Microgrids: Affordable, Reliable and Renewable Power ft. Rod Matthews (Brevian Energy)

While we all appreciate having access to electricity, most of us probably don’t give too much thought as to how it gets to our homes and businesses. We just want it to go on when we need it, for it not to be too expensive, and to be as clean as possible.

We can largely thank our grid infrastructure for helping to have achieved this over the years. But the grid has its limitations:

• You are at the mercy of the fees charged by your local utility provider;
• Because everything is centralized, there are risks of major outages and even security threats;
• You don’t have control over the source of your power (for example coal vs renewable energy);
• And, more recently, the influx in electrification (notably of our cars) will put significant strain on the grid.

In seeing these issues in his own community of San Diego (home to the USA’s most expensive electricity), Rod Matthews decided to do something about it. In early 2020, this navy veteran and a partner of his founded a company called Brevian Energy.

Offering affordable commercial microgrids, Brevian Energy partners with renewable energy providers (solar, wind, hydrogen) as well as storage solutions (typically batteries) to offer affordable, reliable, renewable power to homes, businesses, and communities.

In this episode, Rod shares with us the difference between the classic grid, microgrids and mini grids, how microgrids can play a critical role in reducing energy costs, increasing resiliency and minimizing emissions. Rod also shares his path to founding Brevian Energy, key government incentives to propel this transition, and shares incredible resources supporting veterans and BIPOC and women owned companies, especially in the renewables space.

I loved chatting with Rod, and learning about how he identified a gap in the market, and has leveraged his entrepreneurial spirit and expertise to launch such an innovative company.

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[Host: Lauren Scott] Welcome to The Resilience Report, Rod. I'm so happy to have you on.

[Guest: Rod Matthews, Brevian Energy] Thank you for allowing me to be here today.

So, you have a really interesting background. Would you mind walking us through your professional journey as to how you got to where you are today?

All right. Well, I am originally from Shreveport, Louisiana.

I joined the navy out of high school. I spent 9 years in the navy as an electronics technician.

I got out of the navy and started working in networking, as a matter of fact, and computer networking.

I did that for a while and caught the entrepreneurial spirit: I worked with a partner to start a company. Then I left out on my own doing network consulting and business technology consulting, which led me into working with a lot of data centers, helping them reduce their carbon footprint, helping reduce their energy. And I was actually introduced to microgrids, and I was really kind of blown away at the whole concept. One, because of just the practical nature of them. And it was a way to help us really reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help save the planet. From there, I had a partner of mine who spent 30 years working in the utility industry, had a vast amount of knowledge and connections. And so, hey, man, this is really the way that we should be going. And we decided to start a company right before Covid.

So, at the exact wrong time to start a business. But it did give us an opportunity to hone in on our business model, really partner with the right people, get the right mixture of technologies and components to really align philosophies with some of the vendors and suppliers that we're doing business with, which allowed us to really step out with a lot. And then the recent passing of both the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act has really helped to pour fuel on the fire of this industry and has really seen things taken off. So, it's a great place to be right now where not only can we have an opportunity to be successful monetarily, but our biggest objective is to be able to do good while we're doing that. 

I'm going to maybe scale us back a little bit just to level set, because we have listeners coming in from all different backgrounds. And yeah, while we all use energy, I think the concept of the traditional grid is not one that everybody understands. Could you maybe first walk us through that traditional grid, and then I'll pull you over, and you can explain the difference between the traditional grid and a micro grid?

