like interconnection those are gonna disproportionately impact the path of energy storage relative to things like wind and solar, which frankly matured many years earlier and are gonna keep going at whatever speed they’re going at. So, I think that’s something that gives me a little bit of pause is we have a lot of problems to solve right now. And the reason I get animated about them, even if they’re not specific about storage is that this is the moment for energy storage to scale rapidly. And the challenges to that, to the whole power sector become ones that are borne by storage disproportionately.

Wes Ashworth (28:38)

Yeah, without a doubt. And something you touched on, California, Texas being early adopters of battery storage. They’ve also had those unique challenges. And thinking about that, what lessons can other states learn from their experiences, both positive and negative?

Jason Burwen (28:56)

I mean, I think getting batteries onto your system and then getting some experiences with them will make for more thoughtful regulation or market design discussions. You know, there’s a desire to try and sort of think out and solve a lot of things in advance of those assets showing up. And I get that. And in fact, that’s something I think that can be quite useful to do. But it’s also possible to go too far and not have the experience of actually operating those assets and seeing how they work and working with them before trying to figure out, and this is how we’re going to design these rules or processes.

Again, on the issue of charging, for example, that’s a case in point, right? It’s like the grid operators can take on some of that responsibility, figure out how to manage it, and then determine what they need to do rather than try to put rules and roadblocks up very early in the process. I would say also that the experiences of a California and Texas are very divergent. California is a very policy-driven approach where there was a lot of state action to promote the industry. Texas is a very market-driven state where there’s no policy in place really, although there was early work by ERCOT to come up with sort of its own order 841 like sort of set of rules and reforms. I would say that the reason batteries started showing up on Texas’s grid because of prices and having the ability to value and compensate resources for their flexibility that they could provide was what brought a lot of batteries into that system.

So, there’s not one lesson because those are two very divergent pathways. I think the lesson, if anything, is that there’s a lot of different ways to build and operate storage in a way that’s going to make business sense. And we shouldn’t expect that there’s only one way to do this. The other thing I’d also add is that I think that we have some important work to do to continue to educate and make sure that places that don’t necessarily have battery storage yet continue to see why this is a really valuable and important part of the grid. I think that sharing the stories about how batteries help with system resilience have been a part of both not just keeping the lights on as a regular part of resource adequacy, but the other things that they’ve done in terms of helping with reliability and resilience are things that you would expect would be widely valued across the grid. And it’s just important to keep sharing those stories, particularly at a time when I think there’s a lot of rising concern across the United States as more and more resources, not just storage, but really all sorts of power resources are being built at much larger scale. And folks are wondering, why is this coming here? We wanna make sure that there’s an understanding for why battery storage is an important part of the power grid, important part of the system reliability, and something that folks should want to at least have around their region.

Wes Ashworth (32:01)

Yeah, no question. In thinking about too, just something you hit on earlier, which storage technology is always a hot topic, right? It’s always something that I think is always buzzing around now. But sometimes, as you said, getting those innovations to market can be tough, you know, and it is challenging and being a part of the solution, I guess. What are some of the overlooked challenges that new technologies face when trying to break into the market and what are some of the solutions that you’re seeing?

Jason Burwen (32:25)

Yeah, I think that first and foremost, is that it’s hard to compete with the mainstream option right now. That’s lithium-ion batteries. That’s a moving target as well. So, you’re not just competing against the value of it today, but its future value as well. And that’s tough. You have to make sure that you’re able to build a track record of performance so that even if your off-taker has signed an off-take contract with you, you need to be able to get financing. You need to be able to get insurance, have warranties associated with the performance of those assets. And that’s tough. You need the customers to be able to get the track record. You need the track record to be able to get the customers, right? So how do you build that track record outside of like a demonstration or laboratory type of environment is really challenging. And that’s where really close partnerships with, in this case, it’s going to probably be utilities, right? That’s what we’re seeing the sort of, whether it’s form energy. I also know that ESS has created some partnerships with utilities for off take and are presumably working very closely with them to make sure that they get an experience that is not just a science project, but like actually helps create the commercial basis for future sales. Maybe not to that customer, but to other customers, right?

