Solar Goes Mainstream | Chad Farrell
Chad Farrell, the founder and president of Encore Renewable Energy, joins the podcast to break down the evolving world of solar energy. Discover how Vermont’s recently doubled Renewable Energy Standard is reshaping the local grid and paving the way for larger, more economical multi-megawatt projects. This episode explores the challenges of modern energy permitting, the spatial constraints of urban solar development, and the critical role battery storage will play in stabilizing our grid to meet escalating electricity demands. Learn how local solar powers Burlington’s clean energy future!
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Chad Farrell, the founder and president of Encore Renewable Energy, joins the podcast to break down the evolving world of solar energy. Discover how Vermont’s recently doubled Renewable Energy Standard is reshaping the local grid and paving the way for larger, more economical multi-megawatt projects. This episode explores the challenges of modern energy permitting, the spatial constraints of urban solar development, and the critical role battery storage will play in stabilizing our grid to meet escalating electricity demands. Learn how local solar powers Burlington’s clean energy future!
Transcript
00:00 Jennifer Green: Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, Director of Sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. Today, we’re pleased to have Chad Farrell with us. Chad is the founder and president of Encore Renewable Energy and is here to tell us about sort of the world of solar. Chad, it’s great to have you here.
00:32 Chad Farrell: Great to be here. Jen, thank you so much for having me.
00:35 Jennifer Green: Yeah. Well, you’re really you know, when we think about sort of sector experts and we think about solar, I often think about encore renewable energy. And I know you’re in the thick of it, both sort of at the state level, even at the national level and maybe even the international to some extent.
00:48 Chad Farrell: Sure. Yeah. We are a Vermont company born and bred, headquartered here in good old Burlington, Vermont. And we are what is known as a vertically integrated independent power producer. So that means we develop own and increasingly operate the projects that we bring to market. We are involved in site selection. We are involved in all the engineering, all the permitting, all the financing, all the construction, and then ultimately the asset management to maintain the operational status of these projects. Increasingly, we are also a buyer of other developer led projects. So that’s been an exciting transition for us. We made the transition between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. We went out to market and secured one hundred and fifty million dollars worth of sponsor equity to help grow the business and transition from what’s known as a develop and flip model to this vertically integrated independent power producer model, all here in good old Burlington, Vermont.
01:53 Jennifer Green: Yeah. Well, we’re so glad you’re here. I think your office is over at Hula. Is that correct?
01:56 Chad Farrell: That’s correct. Yeah. Walked right over here.
01:57 Jennifer Green: Yeah, I love that. So tell us about what’s happening in Vermont, the state of solar. I think it’s been a challenging bit of time.
02:07 Chad Farrell: It has been a little challenging. I mean, I think, good news is Vermont has been, you know, an early adopter, a leader in the industry. This goes back ten, fifteen years to when encore was, was started. So, you know, but I think we, we’ve, we’ve reached maturity in this, in this state. And I think some of the legislation, the recent legislation is, is reflective of that. We did get a chance to double the renewable portfolio standard here in Vermont. It’s called the renewable energy standard or the RES. That was that was really helpful. We did, in exchange for that agreement, we did alter some of the net metering programs. And, you know, net metering is a great policy for states that are earlier in their adoption of renewables. Really helps to stand up an industry, a local industry. And this is not just the development community, these are, you know, all of the supporting attorneys and professional engineering services, all of the construction folks, all of the regulatory folks really just need to understand how to bring solar from what we call concept to cash flow.
03:24 Jennifer Green: So sort of back to the site to raise, which you referenced for folks that don’t understand, raise or know how it operates and impacts your business or BED for that matter. Can you describe what that is? What does it mean to be renewable energy standard state?
03:36 Chad Farrell: Yeah. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a state legislative mandate really to procure increasing amounts of renewable energy on a percentage basis of each utility’s power procurement. We, we doubled that from ten percent to twenty percent in the most recent legislation. And you know, what that does is that provides a market signal to all of the distributed utilities that they need to procure, local, state cited in Vermont projects. And this is, you know, this is good for a lot of reasons. It’s good to have a diversity of energy supply, as you all know, and are very active in procuring here at BED. And it’s also good for energy security. You know, we want to have at least some of our generation located on the grid, not just relying on all the all the energy that gets transmitted here from other places, Canada and elsewhere. So it provides energy security, it provides resiliency. You know, every time we develop a. I should have mentioned our, our standard project size is increased. It’s it’s now in the multi-megawatt scale. And, you know, a typical project size for us is five megawatts, five megawatt project is roughly a ten million dollar investment, and upwards of ten percent of that can often be interconnection cost. And those interconnection costs are directly improving the grid. So we develop a project, we construct it, and all of those interconnection upgrades happen as a result of that project. It’s not borne by the ratepayer. So that’s that creates a more resilient and energy secure grid.
05:21 Jennifer Green: When you talk about customers, are you talking about commercial customers? Are you talking about utilities that are buying your power? How does that work?
