Taking Charge: Can Battery Energy Storage Systems Unlock the Full Potential of Renewable Energy?

Renewable energy can be intermittent, making it a challenging power source for power grid operators to manage. But the burgeoning technology of battery energy storage systems (BESS) is poised to help fill those critical gaps. BESS is expected to quintuple in capacity by the end of this decade. These systems play a crucial role in the renewable energy life cycle, ensuring a stable supply of electricity to customers, data centers, the national grid, and energy needs worldwide. But the installation costs for some large-scale systems are high, along with a number of maintenance and environmental issues to consider. 

In the fourth episode of Accelerating Energy, Pat Wood, CEO of Hunt Energy Network, a developer and operator of distributed energy resources in Texas, talks with host and Sidley partner, Ken Irvin. Pat, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under President George W. Bush and of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, discusses what’s in store for battery energy storage systems and how industry stakeholders can offset the barriers to their wider use. 

Transcript

Potential of Renewable Energy?
Ken Irvin and Pat Wood
November 2024

Ken Irvin: Thanks for joining us for today’s episode of Accelerating Energy.
I speak with Pat Wood, the CEO of Hunt Energy Network, on the topic of battery energy storage systems and the crucial role they play in the transition to renewable energy.

Before we start, I wanted to let you know that just after we recorded on Friday, November 1, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came out with a surprise ruling.

The Commission, on a two to one vote, with republicans in the majority, rejected a request to increase the amount of load that a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant could provide to a neighboring data center.

The Commission said the increase in power for this single customer could lead to higher costs for consumers and impact the gird’s reliability.
The issue of these interconnection service agreements is just one of the issues that I discussed with Pat.

I think you’ll find his comments, that come from his decades of experience, provide some keen insights into the potential of energy storage for the grid.
Hope you enjoy the podcast.
………………………………..

Ken Irvin:
Renewal energy can be intermittent, making it a challenging power source for power grid operators to manage, but the burgeoning technology of battery energy storage systems, or BESS, is poised to help fill those critical gaps. BESS is expected to quintuple in capacity by the end of this decade. These systems play a crucial role in the renewable energy lifecycle, ensuring a stable supply of electricity to customers, data centers, the national grid, and energy needs worldwide.

Pat Wood:
The one thing that we didn’t have until about 2018 was the ability to store it and so that’s where I do think batteries are big enablers for a greater expansion of these low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies to really proliferate.

Ken Irvin:
That’s Pat Wood, CEO of Hunt Energy Network, a Dallas-based developer and operator of distributed energy resources in Texas. He is also a past chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under President George W. Bush and before that chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas under then Governor George Bush. What’s in store for BESS, and how can industry stakeholders offset the barriers to their wider use? We’ll find out in today’s podcast.

This is Accelerating Energy, the podcast from the international law firm, Sidley Austin. We help clients and businesses better understand energy policy changes, and see over the horizon. We drill down on critical and late breaking energy transition topics from all corners of the industry. I’m your host Ken Irvin.

Hello, and welcome to Sidley’s Accelerating Energy Podcast, episode number four. Pat, it’s great to have you here with us today. Thanks for joining us as we continue to shine a light on energy transition in 2024 and beyond.

Pat Wood:
Great to be here with you, Ken, looking forward to our visit today.

Ken Irvin:
Before we dive in, a bit more, Pat, if you would about your role, your company. Hunt Energy Network, as I understand it, uses a proprietary platform to locally balance generation and load while maximizing asset returns within its network for the benefit of owners and customers of clean energy technology.

Pat Wood:
When you and I met at the Energy Training Institute a couple of months ago in your office there in D.C., I was really struck by how much is going on across the country and in all the different power markets. I’ve been so focused on ERCOT markets since I left FERC, and you know it’s occasionally very helpful to pop up and look over the transom and see what’s going on, but this energy storage idea is something that’s new.

When I was at FERC, we regulated the gas industry. They had these wonderful underground storage facilities that put the gas in there in the summer usually, and they took it out in the winter when the demand was really high, particularly up in the north, but we never had that in the power side. When we were restructuring the power industry, gosh, if we had storage and had been able to break that tyranny of generation and consumption, and put it into this storage and let it sit awhile, oh, that would’ve been such an awesome tool to have. But it’s here now, and so that’s what we’re doing.