Okay. 50,000-foot view. I don't want to get too in depth. So, essentially are the major grid you can look at it as generation, transmission, distribution, consumption. We'll look at it at those four parts. So, generation, traditionally, you're looking at these large power plants that boil water to produce steam to turn a generator. Now, there are several different ways they can use to heat up that water. I mean, a lot of times they use coal as a mixture to get the water to steam temperature. Sometimes they use nuclear power, sometimes they use natural gas, but in a lot of places they use coal to do that. Now, when they use that coal to heat up the water to turn the generator, that power gets transmitted over long distances because you usually have a 500- 600 mile radius sometimes that each one of these power plants can cover and that gets transmitted to an area maybe 300-400 miles of transmission lines, that’s because it's easier to transmit power at a high frequency / high level. Then they step that down and distribute it to an area. That's where you see your substations: all the houses and businesses, you're connected to a substation in an area. And then from that area, you use that to consume your power coming from that. So that's essentially the national grid. So, they generate the power, transmit power long distances to the substation, then distribute power to the individual houses or businesses in those individual houses. They see the meter they connect to a meter. And that's how you are charged for the usage of that power. 

A microgrid is effectively the same thing, but on a much, much smaller scale. You have generation assets, like solar: solar panels - they generate power. You can have hydrogen fuel cells. You can have things like storage, like battery systems that can store power and still be considered as an asset, sort of like generation because you're able to draw power from it. And that power is transmitted and distributed over a much smaller distance. Instead of hundreds of miles, it's hundreds of inches or a few feet. So, then you convert that power. Most of the time, that power is what's called DC, direct current and your appliances in your house, that's like the distribution system use AC. So, they convert that power, convert it from DC to AC and then you use it locally, you consume it locally, just like you would in a grid. So that's why they call it a microgrid because it's a much smaller version of the larger grid where you have generation transmission, distribution and consumption and you have that hyperlocal generation, transmission and consumption.

That was very digestible. Thank you for breaking it down away.

That was probably about as easy as I can make that!

I got it; it was perfect. So, you're the co-founder and CEO of a company called Brevian Energy, which is a micro grid solutions provider, correct? Would you mind walking us through that?

All right, well, essentially, we just said what a microgrid is. And we like to say: if you've seen one microgrid, you've seen one microgrid, right? Because every one is totally different. So that's where we come in and we analyze. If you are an existing location, we can analyze your usage over usually at least a one year to two year timeframe to understand the cyclical nature of your usage. We can make sure we design a system that can meet your needs during your peak times. So, we perform that analysis. And then we come in with, most of the time, we use solar - it is a real large component of what we do. Solar panels come in with battery systems that can and the type of battery systems that can take your whole load and can shift the load on a daily basis instead of just being a backup system that only can take your load when the grid is not available. 

What a lot of people don't realize is that there is what's called a demand charge which is number one on your bill. So, you get charged for the energy that you use; that's your consumption. But that's the consumption charge or per kilowatt hour charge. And you also get charged for the amount of power that's made available for you to consume at your peak. And that's measured in 15-minute intervals. That's why they call it your interval information; so, your highest peak usage or your highest 15-minutes of usage in a given month is what you're charged for as a demand charge. That could be as much as a third of your bill, depending on how much that's made available to you for you to use. So, a lot of people really don't understand that. And here -- we're in San Diego, California - and I won’t say the name of our utility company here, but we have the highest utility rates in all of the United States of America. And we have what's called Time of Use, where we are charged three different rates depending on the time that you use it. So, there's a rate from 7am to 3:59pm. That's called Off Peak. There's a rate for 4pm to 8:59pm and it's called Peak, and in some cases we've seen that to can go to as much as 74-75 cents per kilowatt hour. And that's a lot. And then after that, that 9pm to 6:59am: that is the Super Off Peak, which is obviously much cheaper. That's when people are encouraged to charge their cars and things like that. Certainly not at that four o'clock to nine o'clock timeframe because that is the most expensive and that's at the time everybody's home, everybody's washing dishes and cooking and watching television and so that peak time really is getting to us. But we have the ability with the microgrid, when you're producing your own energy and we have the battery systems and the control systems that come with them, to shift your load at 3:59. If your solar panels aren't really producing particularly in the evenings in the wintertime when the sun goes down relatively early, these timeframes your power is kicking in almost at eight o'clock at night. But in other time periods, when that is not the case, we have the ability to shift the load to the battery system. So now you don't have to draw from the grid during those peak usage times. So, you don't have to do that at all. And if it's not grid-attached, you don’t have to worry about that anyway.

