Jon Powers: Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. I’m the co-founder of Clean Capital, and served as President Obama’s Chief Sustainability Officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. You can get more episodes at CleanCapital.com. Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. We’re excited to be releasing a new set of interviews. We took a little pause on recording after RE+, and are ramping back up for 2024. Today we talked to the CEO of Connexus Energy, Greg Ridderbusch. Greg was a West Point graduate, went on to a incredible career in the utility space, helping to lead one of the most interesting utilities in Minnesota, to help drive the energy transition. Greg’s retiring, and reflects on his experience in the space, but also his vision of where we’re headed. Utilities play a significant role in moving forward, driving and scaling renewable energy, bringing more to the grid, helping us manage the grid in a way that’s reliable and affordable. We’re going to talk more about that with Greg and explore the opportunities and challenges ahead. Hope you enjoy the conversation. As always, you can get more episodes at CleanCapital.com. Greg, thanks so much for joining us at Experts Only. Greg Ridderbusch: Really pleased to be here today with you. Jon Powers: You’ve got such an amazing experience and career in energy, but before getting to that, I know you’re a West Pointer. What was your interest and commitment to service, and where’d you grow up to get your appointment from? Greg Ridderbusch: I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and I had a senatorial appointment. I kind of grew up in the seventies, when energy and all that was a big issue. But going to West Point, for me, was kind of a calling, an opportunity to be military leader, and then ultimately a civilian leader. And I was kind of a shy and nerdy person, and that doesn’t work at West Point. And so, I went there and graduated in 1980, and had mainly career experiences. It was a quiet time from a conflict standpoint, thank God. Right? Not like today, when young men and women go in the service, they’re going to be in harm’s way. But I served for 10 total years, and I was an engineering graduate and served in the engineers in the Army. So I did war planning, we built things for theater of operations, support, various things like that, but finished up, pretty much, down in Georgia. And from there, I went on to doing a full blown engineering degree at Georgia Tech. Jon Powers: Yeah, I think folks aren’t as familiar with the West Point being an engineering school, but really it’s one of the leading engineering schools in the whole country. We’re recording this before the Army Navy game this weekend. It’ll probably come out afterwards. Any predictions? Greg Ridderbusch: Army’s going to win. Jon Powers: Outstanding, outstanding. I was blessed to go to the game that they broke the multiple-year losing streak to Navy, and was sitting in the Secretary of the Army’s box and surprised when everyone got up and rushed the field. It was awesome. Greg Ridderbusch: It was a pretty sad period of time, but they have a chance of taking the Commander’s trophy this year. Jon Powers: It’s incredible. It’s incredible. Well, excellent. So I’ll come back to the questions around your leadership experience because it really, I think for me personally, being a vet and knowing how many vets are in this space, in the clean energy space, it has become a second mission for a lot of folks. And I actually talk to a lot of colleagues who have experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, are driven by that, but also the leadership experience you get in the military and how it helps you lead a growing startup, or a large utility like you’ve done. I think people really don’t always recognize the value until they actually see it firsthand, of what that military experience brings. So thank you for your service. Greg Ridderbusch: Absolutely. It does translate across. I think from your own service, you know that there’s things that you can take and they clearly are value, and then the rest that are not, you park them and you move on. Yep. Jon Powers: So engineering school, was it energy, or was it engineering first and then you just happened to get into energy? Greg Ridderbusch: I did a master’s in Mechanical and it was in energy, thermal systems, things like that. And when I graduated from Tech, I had an opportunity to work as a development engineer in clean technologies for combustion, for industrial processes. So really early on, I’ve had professional experience in efficiency, clean energy, how do you do it, what are the technologies? And I did that for a number of years, and then started to, oddly enough, I worked for an organization called Gas Research, which is similar, to those who are listening, to EPRI, Electric Power Research. Jon Powers: Oh, yeah. Greg Ridderbusch: And I sponsored a portfolio of development technologies in natural gas utilization, and at that point it was still very early stage. How do you burn natural gas at the lowest environmental impact, the highest efficiency? Did those things, and what I liked the most was the business of technology and how technology can transform in various ways, industries or applications. And I had a chance to go back to business school in Chicago, and I did, and I came out of that as a management consultant working for utilities. Jon Powers: Oh, interesting. So when you were on the consulting side, what led you to go in-house at, was it Connexus, the first place you went in-house? Greg Ridderbusch: It was Great River Energy. And what happened was, I had the opportunity to consult across many different utilities, couple of municipals, couple cooperatives, and I was mainly in the business development and strategy space, working for executives of utilities. One of my clients was a Minnesota cooperative, a large one. It was a generation transmission company, and they asked me to come join rather than advise, and kind of like eating your own dog food. It was all right. I guess I’m going to take my own advice and do the things that I’ve been consulting on. And that’s what happened. Jon Powers: That’s amazing. Greg Ridderbusch: That was in the 2005 timeframe. Still pretty early, given that the Energy Policy Act here in Minnesota, that created the Renewable Energy Standard, occurred in 2007. So if you really think about how time plays on, this whole space, and you’re a veteran of it, has evolved remarkably over 15 years. It’s been- Jon Powers: Absolutely. Greg Ridderbusch: Yeah. Jon Powers: Yeah. It’s funny you say that because I talk often about how, from a federal level, George Bush led, with the Democratic Congress, Energy Security Act, really got the ITC out there, got things moving. And then you bring in the American Recovery Act and the plethora of funds that got poured into shovel-ready green projects, sort of got the rocket ship moving, and then brought efficiencies across the market that we’re seeing today. So for folks that are not familiar with, first co-ops and then I guess Connexus, can you talk for a second about the utility you’ve been leading and how it differs from maybe other utilities in the space? Greg Ridderbusch: So Connexus is an example of a distribution cooperative. And so what’s that mean, is historically it would purchase wholesale power, that power delivered by transmission, the big wires to substations, which I think we’ve all seen driving around. And then our job was from substation to consumer. And so it was that old space where you thought of generate power somewhere far away at large scale because of economies, move it by high voltage lines to minimize line losses and improve efficiencies, and then one-way street, delivered to the consumer. And while that is pretty old thinking at this point, the grid is completely transformed. That was the background in which companies like us, we grew up. I mean we were formed in about 1936 and we’ve been serving ever since. And it is a business model where you’re owned by the consumer. So mutual insurance companies, things like that similar. And these companies owned, for mutual benefit with other cooperatives, for scale, they put together these generation companies that built the power plants of the past. And then, we are governed by the consumer. So every consumer of Connexus, of which we have like 145,000 accounts, owns a piece of Connexus. They vote for directors that are on our board. So when I and the leadership team at Connexus, meet with our board, we’re meeting with the consumers of electricity of Connexus. And it’s different than investor owns who serve investor purposes, but they all work. And then municipals themselves are different. But a lot of the countries serve by companies like ours, we are in the 20 top largest of about 830 nationally, and we don’t have a profit motive, so we don’t look for, like investor owns, return on assets. We are what is the best affordable cost we can achieve for the consumer. Now you might argue there’s a little bit of both worlds in that, because we invest in assets that have to perform. But at the end of the day, Connexus consumers expect the power to be there all the time and they expect it to be affordable. And then really recently, if you let me use recently 10 to 15 years, the renewable part of it is a passion for some consumers, but actually some of the green interests out there might be surprised that not all consumers think of that. Right? Jon Powers: Sure, of course. Yeah. Greg Ridderbusch: I want to wake up in the morning, I want to flip the lights on, and I want it to be there all the time. But we do have consumers that are at both ends of the scale, some very passionate, and we’ve been an innovative utility. Some which are, I just want it to be there all the time and be affordable. And so cooperatives serve across that spectrum, and that’s a few words on Connexus. Jon Powers: Yeah. Let’s go back to that innovative utility piece of it because I think it’s such an important… You’ve witnessed that real transition of a business model from the decentralized grid, or the centralized grid, to what we’re becoming the, you used the term grid edge, but the decentralized grid, right? It’s really sort of a new world for many folks in the industry. When you think back, when the grid was the engineering feat of the last century and really powered our economy, got us moving. We’re at a place now, where consumers, especially corporate consumers, a decade ago, they paid their utility bill. They maybe negotiated a rate, but they paid the utility bill. Today Google has a sophisticated energy procurement shop that has a policy team that’s going into states and shaping the policy so they can get the renewable energy they need for their data centers, for instance. And others are doing very similar, more sophisticated approaches, but not