But at Hunt we’re trying to optimize the distributed network, so we’re pushing our batteries out toward the distribution system. I’ve now got 29 batteries on the Texas power grid, and they’re attached at the substations of the utilities, so that they feed not only the ERCOT transmission grid, but feed the individual distribution grids as well, so that’s where we’re starting.

We’re also looking at thermal peakers. We’ve got four of those underway as well, and then we also are very active with a number of customers across the state with behind-the-meter generation that they want to optimize and have be a contributor to our state’s reliability. Because, as you may remember, we had really bad episode back in 2021 where a lot of those assets were not available to the market, so we’re going to fix that.

Ken Irvin:
The technological advantage of having battery storage plugged into the wholesale power market or even at the distribution level is a pretty amazing advancement. It opens up a lot of possibilities. I was recently at the WSPP Conference talking about data centers and AI and the load that is going to bring to the market, and batteries play an important role there, and the peakers that you talk about play an important role there.


Pat Wood:
Yeah, I just think the grid of the future is going to be certainly in the Sun Belt where you’ve got good resources like we do in Texas, with wind and the solar, and we’re going to have a renaissance on nuclear probably coming as well, so those three are carbon-free resources. Those combined with natural gas, in our case diesel, as we do have some diesel peakers we’re looking at as well, that combination of assets is really where the world is going.

And so the one thing that we didn’t have until about 2018 was the ability to store it, and so that’s where I do think batteries are big enablers for a greater expansion of these low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies to really proliferate. You know, the nice thing is, Ken, is that wind and solar are the lowest cost ways to generate electricity with or without the subsidy. So, let’s just get these subsidies over with and let everything compete on the merits.

Ken Irvin:
Well, you kind of anticipated my next question about the Inflation Reduction Act and those tax credits. We see people doing a lot of solar right now, trying to earn the ITC and take advantage of what all that offers. There’s a lot of tax credit there.

Pat Wood:
Well, it’s been around since probably when I was on the Public Utility Commission, so think late ‘90s is when the PTC for wind and ITC for solar were introduced. They might’ve been around before that, but that’s when I started to notice them, and they were on a path, I think, in the late 20 teens to go, to kind of go down, and then the IRA put that up and kind of held that for another 10 years. And when you look at the yawning size of the national deficit, this is probably a trivial part of it, but it does distort energy markets.

I mean, I’m kind of a big economics guy, and so we’ve got to make sure that what we’ve got out in the market really is sending the correct economic price signal. So, when you’ve got a resource that gets another 20 dollars or 30 dollars a megawatt hour if it produces, it has a different incentive than a resource that doesn’t have that. So, I think the PTC is probably the most interesting one in the energy markets because it’s on the units derived or the units that are sold by the wind farm.

An investment tax credit just makes the CapEx or the building of it cheaper. I don’t know if that has the same kind of daily distortion that a volumetric tax credit that is on the wind seems to have. So, I know that sounds like a nerdy thing to say, but you know the way you give a credit does matter, and so that’s kind of got us where we are. But anyway, whether it’s here nor there, they eventually go away, and so batteries are a great enabler for these two really low-cost resources to really be more useful to the grid.

Like, for example, we charge it in the morning. It used to be we, I mean, really just really four years ago, Ken, before solar came into Texas, we would charge at night when the wind was blowing really hard and sometimes that price would be negative. The wind farm would actually pay me 10 dollars a megawatt hour to fill up my battery. It’s like, great. But then he’s getting another 13 from Uncle Sam for the balance of the tax credit, so it’s like, oh, okay that’s where that came from. So, that was a little odd and remains odd.

But for the most part we’ve got solar coming out now. We’ve got now 25 gigawatts of solar up from zero before COVID, so that’s a dramatic change. So, we fill up our batteries now between 9 and 12 in the morning. So, we’ll run our batteries through the sunset and then keep them open through the night, keep them empty, and then fill them back up in the daytime. Now, that will probably change in the winter. We’re learning a lot. Every season is kind of a fresh new deal, but we’re learning a lot from operating these batteries every day. But that’s one that has been the most intriguing to me is when is power really the cheapest? And it’s no longer the middle of the night … it’s in the middle of the day.

Ken Irvin:
It’s interesting to hear you say that the prices are lowest in ERCOT in the morning and that’s when you charge your battery. Out west in California, I think that phenomenon appears to occur in the afternoon, but you know each market would be different, and definitely where the sun is shining there is a period of time where prices are very low and solar is fully cranking away. I know in some markets there are actual solar curtailments that the total supply of generation is more than the demand and so things have to be curtailed.