And does Brevian Energy partner with manufacturers? Or do you work with whoever is looking to put in the microgrid and they select, for example the renewable energy source?

We have a solar panel company that we work with for all of our projects. We toured their facility and we met with the founders and owners, so we have a great relationship with them. We have a battery manufacturer that we've partnered with, our control systems partner that we partner with, hydrogen fuel cell company that we partnered with, wind turbine company that we partner with to bring in these technologies. 

And again, like I said, that mixture of technologies is totally different, depending on the requirements and the needs of each customer. Some customers may be more mission critical than others. Some customers may be more cyclical in nature, like a school: in the summertime, there's very little usage, some of them may have summer school, but some of them no may not so it really kind of kind of depends. Some have requirements and operate 24/7 (for example a manufacturing company) so it really depends on the usage and the nature of each particular individual customer; it would depend on that mixture of technologies they will need to sustain.

Based on your comment that “once you've seen one microgrid you’ve seen one microgrid”, I imagine your answer is going to be yes to this question, but is there a big difference between microgrids that you have for residential setups versus commercial?

For us, we only do what's called the CNI or commercial and industrial. We don't necessarily do individual houses. Now, we will work with developers to do a neighborhood or individual neighborhood, so we would supply power feed power directly into that substation. We could help to eliminate a lot of those charges for a particular neighborhood, particularly new development. Now we can really do that quite easily. Here in California, there's a mandate that any new home that's constructed must be net zero consumption, meaning they must produce as much power as they consume. A lot of that they're doing with solar, but we're looking to partner with property developers who would build these new communities so that we could do that for the entire community instead of each individual house.

And do you see a difference – and it sounds like California at a state level is very unique – do you see a difference from state to state and possibly even country to country when it comes to the market for microgrids?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Particularly here in California, and a lot of the West Coast states. There are several local incentives. There are several incentives by the investor-owned utilities in each of these areas, and by the California PUC (public utilities commission). Now there's all kinds of federal money that's available, there's incentives, but we pair that with the actual state-led incentives, such as the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP). That's here, local and unique to California, that even offers an additional layer of incentives for people to get these projects financed. 

So, with the combination of the inflation Reduction Act that we've seen, which can pay up to 40-60% of your project between incentives, and you pair that with some 30% incentives for bringing in battery storage and things like that with the local incentives - a large portion of these projects are paid with incentives. So up to 70% of these projects are paid for directly with these incentives. That's why you're seeing such a huge demand for the services. And, frankly, with the market that we're focused on, there's not a lot of people really focused on that market; we feel it's underserved that below one megawatt or that small to medium size customer, and people are either focused on the individual residential or they're really focused on the larger utility-scale projects. So, our core focus is on that small to medium sized customer that has a real need. We feel that we can make an impression doing that.

Certainly important work. On the topic of the energy transition, I'm up in Canada, and a lot of it (the conversation) is about how can we support more remote communities. Do you feel like micro grids can be part of the solution?

That is the way. As a matter of fact, that's how it's being done primarily right now is microgrids. But primarily, their microgrids are generators. And a lot of cases these are diesel generators which one is hard to keep going. It's not sustainable. You have to transport fuel; they're using fuel to transport fuel, and it's expensive to do. So, we need to increase the mixture of more renewables in the mix. Absolutely. And semantically, a lot of those are what's called mini grids. And a mini grid is effectively a microgrid that is not attached to a national or larger grid. You’re an island, you're all on your own. You're generating your own power, you're on your own. So that's why a lot of those are actually mini grids where they're not attached to anything else. They're responsible for generating their own power and the cost of maintaining those big diesel generators and things like that; it's a lot more maintenance to keep diesel generators going then solar panels and batteries.