You also have to deal with a financing landscape that I would say that you’re going to have a runway of various sorts, but you’re going to be doing so at a time with a lot of change in ferment and the market you think you’re selling into is probably not the market that you’re going to actually be selling into whatever it is five, 10 years out from now. And so in a certain way, there’s just a lot of challenges with timing, right? There’s been great ideas out there that were too early, and I’m sure there will also be great ideas that are too late. And there’s just a certain degree of luck to this in terms of being at the right part of your technology development and maturation and commercialization when it makes sense to do so and not in a macroeconomic environment or an industry environment, which is very risk averse or where investors are looking at much shorter horizons.

Wes Ashworth (34:37)

Yeah, a few more questions as we get closer to time and I want to cover as much as we can. Just thinking about the industry leaders and policymakers and their ability to just better collaborate and accelerate the clean energy transition. What advice would you offer to those industry leaders or policymakers?

Jason Burwen (34:55)

I’d offer two sets of advice because if you’re an industry person I’d say, this industry is driven by policy, and you need to be able to engage with it effectively. You know, it’s not simply a matter of showing up to advocate this is what I want. It’s also a matter of like being there day after day, year after year, working through the tough issues that whether it’s grid operator like at an RTO or ISO or a state regulator is dealing with the old adage that relationships drive politics is true in a lot of ways.

And that’s an important part for anyone who’s trying to drive for the clean energy transition. You just can’t parachute in and out. You have to be there for the longer haul and create those relationships. And then from the policymaker side, there’s an enormous amount of value to economic transition here where we are building projects and industries that can provide enormous, not just like immediate impacts to the power sector, but can also whether it’s employing folks obviously in skilled trades, whether it’s creating know-how that can then go on to build a future companies in the same or adjacent spaces. Like there’s a reason why the United States has been so economically successful for so long, and it’s about embracing the technologies of the future and putting in the investments, private and public, to make sure that the US is where we continue to create a lot of value in those industries and sectors.

And this is no different. Clean energy, we could call it clean, but a large part of clean energy is also energy that’s produced here. And you don’t have to rely on it coming from somewhere else, right? So, I think that that’s just something that I hope becomes a greater part of the conversation here. There’s a lot of economic growth and domestic reliability that you get from really leaning hard into the energy transition here.

Wes Ashworth (36:59)

Yeah, that’s so good. Final question. Any just final thoughts, key messages you’d like to share with our audience, anything we missed, whether it’s about the future of energy storage or otherwise.

Jason Burwen (37:10)

I encourage folks to really, if you’re not already up on what’s happening in battery storage, to really pay close attention here because this is such a fast growing and fast-moving industry. There’s a lot of good stuff to do out there, but I’m always grateful when really smart and motivated people show up in the battery storage industry, having come from other places and

I don’t know who’s listening to your podcast right now, but if you’re coming from an adjacent space, finding your way into this exciting sector is something that I certainly encourage you to do because we need you. We need all these great folks, whether you’re coming from renewables, whether you’re coming from gas or other field power sources, whether you’re coming from outside the power system and you’re in software and you’re doing algorithms or AI, like all of that makes a lot of sense in this space, there’s a place for you here.

Wes Ashworth (38:05)

I love that. Just great, great closing thoughts there. And I couldn’t agree more. Something I’m personally very, very passionate about is us trying to draw that the best talent from other industries in. And I think we need all of those individuals and talented individuals to make this work. So, I love that. So with that, it brings us to the end of today’s conversation with Jason Burwen, VP of Policy and Strategy at GridStor. Jason, thanks so much for sharing your deep insights on energy storage, policy, and the future grid resilience.

To our listeners, as always, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, share it with your network, and stay tuned for more discussions with the innovators shaping the clean energy transition. And with that, we’ll see you soon.