And interestingly enough, solar gets clipped because its cost of production isn’t much. So, having more batteries, it’d be terrific just to take advantage of that, right? Like, you have actual excess supply of energy, you can soak it into a battery and use it later in the night when people are cooking, and doing TV, homework, and laundry, whatever those things are that drives electricity demand.

Pat Wood:
I agree. You know, again, those two hours when the sun goes down are really when our batteries make their money, probably 90 percent of our revenues come in those two hours. Now, those two hours are going to change this Sunday when we go to daylight savings time, and we fall off a bit, and the days get shorter. So, that two-hour period can slide quite a bit through the year from ending at 9 o’clock to ending a 7 o’clock. But at any event, those are when a battery is most useful.

You would think it work proportionately in the morning, but because morning loads are just not that high. Now, again, we’re going to probably experiment with that a little bit this winter because in the winter mornings it’s cold, people turn on the coffeepot, they warm up the house, they do whatever uses electricity, so you kind of have a two-spike day. I’ll see if the batteries kind of change what they were from last year, but what we’re finding that’s so fascinating from our algorithm side, our platform side is, as they say in the stock market, past performance is no indication of future.

It is totally that way with regard to storage in ERCOT these days because what happened last year has very little impact on this year. So, all the great data scientist people are sitting there scratching their head going, “Well, I’ve got all this data from last year.” And I’m like “it’s useless” because we didn’t have 25 gigawatts of solar back then and now we do, and we’re going up to 50 in the next three years. It’s like, good gosh, what’s that going to do to everything? But it’s been a great rollercoaster ride, I’ll tell you that.

Ken Irvin:
It seems like with data centers and artificial intelligence that rollercoaster just got extended or the volatility, the newness of what the market looks like, is thrust upon us here. Data centers are like a big chunk of the resource issues that we’re dealing with, and they continue to want to have access to power 24/7 or even really kind of less concerned about emissions-free versus just reliable electricity. So, interest in dispatchable resources like those natural gas peakers you talk about.

Pat Wood:
I agree. I think the data, it’s been fascinating to think that really since I’ve been in the business, my whole professional career, the demand for electricity has been largely flat. We did a lot of gains for energy efficiency, I think, in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s as we got new light bulbs, and insulation, and better appliances, and all that. So, even though the economy was growing and people were having children and all that we were still pretty flat on power demand. But starting to kind of rebound from COVID, and I think it’s not just in Texas but everywhere, is this spiral upwards because I think we’ve kind of internalized the one-time efficiency gains.

We’ve got electric vehicles now becoming more and more pervasive. The uses for data, for AI, cryptocurrency, just as you pointed out, Ken, are just as hungry as they can be. The reshoring of manufacturing, which I think started under Trump, now accelerated under Biden in the laws that were passed, I mean, that’s all screaming for just more and more power. And I’m kind of an evangelist for infrastructure and have been for a long time, but we have got to be building yesterday, everything, because we’ve got a lot of hungry customers that need power.

And you know if the country wants to stay at the forefront, and god knows we do, we’ve got to be able to meet that need. And I think we’ve got a pretty strong culture now that we want that to be met cleanly. As a Texan, I happen to think gas is pretty clean, certainly when you compare it to oil or compare it to coal, and I think the technologies to decarbonize or to at least clean up the gas effluent are going to be successful. I mean, technology has saved us every other time and it’s going to save us this time too.

I’m not one of those people that think we don’t need to be mindful of cleaning all this up. In fact, I think, like I said earlier, I think Texas is going to probably show the way on this front because we’ve had to do it. We just don’t kind of worship at the high altar of climate science, but we can get there because the economics are really good. I mean, our rates for our customers went down when we hooked up all that wind and solar because it’s free.


Ken Irvin:
And it shows with, you know, the number of data centers, number of tech companies relocating to Texas, right, like, people are attracted to that. They’re attracted to the market design for that. It is interesting to hear about data centers and trying to manage the resource planning, the forecasting. There are people out there saying data centers alone are going to double the demand for electricity, and you’re right about other electrification.

One of our guests was talking about electric trucks and I know that there’s a lot of states that are amenable to requiring electrification of trucking, and there’s electrification of space heating and other things that drive electricity demand. So, having more resources, batteries and other resources, seems important and Texas, I think, is doing a good job of helping that out, the other markets are as well.