Very interesting. I was just speaking with a previous guest who's up in the Yukon, and they were talking about how there's a push for electric vehicles, (and this could be anywhere in North America or anywhere in the world), but there's a push for electric vehicles to help reduce emissions, but there are concerns about the pressure this is going to put on the grid. Do you think that micro grids can be part of the solution in that?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't really see any situation where a microgrid couldn't be more effective. Number one, we like decentralization, we feel that just from a practical standpoint, from a security standpoint, if you had a lot more places that were generating their own electricity, you wouldn't have a localized or centralized event that could take down power for a huge area. I recall going back here, I think it was 2016 here in the San Diego area. We had a person who was changing a fuse in Arizona, which is our neighboring state here. He made a mistake, didn't follow a safety procedure, shorted something out. Fortunately for him, he didn't kill himself, but he blacked out power for all of Southern California for about 12 hours.

Oh, wow. A mistake on the job at a whole different scale!

But just think about that. So, one person can take out power. I mean, this is cell phone towers. This is everything. So, there was no communications for all of Southern California, probably 5- 6 million people for about a nine hour period. But if there were microgrids, that would not have been the case. So, we need more decentralize power, because that was everybody was getting their power fed in coming from the grid coming through Arizona at that particular time.

It sounds like microgrids can actually be almost like a redundancy or a backup plan if there are (for example) critical facilities like data centers or things like that. Are you seeing them being partnered?

Absolutely. We look at it as a triangle: we have three things that we look at. We look at the reduction of cost: by you generating your own electricity, it is a lot cheaper than you buying it from whatever local utility you come from. Secondly, there is the resiliency aspect because you're generating your own power and not reliant on it coming from an outside source. A lot of times, you can use that outside source as really just a backup to you. And then last but not least is the sustainability aspect of it. You're not producing these greenhouse gases; you are more sustainable to the environment. And hopefully we are helping to protect the environment by deploying technologies like this. So that is the triumvirate that we look at: reduction in cost, increase in resiliency, and also the sustainability aspect of it.

As part of the sustainability journey, there will definitely be a transition in the workforce. We know a lot of our workforce in Canada, and North America, around the world is deeply linked with the history of oil and gas. Are there opportunities for the just transition for a lot of these skilled workers to be able to get involved in microgrids?

Absolutely. There are going to be, in this transition, so many opportunities. People are going to have to put solar panels on the ground and on rooftops. People will have to deploy these battery systems. People who are going to have to make the solar panels. So, we need more manufacturing here locally in the United States. Just think about this: in the United States, we are going to totally remake our entire power infrastructure over the next 10 to 15 years. That's going to require a lot of work, a lot of manpower. AI is not going to be able to put solar panels on the ground, right. I see a lot of opportunities for people in those industries to be retrained and be redeployed to help redesign our whole infrastructure.

Very encouraging. Are you working on any projects right now that you're particularly excited about and that you can share?

Right now, we're working on a large multi-tenant building that has a lot of those kinds of customers that we talked about that are below one megawatt, but above the residential level. So those are our target markets. And this gives us the opportunity to provide that triumvirate that we just talked about for all of these customers. They're like 32 individual, small to medium sized businesses in this building, but the building owner provides power as a part of their rent so they don't pay an additional cost for electricity as a part of their lease agreement/rental. They have power that comes with it. So, it's beneficial for the actual building owner to keep their costs down. They can reduce costs and provide a more resilient service to their customers. It makes their property more attractive if people know that they have reliable power; they don't have to worry about their power going up and down all the time. So, it's a win-win for everybody involved. I'm really excited about that. I like win-win situations; that's true business to me.

You mentioned that you started this business just before the pandemic. So, I'm sure you've seen ups and downs, and just the overall landscape, I suppose, of trying to offer sustainable solutions can be challenging at times. Do you have any resources that keep you motivated throughout those ups and downs?

