Microgrids As A Service

Microgrids are more and more popular every year. They offer tremendous benefits in terms of energy security, resilience, and energy independence. Though, our concept of a microgrid and how you put one together are probably far too simplistic, as I discovered recently when interviewing Michael Stadler, co-founder and CTO of Xendee, about microgrids and about Xendee’s “microgrid as a service” offering.

You can now listen to my full interview with Michael on your favorite podcast network. He provides some background on his own career, including winning a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama. The work he won the award for actually forms the basis of Xendee and its microgrid as a service offering. In particular, it was for being the lead developer of the Distributed Energy Resource Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) platform, “which was recognized as one of the most advanced economic decision support tools ever created for locational economic optimization of microgrids and hybrid distributed energy systems.” On top of his core work at Xendee, Michael also now co-teaches the “Microgrid planning and economic optimization” course at UC San Diego (CSE-41291).

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After explaining what a microgrid is, in our interview Michael delves into the complicated and valuable business of “microgrids as a service” — which, notably, does not entail building microgrids for others but rather providing the software and modeling tools to design and build good microgrids.

It’s a complicated topic when you delve into what Xendee does and how extensive the modeling framework is. However, the good thing is that it allows companies or institutions that want microgrids a fairly simple way to get them designed, built, and off the ground.

Michael also provides some examples of microgrid projects he has worked on, including a major military project.

We also talked at length about California solar net metering at the end of the interview.

You can listen to this full discussion about microgrids and microgrids as a service via the embedded SoundCloud player above or the embedded Spotify player below.