Pat Wood:
Yeah, and I do think, it’s funny because I’ve traveled a lot these last couple of months, but the data usage issue for electricity is really the dominant discussion item everywhere. And you know it’s become pretty clear to me that the data customers … they didn’t get that big and valuable for just playing around. They’re playing a good game as they’re putting the states against each other, so it’s a beauty contest between Virginia, Texas, and some of the southern states, and some of the western states, as to where all this is going to go.

And so, I was on a panel in Texas the other day with former utility commissioners, and I said let me just ask a threshold question, because you know these aren’t necessarily bringing a lot of jobs and they’re not doing any of the other kind of great things we generally think when we’re relocating businesses to our state: “Is this a race we want to compete in?” And to a person, all five of those former commissioners here said, “Absolutely, that’s what we do.” And I thought, well, that’s pretty good because it’s kind of a diverse panel of commissioners, let them speak for the state. But it was a nice, for me, sampling of people that over the generations have done the job that I did and said, you know, “That’s what we want to do.”


And I think some of these other states, I mean, clearly the state of Virginia in that regard, and they’re doubling down on wanting to meet that load. I know the FERC’s dealing with some tariff issues related to this. The big picture answer to this and all this new load coming in, Ken, I think is if you come in, and actually people are hearing this from the Texas grid operator and from the chairman of the commission, we want you here, bring your generation with you when you come. Now, whether that’s 24/7 generation is one thing, chances are, I mean, I tend to think, use the grid as much as you can, but when the price gets high go to a backup generator.

So, have either, you know, a diesel or a natural gas backup generator that you would use, hopefully relatively seldom, but have it there for when the grid gets tight and the prices go up, and then you can be a real asset to the grid. And then otherwise you can take advantage of that increasingly carbon-free electricity that we’re starting to see a lot more of here. So, that’s how you do the win-win.

Ken Irvin:
Well, let me shift topics on you because I think there are some hurdles to that win-win, right? Like interconnection, and I know you’re familiar with generation interconnection from your time in government. Now we have demand, we have load interconnection issues too. So, if you’re going to bring your own data center and bring your own generation that’s two different interconnection studies, right? Or at least a part A and a part B of the same interconnection study. So do you think interconnection is still a big obstacle? Are there ways to improve that?

Pat Wood:
Well it’s a good point because I think we’ve focused my whole career on generation interconnection. Again, like I said, load has been pretty flat, but now load is coming in, we’re seeing this, when we’re having delays getting our small batteries interconnected it’s because a crypto guy is right next to me and they’re busy trying to run the wires out to him. And it’s like, well, oh there’s no queue, there’s no kind of protocol. Because I thought I had fixed all this stuff from now on from my time when I was at the PUC and then when I went to FERC we did the standardized generation interconnected. Of course, it just proves the hubris of a young buck like me at the time, which is it won’t last.

Ken Irvin:
We’re still using the LGIA. That’s still how we do it.

Pat Wood:
Well, I’ve got the initials right, but it hasn’t grown with time like a good teenager should. So, I don’t know, I think I’ve spent some time with both sets of commissioners here in Texas and at the FED saying all this stuff we did worked for our time, but don’t feel like it’s religion, that you can’t touch it. I mean, make it better for the current time, and you know, I think they’re trying to do that. But I do like the way that we interconnect generation in Texas, and I think we ought to do load the same way, which is we’ll hook you up now, but you’re going to have a kind of subgrade service until we get the infrastructure balanced.

So, as for generator, it’s called connect and manage. It’s connect it now and you’re going to probably be curtailed to wind farm, you know, 10 or 15 days of the year. There may be big days for you, sorry, but we’ll get that transmission grid beefed up over the next three to four years through our normal transmission upgrade process, which is what works pretty well down here. I just found that generators would rather be in the game sitting in the back seat than not in the car at all, and so I think perhaps load could be the same way.

It’s like, hey, data center we can get a 100 megawatts in you now, but it’s just going to take a while to get you up to the 500 you want. Why don’t you get on in here? And then, you know, I think that’s, that’s not kind of too out of the mean. I mean, it is I guess if you work at a restaurant where you want to have the final meal prepared and give somebody the beautiful plate of the plated food, but when you’re hungry I just wouldn’t mind bring it out from the kitchen when you’ve got it ready. I want the beans now. I want the salad now. If the meat takes a little longer, I’ll get the meat when you get around to it.

But I don’t know, I think maybe that approach could be one to consider, that we set customer expectations differently than we do now and then it’s also easier on the utility to not have to hit perfection before they interconnect.