Oh, yeah, as a matter of fact, we are involved in a couple of different programs. One is The Rosie Network. I am a navy veteran. And this is a program that's designed to help veterans and their spouses, and their family members become entrepreneurs, start their businesses, show them the right components and how to put them all together, how to do a pitch deck. 

We are also a part of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and we're part of their Accelerate Cohort, which is a two year program to help minority or BIPOC and women owned companies that are engaged in sustainability or in renewable power in general, help them get access to the resources that they need, to help grow and sustain their businesses. So, we'd like to give them a shout out.

And last but not least, the Clean Tech Open, which is a nationwide program to help sustainable businesses connect and get resources. A lot of these programs were really kind of created around that timeframe. We're taking advantage of those resources that were made available to us, and it's so great that they have programs like that to help us get going. They've really been a Godsend for us. So that's what we've been doing: focusing on building our business, and really kind of growing the business that I guess that timeframe of COVID allowed us that opportunity, at least to really understand and kind of mold and craft our business, really understanding who our customer was, and allowed us the opportunity to go out and get the resources to go out and tackle that. So, it's been a challenge, to say the least. But it's been fun. I like challenges, anything easy is not really worth doing.

Well I love that you have built this incredible community around you. On the topic of sustainability, was this something that you always sort of knew you want your career to end up in? Or was this a pivot that happened mid-career? 

I had no idea, to be honest with you. I've always been a guy who saved my beer cans and that kind of stuff. But to say coming up that I was a climate change warrior, absolutely not. But shout out to Al Gore: his program introduced me to what climate change really was. I had always heard the term global warming and I was like, “Oh, whatever”. And I was a young guy; I didn't really care about that. But when I saw that movie that he produced, seeing glaciers fall into the ocean and seeing what's happening to the Arctic. I was like, “Man, this is real”. And seeing sea levels rise and even now seeing the frequency and the violent nature of all these storms that are happening. Right now, we have a storm coming in – storm season for us doesn't even really start until September and they already have storms coming in June. So, that is evident that there is something going on, and it is really I think man made and we need to take action to change that or we're going to make it devastating for all of us in the future. So, we need to work together to make that happen.

I have an immense amount of gratitude for you and your business in trying to find innovative solutions to help address such a big problem. And interestingly enough, we're both connected then because Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth tour was what sparked it for me; that I knew I wanted to be finding a solution pulling business and sustainability together in my career as well. I like to end every episode by asking the same question which is what do you think it will take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward?

I think it takes commitment, right? It takes everyone to coalesce around any inconvenient truth. We all have to really come to that conclusion of really what truth is, number one, and then we have to be committed to an action plan. To try to remedy it before it's too late. Again, we're seeing massive storms, we're seeing droughts and fires here in the West. And even now what's funny is this year for the first year, (I've lived in California here for the past 30 years) I've never seen it rain so much ever. We had record snow levels this year in California. So, it's just been kind of kind of strange in general. But in a lot of cases, I've seen it when it has rained before not nearly as much as we get a lot of growth during the season and then we go through a year or two of no rain and drought. And all of this brand-new growth is now all dried out and now it's already to burn again. So, wildfires. We just have to be careful with that as well going forward.

If someone wants to learn more about you or Brevian Energy, where would be the best place for them to go check that out?

I would say the best place to go is our website, which is www.brevianenergy.com. You can kind of see what we're about, what we do and who our customers are. And you can always get in contact; there's LinkedIn (we're pretty active on LinkedIn). You can look us up on LinkedIn at Brevian Energy or you can look me up personally as Rod Mathews. And you can always reach out to us via email. You can hit us at sales@brevianenergy.com. We look forward to speaking with you. We look forward to just hearing from you in general. We love feedback. We love to talk to different people to really understand what their needs are to make sure that we're hitting the mark, to make sure that we're getting it right. 

Thank you so much, Rod. I learned a ton today about microgrids, mini grids, and how it all works together. So, I really appreciate your time.

It is my absolute pleasure; anytime.