Changing The Business Model Of The Utility: Winning Allies
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By Scott Cooney
Recently, I had the great pleasure to sit down with one of my longtime heroes, Henk Rogers, a true climate champion, to talk about solar, storage, microgrids…all the good things. Rogers made hay in the gaming world, helping bring Tetris to the world, and then turned his attention to exploring what else was happening in the world. And at one point, the newspaper in Rogers’ then hometown of Honolulu had a piece that said that we would more than likely, in our lifetime, see the end of coral reefs. It was his waking moment, much like the infamous reading of The Death of Birth was Ray Anderson’s “spear to the chest” moment. Rogers became a clean tech champion after realizing that we (and our carbon pollution) were the cause of this environmental disaster.
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Rogers also took his ranch off grid with solar and batteries. The ranch is a fully functional microgrid. The ranch has Outbacks and Solarc inverters, but Blue Planet’s control software makes sure they work compatibly. The Lithium ferrous phosphate batteries Rogers is using at his ranch are available through Blue Planet Energy, and come with a number of benefits. According to Rogers, they’re safer. They don’t get hot, so there’s no cooling system required. There’s sensors on each module of the battery that help align temperatures and productivity. There’s less moving parts, so less to maintain and less things to go wrong. BPE offers a 15-year warranty on them.
Blue Planet Energy has its most high profile case studies in “island” communities — Puerto Rico and Alaska. In Puerto Rico, they put in microgrids after Hurricane Maria caused catastrophic public health problems by knocking the power out to so much of the island. Thanks to BPE’s microgrids, schools are acting as shelters (as they were intended but failed after Maria). Blue Planet got some funding from Red Cross to retrofit 120 of these schools with some microgrid technology. The next time, when the power went out after the next hurricane, all the schools had power and were able to support people in the emergency basics – clean water, lights, and safe shelter.
Read the full article at CleanTechnica