everyone has that capacity to do it. A lot of folks are just following and taking action. How have you led the utility through that transition, which are still very much undertaking right now? Greg Ridderbusch: So instead of thinking about the distributed grid, I think about the integrated grid. So we just talked about how electricity was kind of generated far away, super highway to the distribution area, and then distributed one-way to the consumer. Today it is, you have to think about all three working together. Where do you put renewable assets? Where do you put storage? Why? How do you operate a grid that has electric vehicles that can charge, really at any time, that could contribute significantly to peak demands? You have consumers that wish, and we encourage this, that wish to do some self-generation. And so you have a grid where electricity is flowing in multiple directions, there are multiple interests for a variety of reasons, and investing in that grid. And then here’s Connexus trying to facilitate the clean energy transition and getting all these things to work together. That’s what we’ve been about. And so I’ll just give one or two examples and- Jon Powers: Yeah, please. Greg Ridderbusch: Yeah. So early on, people thought that renewables would add cost to the grid. Okay, well, it doesn’t, at least our experience to date. And I’ll give you one example, as we started putting solar at distribution, which is localized, not far away, we looked at the economics between taking wholesale energy being delivered to us for distribution versus generating it closer to the consumer, 30% less cost than wholesale. Now, it’s not a fair direct comparison because the grid’s on all the time, right? And solar or wind’s on intermittently. But I’ll tell you what, when you’re paying a certain number, call it 80, and if you can pay 55, you’re going to want as much of that local power as possible. So that’s one example. Jon Powers: By the way, if you had a battery, maybe you can capture that and maybe 75, but it’s still in there. Greg Ridderbusch: And we do have batteries. We were the first utility to implement megawatt-class batteries, and we did it at a solar site. And the reason we did it, was to lower our load management cost, and the batteries at that point in time, because of federal incentives, I think you’re quite aware of the benefits from tax and investment standpoint. They wanted to see solar working with batteries, and so did we. We were able to lower our cost to manage our peaks significantly by doing those first batteries. And now, we’re doing batteries at a substation, and it doesn’t sound, oh, so what? Well, big deal because- Jon Powers: Pretty big deal. Greg Ridderbusch: Yeah, we have a substation that was straining to serve at the hottest days of the summer because everything had grown up around it. So instead of doubling the size of the substation, we simply added a battery for topping capacity at a much lower cost, with more capabilities. So rather than a transformer or more lines coming in, now you have something that has the optionality, what a battery can do, but serve that immediate need at a much better economics. And now, maybe I’ll give one other example. Jon Powers: Yeah, please. Greg Ridderbusch: The other thing that’s different today is how do you engage consumers? Because many of them want to be engaged in helping manage their own costs and use. It could be a motivation, it’s solely their bill. It could be a motivation where they want to be more efficient. So we’re the first one to offer, it’s called peak time rebates. So as we get near peak days, and let’s say we had the good fortune of you being on our system, we’d send you an email, if you had signed up for it and say, “Hey John, please, tomorrow between the hours of four to seven reduce your use.” We pay you to reduce your use. And we measure that because we have real-time telemetry on our grid. So that transition to new sources that are locally producing, consumers that want to be part of managing their own grid, and then to look at new asset economics that had never been considered before, those are the things that we won’t claim we’re expert at all that yet, but we have been working hard on those capabilities as part of this clean energy transition. Jon Powers: One of interesting things for me is the role you guys have played, also, really championing policy in Minnesota on these issues. And I think, when you folks that have… I mean, I’ve been in the solar industry now for a while, but there’s many folks that are like, “Oh, Minnesota? I get Florida.” Well, Florida doesn’t have it, but Minnesota is doing great. What role did you see as a leader of the utility, and then a leader of the industry and helping you championing those policies so that, whether it be the RPSs or the community solar stuff that’s happening in Minnesota? And I want to leave the agrovoltaics piece to the end. I know Rob’s sitting there, because I know you want to talk about those pieces for sure. But what was your role as a leader involved in those conversations? Greg Ridderbusch: So we’re a co-op, not investor-owned. And we have an ethic to benefit the overall consumer and also the communities in which we serve. Sounds a little flag-waving, but it’s really true. Jon Powers: Yeah. Greg Ridderbusch: So as we’ve learned things, we’ve had the ethic of sharing when people want to hear about it. So we don’t walk to people on the street corner and