Chase Weir isn’t easy to unpack. But it is an endeavor that is worth it.
Weir gives the impression of being a quiet, perhaps contained man. But when he talks, ideas flow, and particularly about the electricity supply ecosystem.
I spent the best part of two days at the University Club in Washington talking to Weir about electricity and how the current crunch might be ameliorated.
Weir differs from many who talk about the future supply of electricity. He has questions and answers.
He isn’t a theoretician; he has been engaged in the electricity supply challenges since the founding of Distributed Sun in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman and CEO.
Weir is also the founder and CEO of truCurrent, which was spun off from Distributed Sun last year with $37.5 million in working capital to facilitate microgrid and distributed energy deployments across the nation.
In 2008, he created a Washington-based nonprofit at the nexus of energy and natural capital, Earthshot Foundation, to which he has contributed major funding. It shouldn’t be confused with Prince Williams’s Earthshot Prize, which came over a decade later.
Weir, 53, rejects my suggestion that he is the scion of a patrician Memphis family with deep roots in music and American history. His family motto has been vero nihil verius (nothing truer than truth) for nearly a millennium.
His first business success was acquiring the company that invented instant-response technology to measure audience reactions to television, film, political and advertising content. Many of the movies and sitcoms we know and love were first tested at his theaters at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and changed before they were distributed and broadcasted.
In a television interview, Weir told me he has been influenced by Robert Wright’s writing, particularly his 1999 book “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.”
Weir is driven by a philosophy that good society stems from abundant and intelligent systems rooted in societal wealth. And he believes smart, affordable electricity goes a long way to assuring economic security and prosperity.
While studying economics at the University of Memphis, Weir learned about intelligent system and discourse process design under Art Graesser, professor of psychology and intelligent systems. Later he studied management science at the University of North Carolina.
In the electricity sector, Weir is attracting attention not only from his business success, but also from his philosophical and systems approach to the grid and the electricity supply ecosystem. That approach is spelled out in three Forbes articles. He is a member of the Forbes Business Council.
The first of these posits that the grid is suffering from what Weir calls “kilowatt illiquidity.” He lays out a scenario where the grid should be compared to the financial markets — where liquidity is essential for business to survive and prosper.
“America is entering an energy moment that few business leaders fully appreciate or are prepared to meet. Demand is soaring as data centers and AI compute, EVs and electrification reshape the economy. Yet the grid that must power this growth is constrained by something deeper than congestion, cost or infrastructure delays. It is constrained by illiquidity,” Weir writes in his Dec. 18 Forbes article.
“If cash flow is the lifeblood of business, kilowatt hours (KWh) are the lifeblood of a modern economy and currently those KWhs are blocked, locked in place, trapped by time, geography, regulation and physical bottlenecks. We’ve built a system where electrons cannot move freely or be stored flexibly. They cannot be accessed on demand or treated like the currency they have already become.”
He declares,“This is the defining crisis of the grid: KWh illiquidity. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.”
Weir says the grid is designed around the highest peak demand on days like when it is hot and air conditioning is running flat out. Instead, he says, liquidity can come into the grid if it relies to a much greater extent on the flexibility provided in distributed energy resources (DER).
He believes networks of flexible microgrids are the key to the future liquidity of the grid.
The tools, capital and demand, are at hand, and he has been successfully deploying them since the creation of Distributed Sun. Its customer base spans the gamut of use cases, from utilities that have needed to harvest their DER possibilities to a national foodservice company that has needed a series of microgrids across its service territories, to GWh-scale battery storage to facilitate interregional transmission.
It doesn’t matter whether the source is behind the meter, in front of the meter or a mixture, Weir tells me. Flexibility, availability and operational choice is the key, freeing the electrons for their highest-use value.
Utilities are warming to the idea of liquidity.
In that same Forbes article, Weir writes, “Utilities are beginning to adapt. Xcel Energy’s distributed capacity procurement model allows batteries and other distributed assets to be rate-based across circuits, effectively extending ‘banking hours’ on stressed infrastructure.”
Likewise, Weir writes, “PG&E’s flex connect program lets large customers connect EV fast-charging and grid-scale storage faster without costly upgrades. Think of traditional loads as cash and flexible loads as credit: utilities can constrain flexible loads during peaks while core demand continues to flow.”
His third article explores the mechanics of time, return-on-time and intentional design, and will be published later this month.
In Weir’s view, electricity is the currency and the grid is the marketplace. But the marketplace hasn’t yet taken advantage of the technologies, like storage, which will liberalize and make it efficient. It needs banking to make its wealth available.
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