Ken Irvin:
Some folks, as you know, are answering this issue by trying to colocate data centers with power plants. Your old shop, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is hosting a tech conference about that trying to give some leadership there. If you were at the FERC right now, what would you be asking of industry to tell you about colocating data and what are your concerns about that with colocating electricity and data, electricity and load at the same generation station?

Pat Wood:
There are two conflicting things. One is that’s generation that’s been dedicated to the market for a generation or two. And so if you’re going to kind of privatize that and pull that off the grid that’s not good for the grid. But then the libertarian side of me is like, well, it’s that generation owner’s property to do what he wants. So, if he wants to do that, have an exclusive, okay. So, I don’t know, I’m really, that one is a great one.

Again, I think if you kind of get an overarching policy, like the one I’ve heard down here, which is bring your generation with you, I think it is as much a play to cut around the generation queue, up in Pennsylvania in the FERC-regulated. Because of the amount of time it’s going to take to get interconnected, as it is some desire to pull that power off the grid and be selfish with it.

So, I do think if you fix the interconnection issues along the lines I suggest, connect and manage for both load and gen, you might reduce that incentive to do things that, I think really all of us would acknowledge, we want the grid to work for everybody. We don’t want kind of a first-class section and a section in the back. We want it to be good for everybody. And I think, yeah, so I think I’d say that, fix the interconnection issue and you might have to turn down that colocation thing to not look so important. Because we aren’t hearing a lot of the colocation requests down here in Texas because you can hooked up pretty simple.

Ken Irvin:
That’s interesting. You know, being able to interconnect and get your service faster maybe obviates the need to bother with colocation.

Pat Wood:
And I was told by someone that it’s not just, they said Pat, it’s not that simple it’s deeper than that. And I said, well, I like to start with what’s dumb and simple first and if you fix that then it’d the other stuff kind of shakes out, so we’ll see. But I know they’re having a hearing, I think, on that just today aren’t they, Ken, over at the commission?

Ken Irvin:
Well, yeah, it’s November 1 for our recording today and there’s a tech conference. This will get aired in the near future, but yes hopefully a successful tech conference for Chairman Phillips and his colleagues. Since we’re reminiscing about your fond memories of Washington, DC, and since its November 1, let me ask you given your experience in government, given your experience in the energy industry, do you have a view about how the commission is doing on FERC Order 1920? How the commission is doing on trying to incentivize more transmission development while balancing that federal and state divide that is the electricity market?

Pat Wood:
I think you’ll notice as part of my business plan we’re actually focusing on the distribution grid because that’s the unexplored territory. It’s also kind of a view that it’s going to be pretty hard, maybe not down here in the more open states that have a lot of land, but I think it’s going to be hard to build a whole lot more transmission. Certainly, the great big national backbone stuff that we’ve all dreamed about, and I’ve been one of them, from coast to coast, that would kind of be this great resiliency asset for the whole country.

But I do sense that we could utilize, that’s a valuable real estate, the ones that are the easements for the current transmission towers. And I just look at those as I drive around the country, and I just think, man, do we have the most efficient use of the powers, the poles and wires on that piece of real estate that we’ve got? And I know, and everybody tells me, absolutely not. There’s so much more technology we can put in that existing right-of-way.

You know, if you take that condemnation of land issue off the table and say, hey, we’re going to use the same right-of-way, or maybe we have to inch it out a little bit perhaps, like it’s hard to, but the same right-of-way for a much more larger capacity transfer power or whatever, but that’s going to be, I think, the lowest hanging fruit. And I don’t hear a lot of talking about that, Ken, and I don’t know why. Because I was exposed to all those technologies back when I was on FERC, and that’s been 15 years.

So, I would hope that we could use the existing right-of-way to get a lot done on strengthening the backbone of the national grid. So, I’ll say that.

And then I think the NIMBY issues aren’t going to get any easier as we get older or as the country gets older. I think there will be times when we can opportunistically get a new right-of-way for a power corridor, or that we can underground if we do DC, if we do more direct current. It’s a lot easier to put that in the ground than AC, which needs to be above the ground, or at least with some restrictions, but it has to be above the ground for most of the time.

But DC we looked at, I mean, I was with a development, and we tried to do something after I left FERC alongside a rail line into Los Angeles to bring some renewable energy from New Mexico into Los Angeles, and found that under the rail right-of-way was a great place to do that. And the technology works, so if you do direct current, again, that’s just one of the vagaries of physics that, that one could work. But you know all these are little one-off, but quite frankly there’s not really a mega plan that’s going to work on transmission.

