Aaron talks with Vaughan Woodruff, the founder of Equinox DG. Vaughan’s an interconnection expert, industry veteran, and “muck shoveler” who tackles bureaucratic and technical hurdles that no one else wants to take on. If you’ve ever wondered why we haven’t connected way more solar to the grid, this one’s for you. Listen to this episode here, or on: * YouTube * Apple Podcasts * Spotify Connect with Vaughan on LinkedIn here. Expect to learn: * Why connecting solar to the grid has become a nightmare (13 states still don’t even regulate the process). * How a federal mandate 20 years ago led to 39 different sets of state rules. Quotes from the episode: “We used to use libraries. We went to the library to get information and then we downloaded it. We now are seeing our kids learn off the internet where they are uploading things and downloading things. That’s what’s happening on the grid.” — Vaughan Woodruff “If we do this right, what I think this does is really enhances people’s control over their own economic and political lives... it’s about getting that power back into the hands of people.” — Vaughan Woodruff Transcript: Aaron Nichols: Vaughan, you’re probably one of the only interconnection experts I know. You’re definitely the only public-facing interconnection expert I know. And for anyone listening who’s unfamiliar, can you just give a quick definition of interconnection and then give a high-level overview of the problems we’re facing as an industry? Vaughan Woodruff: Well, first off, you’re living the good life if you can keep us at arm’s length. That’s great. Interconnection is the process the utility uses in order to make sure that anything that it connects to its grid is safe. This happens at the transmission level for big utility scale projects. The stuff I focus on is really on the distribution system—so everything ranging from small residential projects up to say community solar scale projects. And so the interconnection process is typically, you know, a customer or someone acting on behalf of that customer applies to the utility. The utility goes through a set of procedures to check whether things are okay. And then it either gives the thumbs up or thumbs down or a thumbs up and says, “Hey, it’s going to cost this much money to upgrade the grid in order to be able to accommodate your project.” And the big piece that I focus on is how we regulate utilities for that because they’re monopoly utilities and really regulating them is how we make sure that we’re serving the public interest. Aaron Nichols: Okay, awesome. Will you give just a general overview of who you are in the solar industry and what your day-to-day life looks like at Equinox DG? Vaughan Woodruff: Yeah, I don’t know what I am in the industry. I’m a little bit of a vagabond. I started out in this industry like 20 years ago when it was largely a plumbing and heating industry. We were doing solar water heating at that time. And over the years as PV got more inexpensive and more affordable, it largely converted into an electrical contracting world. I started a company that started in solar water heating, moved into electrification—so solar PV, energy storage, heat pumps, as well as EV charging. Man, it’s been so long, I sometimes can’t remember. I did that for roughly 12 years with the founder and ran the company. And then we merged with a larger national, multi-state company up here in the Northeast. I’m originally from Maine, where I live now. I have always kind of jumped between local work here in Maine—Maine’s a nice small state, a lot of connections here. I was the chair of the industry trade group through a pretty tumultuous gubernatorial administration here, so really worked to kind of build coalitions, both within the industry and with other advocates, and even with utilities and commissioners. Most recently, I’ve really focused on interconnection. It’s an issue that really impacts our ability to deploy solar, energy storage, and EVs that are able to backfeed to the grid at scale. It’s a really complicated and bureaucratic process. For some reason in my life, I always pick the things that nobody likes to do. Aaron Nichols: You’re a muck shoveler. Vaughan Woodruff: Yes, exactly. Beating your head against the wall. Because at the end of the day, it’s impact, right? There’s not a lot of glory in it, but it’s absolutely important. Interconnection is just really important to have folks in the weeds doing this stuff who understand how it works and can help bring coalitions together to drive change. I’m trying to do that, but we’ll see. My success will be measured probably as I’m sitting in my rocking chair late in life reflecting back. Aaron Nichols: Well, for everyone who’s listening, welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. My guest today is Vaughan Woodruff, who’s an interconnection expert and industry veteran, as you heard. It was lovely to hear you say the thing about the rocking chair. I talk about that all the time. I believe that if I spend my life putting my energy towards deploying as much clean energy as I possibly can, I’ll be able to look back at the end of it and say that I had lived a good life and that it mattered. Vaughan Woodruff: Well, I saw you post about a grandfather who kind of gave you an earful. I had a grandfather who sat in that rocking chair. I think we probably had some examples there for us to think about as we have a chance to think about life in its full breadth. Aaron Nichols: Yeah, absolutely man. So would you give just a general high-level overview of the problems we’re facing related to interconnection as a country and why it’s become such like a tangled messy ball of string? Vaughan Woodruff: Yeah, the answer to that question largely dates back 20 years ago. In the mid-2000s, the Feds made it very clear that this was a state responsibility to regulate. There was actually a bill that got passed, the Energy Act in 2005, that said essentially every state within the next couple of years should put together interconnection rules. At that point, a lot of states only had regulations on the books having to do with big utility-scale stuff where you have to do engineering studies for every single one of them. If you read the Energy Act—I won’t do it here because I want your listeners to stay engaged... it basically says you need to do this, every state you need to do this. And then at the end, if you look very carefully, it was an optional thing for the states to do because of “states’ rights.” What ended up happening from there were essentially maybe 39 different routes that states took. This process is essentially the same everywhere: you have a customer applying, the utility needs to assess the project and its grid to evaluate if it can be okayed in a few days or needs a big detailed study on the physics to figure out whether it’s safe. We have 37 different sets of rules and 13 states that don’t even regulate it—they just leave it up to the utilities. So at that point, it’s just whatever the utility feels like. A big part of this is really about having consistent, enforceable rules. We don’t have that. It makes it really, really complex. Aaron Nichols: Right. Yeah. I know that people in the industry love to talk about interconnection in Australia and how simple it is... How do we get somewhere to something like that as a country? How do we get the incentives right to make sure that we build a better system? Vaughan Woodruff: One of the challenges is that utilities in this country are incentivized to be conservative. Safety and reliability doesn’t benefit from taking lots of chances. You take chances and the grid goes down—that could be life and death. It’s bureaucratic. When new technologies like distributed energy resources come in, it butts heads against utility practices. Oftentimes the solutions actually benefit both. I was involved last year in a proceeding in New Hampshire where the utilities were initially very reluctant to look at IREC’s model. But after months of digging in, it became clear that good, strong, clear policies benefit the utilities and their staff as well. Number one, we need uniformity—some sort of underpinning foundation that’s roughly the same. In Australia, they have very high penetration rates and there’s a lot of innovation going on. I think at the end of the day, that diversity in the United States is wonderful but also challenging when it comes to scaling and standardization. Aaron Nichols: So if I’m hearing you right, it seems like the utilities have been regional monopolies forever and have been incentivized to move very, very slowly... Is that about right? Vaughan Woodruff: The paradigm has shifted. I like to think about it—we used to be libraries. We went to the library to get information and then we downloaded it. We now are seeing our kids learn off the internet where they are uploading things and downloading things. That’s what’s happening on the grid. People are now able to upload their energy and be generators and producers. That’s complicated. Now we’re expecting to see increasing amounts of renewable energy on the grid owned by a bunch of different people. States are grappling with how the utility model fundamentally changes. It used to be safety, reliability, and affordable costs. A lot of states are now saying there’s a fourth leg to that stool, which is decarbonization. Aaron Nichols: It is such an interesting problem. I think when I was reading Gretchen Bakke’s book, The Grid, she was talking about how we insist on talking about electricity as if it’s a commodity like boxes of bananas, but it’s not. It’s instantaneous. Vaughan Woodruff: Agreed. The grid is a really complicated thing. What we