say, “Hey, here it is.” So when we have an opportunity to testify at a committee hearing about what we’re doing with respect to solar and its economics and the debate going on, but is it less money? More money? And we say, “Okay, here’s what it works for us. It’s cheaper, here’s why.” And then when we do batteries, you’d be surprised at how many people have had it, just the battery’s just sitting there. It’s not moving, it’s just absorbing energy and discharging it. But people want to come see them and we want them to come see them, so they can envision what elements of the distributed grid, at a local level, might be. And so we’re doing that because of that ethic, community serving member serving, and if someone has an interest in what we’re doing, we share what we’ve learned. And so there’s no more complicated than that. Jon Powers: Yeah. Excellent. So I do want to take a moment and recognize Rob Davis who helped set this up and his role being a champion in agrovoltaics. It’s a story that I’ve had Rob on the podcast, but I talk a lot about it in the advocacy stuff I do because I think folks don’t recognize the potential that solar can play in helping the agriculture community address some of the issues around pollinators, etc. And you guys have really helped lead some of this work. Can you talk for a second about what drives that, what benefits you have found from agrovoltaics. Greg Ridderbusch: I want to rewind it back to pollinators themselves, and I won’t go- Jon Powers: Yeah, please. Greg Ridderbusch: So I was there during the day that we had one of staff come to a senior team meeting. We were talking about we have a tiny solar array at our headquarters, at the time was the biggest in the state, 245 kW, if you believe it. Jon Powers: Wow. Greg Ridderbusch: And we were saying, “What are we going to do?” And we were going to put gravel down, and someone comes in and says we should put pollinator plantings, deep rooted plantings, upgrade the soil over time. Okay, we did that. A couple years later, someone walks in and said, “We have someone that wants to put beehives, an apiary, within the border of our array.” And I was at the meeting, I was thinking, what the heck is that? And then you sit back, and then you talk to the owner of that and there’s a social appetite out there for cleaner honey, the kind of things that you can save from honey coming from solar production. And so we did it, and we found out there was a ton of interest. And that year as a co-op, most businesses have an annual meeting. We had an annual meeting, and then we had a couple of weeks later, we had a meeting where we shared what was going on with our honey production. I had three or four times as many people want to hear about honey that hear about. And we realized, John, the thing from that was, as a utility where we’re having societal impact of the green energy transition, what can we do to make it more friendly? And hey, we can make these assets that we are building near population, improve the soil as we go, produce honey at apiaries that are located there. And then most recently, and this is something that Rob Davis brought to us, is people are now thinking about growing crops within the ground surface of the array. We had NREL interested in looking at that with us. So back to your former question, and we get involved in sharing, said, “Sure, let’s do that.” So that’s kind of the steps along the way. And we feel good about it. And it’s just, you said this, it’s just in its infancy, but we are doing it because it is an approach to make these assets friendlier to the localities in which they are located. So we’re paying land rents locally rather than it being a hundred miles away. The energy is being delivered to the consumers that have that array and they’re hosting it. The honey, they have a chance to come to our headquarters, they can buy some, we donate it to charity, and all those things so that when we ask a City Council, or Planning and Zoning in a city or a county that we’d like to put in the next one, we’re able to share with them, this is about overall community and how we approach things. Jon Powers: Yeah, I mean we’re facing, right now, a frontline battle in solar and communities where anti-solar forces are going in and getting permitting fights, and whatever, at the local level, in places like Ohio and other places. And when you tell the story of what it can do, it helps change the dynamic of how a farmer, or others in the community, think about these projects. It’s really important, the work that you guys have done, cutting edge here, to help us translate this and hopefully deploy more, right? Because that’s really what we’re, from my perspective, what we need to be doing to solve the climate crisis in a way that’s ecologically friendly, and I think this is a key part of it. So I want to flash forward, and you’re going to sit down with your predecessor in 2030 and you’re going to look back over the last seven years of the industry. What changes do you see happening, and what are some of the challenges that CEO is going to have driving those changes as more and more pressure comes to scale up renewables to address a climate crisis, to make sure we have a stable grid for consumers? What are some of the things they’re going to be wrestling with? Greg Ridderbusch: Well, they would’ve started, as they took on that job, with a utility who has top 5% in the country, sometimes 1% in terms of reliability. So