It’s going to be a lot of creative, new one-offs that connect good resource to load and you know a lot of that resource going forward is probably going to be wind and solar from the center and the southwest of the country going to somewhere else on the big grid.

Ken Irvin:
Technology like dynamic line rating and reconductoring with the new technologies and carbon fiber. It definitely adds to all the enhancements that you’re describing and I think FERC is trying to incentivize that. I think the IRA is trying to incentivize those things too.

Pat Wood:
Yep, I agree with that.

Ken Irvin:
Which brings me to sort of the big looming question in our discussion today is the Presidential election. You know, November 5, a few days from now, is voting day. Many folks, maybe everyone, expects the outcome of this election to have an impact on energy. What do you think the future holds for us given we have this election? We have elections across all aspects of the federal government. Looking ahead what’s your vision? How do you see things working out?

Pat Wood:
The interesting thing I don’t know that people think about, I mean, other than some of these kind of high headline climate issues that have kind of become a Democrat and Republican distinction, energy policy is inherently local and regional. So, I mean, I knew that when I was going through FERC, it wasn’t the Democrats doing one thing and the Republicans, it was the Westerners were this way, the Southerners were that way, the Midwesterners were this way, Texas had its own dynamic with kind of the center part of the country states. So, the energy policies of the states were really driven by regional blocks in the Senate and somewhat in the House.

Ken Irvin:
The West and the Pacific Northwest continue to be very proud of their defeating standard market design and pushing that back and retaining their autonomy, right?


Pat Wood:
And costing their customers billions of dollars, but yeah we’ll talk about that some other day. But there is a feeling, I think, that some of these things would be different on the margin with Trump and with Harris, obviously, I think on LNG exports. You know, I would hope that, that would be robust under Harris, but I mean I know it will be under Trump. And that’ll probably cause gas prices to go up here, actually, as we send more gas that’s kind of trapped here in Texas out to the rest of the world, but you know I think it’s a price worth paying.

But I think it’s, you know, something nobody ever talks about is all this great export of oil and gas means that our local price goes to a world price, which generally tends to be higher. So, I’m kind of sanguine about it because I do know that it seems to me that most industry in the country and businesses they kind of are ignoring the elections these days and have moved to we’re going clean. Now, how they define clean probably matters to some, but I think everybody’s kind of drunk the Kool-Aid about we want to, you know, be kinder to the environment not just on carbon but on everything else.

So, I think that story’s already been written, and that book is closed, and we’re moving onto something else. So, sometimes the politics seems to lag the reality, and I think energy is probably a good example of that.

Ken Irvin:
Pat, that’s terrific insight and I want to thank you for your time. I’ve got one last question since you’re, you know, a bit of an oracle, you’ve been at the federal level, the state level, and now you’re in the business. You know, when you look down the highway, when you look what 2025 and beyond, 2030, etc., what are the exciting opportunities you see out there? What gets you energized, if you’ll allow me the pun, about what the future holds for us?

Pat Wood:
Well, I mean, the three I’m involved in, honestly, I expect to kind of take me till I take my last breath. But you know storage, peaking generation that’s very cost effective, embracing and bringing into the party this behind the meter generation. You know, I think all those things are, again, those are what I call edge issues. The old grid that I loved regulating and got to help shape and form was this central station centered big backbone grid, but I’ve actually found that as our society and culture is decentralizing, our businesses and our economy are too.

And so, I like being out there on the, I guess, virtual edge of the power grid, beefing it up. I certainly care a lot about being here for any winter storms that come back to Texas or any bad summer events that help keep people alive, because we lost 200 people during Winter Storm Uri, and I still carry that like a cross. But I do like being able to just keep the lights on for the customers and there are so many neat new ways to do that, that it just never gets old.

Ken Irvin:
That’s terrific. I want to wrap up our podcast today and let everyone know we’ve been speaking with Pat Wood, CEO of Hunt Energy Network, about the energy solutions that battery energy storage systems offer, and the role that BESS can play in the future of data centers, the grid, and our global energy needs. Pat, it’s been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for sharing your insights with us today

Pat Wood:
Thanks, Ken, always good to see you. And I look forward to seeing you in 3D someday soon.

Ken Irvin:
You’ve been listening to Accelerating Energy. I’m Ken Irvin. Our executive producer is John Metaxas, our managing editor is Karen Tucker, and our associate editor is Darren Schabdach. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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