05:29 Chad Farrell: Both. We are most active in doing bilateral power purchase agreement projects with the distributed utilities here in Vermont. So that would be you know, that would be Green Mountain Power, all the small munis that are affiliated with VP SA and Vermont Electric Cooperative. So those are our main customers under the net metering paradigm. There are ways to deliver attributes of that electricity to customers. We’ve shifted away from that program. And now it’s mainly we’re meeting the renewable energy standard here in Vermont with larger projects. But the good news is for ratepayers is those projects are more economical. You know, with scale, we get cheaper cost per kilowatt hour generated. So that was the trade off that was made in that legislation.
06:18 Jennifer Green: Okay. So it sounds like things are kind of rolling in Vermont. Would you agree? Or, you know, where are the challenges that are sort of holding us back from deploying more solar?
06:26 Chad Farrell: I think the permitting environment here is, is challenging. The fact that we, you know, essentially permit solar projects as if they were permanent commercial structures is, is, is a bit of a challenge. You know, I think the environmental impact of, of, you know, five megawatts of solar across, you know, twenty, twenty five acres is quite different than, more, you know, permanent commercial or, you know, residential real estate. I would also say that just an understanding that, you know, solar is no longer, a, you know, it’s no longer alternative energy. You know, we’ve really, over the last fifteen years, the market has accelerated to the point where we have enough scale that we are delivering some of the cheapest electrons possible to the grid. Just that understanding, I think, by the regulatory folks, as you know, would be helpful. These are rapidly deployable, cost effective, reliable electrons that we need on the grid. It’s in all of the above approach at this point, we have massive energy demand coming our way from data centers, from the electrification of the thermal sector and the transportation sectors of our economy. And we need to put as many electrons on the grid as quickly as possible. And solar is the tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.
07:53 Jennifer Green: Of course, Burlington BED has a diverse portfolio, which includes solar, hydro, wind, and biomass. With solar being a little sliver of our pie. Talk about the potential in Burlington and talk about maybe residential solar. The sense is that it’s saturated. And of course, we’ve got these challenges with our slate roofs and tree cover, etcetera. What do you think? And, you know, tell us what, what’s the lay of the land in Burlington vis a vis solar?
08:18 Chad Farrell: Yeah, I think look, I think the utility here has done a great job of, you know, that diversification, as you mentioned, Jen, and I also think that, you know, the utilities always realized that solar is an important part of the mix. We are challenged here in any urban environment. We’re challenged with spatial constraints, right? Naturally, the built environment is, takes up the majority of the land here. So I think it is important to leverage any and all rooftop that’s possible. And that would be from the residential scale to the commercial scale. You know, we’ve done a small handful of roof mounted projects in the city. We delivered the carport project at the Echo Science Center, the high school. I believe our friends at Suncommon are working on that project. We did, I think it was a two hundred kilowatt project on the bus garage. All of the new buildings, I believe are, are being looked at and, you know, included in the solar portfolio.
09:19 Jennifer Green: And for BED customers that get frustrated because they’re not good candidates for solar. I always say never fear because your utility is sourcing solar as part of its bigger portfolio.
09:28 Chad Farrell: That’s right. Absolutely.
09:30 Jennifer Green: Tell us a little bit more about sort of how battery storage is going to fit with solar. What’s your what’s your vision?
09:35 Chad Farrell: Battery storage with battery storage. What we’re trying to do is make the sun shine at night. The battery storage industry has grown by leaps and bounds. You know, much like the solar industry. I was saying earlier how the solar industry has achieved scale to the point where pricing has decreased over ninety percent over the last fifteen years. Storage is on a similar trajectory. The scale of the industry is allowing for compression of the price curves, what storage is going to do. It’s going to increase the capacity factor of solar and wind for that matter. So these are intermittent generation resources. But to the point where solar is now cheap enough to be responsible for charging these batteries. And so batteries throughout the grid can help extend the capacity factor, allow for energy to flow where it’s needed most at a time when it’s in most demand, which is generally in the evening hours and really helps to again, stabilize the grid. So we’ve been fortunate to have been able to deliver, our first two energy storage projects in the state of Vermont. The first one in Middlebury, the second one down in Royalton. These are multi megawatt battery projects that allow, in that case, Green Mountain Power to address annual and monthly peaks that they are seeing on their grid and also allows them to, you know, provide a little bit more energy security for customers on those circuits.
11:13 Jennifer Green: In conclusion, you know, leave us, leave us with a sense of hope.
11:17 Chad Farrell: I would go back to the earlier comment, solar and storage and wind energy, renewable energy in general is no longer alternative energy. There are significant capital to support the deployment of solar storage wind. There’s, you know, it’s it’s stable, it’s predictable. It’s bankable in an era where energy demand is skyrocketing, we need all the tools in the toolbox, and solar and storage are increasingly the most rapidly deployable, most cost effective, most reliable sources of energy generation out there. So we’re going to see more of it as a as a lifelong environmentalist. That makes me hopeful.
12:00 Jennifer Green: Well, Chad, it was a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you sharing your expertise and knowledge.
12:06 Chad Farrell: Thank you Jen. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate it.
12:10 Jennifer Green: Thank you again for listening to Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about this show or what BED offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at burlingtonelectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to net zero energy.