Connexus consumers might endure a five-minute outage once every two to four years. So that’s the standard that is extremely high and we’ve invested in it to maintain that. And plus, we are just coming off of five years, we had an inflationary increase, but five years flat rates. So the first thing that consumers care about is, and especially with the inflationary issues in our economy, can I afford electricity as we are using more and more of it? An electric vehicle, an induction heating in my home for cooking. So you look back and say, “Were you able to maintain electricity as affordable for the enhanced uses that’s being put to?” And second question, “Were you able, with this grid that’s gone from this one-way simple highway to this multi-directional, and I think that the grid is just being also the physical plus the information layer that flows on top of it, that allows us to optimize it, really able to take that grid that has its humble beginnings and transition it to where it supports this really complex dynamic environment on the grid?” So I would want to look back on that. And then, the one that, of course, is out there is what happened to energy supply? And were we able to locate enough new renewable resources? In 10 years, if you started today, you wouldn’t have a nuclear plant even up and started under construction. So on a ten-year horizon, you wouldn’t even see that. But are we on a path to engage overall society on the kind of resources that have to be out there broadly, and that means including localized on the roof, localized at the farm. A lot of people feel like that competes with the interest of the industry. We do not. We see all those sources as being needed. We have all this growth going on and we have challenges in siting, we better have as much localized as possible. So if I come back up, and I’m looking back at 2030, this integration of interests across edge of grid, distribution, and bulk, were we able to get that to happen? That’s a tall order. We think it can, but it’s going to require a lot of people to work together, where in the past there’s this competition going on, which is good, part of our society. But in order to get this to happen, it’s going to require so much alignment of interests and working together, and that’s something that co-ops are good at doing. Jon Powers: Greg, the first day that I got to my unit in Germany, I had a platoon sergeant who was smart enough to realize, here’s a young lieutenant walking in. He pulled me by my collar, around the side of the motor pool, and he said, “Look, there’s two types of leaders in the military. There’s those that lead by rank, and there’s those that lead by example.” It’s like soldiers are going to follow those that rank them because they have to, but they want to follow some that sets an example and sets the standard. And clearly, a lot of utilities are trying to lead by rank. You guys have definitely led by example. Thank you for doing that and setting the way for us to continue to move forward in the fight against the climate crisis. If you could, we just went forward, I’m going to go back to the day of graduation at West Point. You could take yourself out for a beer and sit down and give yourself a piece of advice, what would you say? Greg Ridderbusch: I think military leadership has so many parallels to what we do today. But for one thing, golden rule, always treat others as you would want yourself to be treated. Lead by example, right? You never expect anyone to do something that you’re not first willing to do yourself, and then also be able to listen to others. Let me share you my experience. So my first day after finishing Officer Basic, I went to my first unit. I was going to be a platoon leader, and my company commander puts me in front of, at this time, there was 70 people in a platoon. And my platoon sergeant, believe it or not, I still remember the gentleman’s name to this day, Sergeant Furtado. He could eat nails for breakfast. He was a Vietnam person, came back, he kept his troops alive. And what I learned was you may think you learned a lot at West Point. You may have thought you learned a lot at Officer Basic School, but here’s someone that has survived. He’s helped his troops survive. He has succeeded. And while that’s a military example, it’s the same thing when you come out into the working world at various levels, and now where I am today, you do not have all the answers. And you need to be humble to be able to appreciate the expertise of others, and to allow them to contribute and help make overall team success. So there’s so much from military leadership that translates across. And I’ll tell you, I’m forever grateful for the opportunity I had to do that for 10 years before jumping into this career. Jon Powers: Well, Greg, thank you so much for the time today and the leadership. Thanks to Rob Davis from your team, for helping to set this up. And Colin Young, who’s a producer here at Experts Only. Really appreciate the work you’ve done over time, and I hope you get a chance to catch your breath and enjoy your retirement, but stay in the fight because we’ve got a lot of work to do. Greg Ridderbusch: Very good, John. Well, I’m going to stay tuned in for sure, and thank you very much for your time today. It was just a very fun experience to do this. Jon Powers: Thanks so much. You can always get more episodes at CleanCapital.com, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.