White House Chronicle

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Entrepreneur Weir Says Kilowatts Need Liquidity To Be Banked, Traded Like Money

Chase Weir, Vice Chairman and CEO, Distributed Sun

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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.

MET Group Advocates for Europe-Wide Energy Bank

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When Benjamin Lakatos speaks, energy people listen in Europe and increasingly farther afield.

Recently Lakatos, chairman and Group CEO of MET Group, has been speaking out strongly in favor of a European energy bank to correct some of the chaos which often convulses European energy markets and leads to general instability.

As laid out by Lakatos, in an interview with Mlex, an energy news service which is part of LexisNexis, the energy bank could be modeled on a central bank.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a lot of chaos with prices and supplies yo-yoing, often reflecting geopolitical uncertainty and state actions.

Some of the normal market protections, like long-term contracts, haven’t been effective, largely because vendors and buyers have found the market so unstable that they have been reluctant to enter into binding, long-term commitments.

MET Group, which is based in Zug, Switzerland, points out that the idea of a European energy bank is far from universal acceptance, but there have been adjacent ideas. One idea is that the energy bank could grow out of the European Central Bank, be an offspring enterprise.

The idea of a European energy bank has also been advancing in think tanks and in policy workshops.

“The ‘energy bank’ would have tools analogous to central banks: liquidity injections, ‘circuit breakers’ in trading, easing margin calls, guarantees, and counter party support,” Lakatos told Mlex.

Lakatos, just 49 years old, is the dynamic leader of MET Group, an integrated European energy conglomerate, which has grown from a gas trading company in 2007 to its current status as a heavyweight active in 21 countries, 33 national energy markets and 44 trading hubs.

Originally, MET Group was a subsidiary of MOL, a Hungarian energy company. It became an independent company in a management buyout in 2018.

The headquarters were moved to Zug because Lakatos, who headed the buyout and is MET Group’s largest stockholder, felt it was a better base for raising capital, from a tax point of view and quite possibly, but he didn’t say so, from a political one.

MET Group is a purchaser of U.S. liquified natural gas for distribution in Europe. From its base in natural gas, MET Group is heavily involved in renewables, wind and solar, and storage. It has endorsed the concept of energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and has become a leader in solar, wind and storage.

The company embraces forward-thinking and is 90 percent employee-owned with the remaining 10 percent held by Singapore’s Keppel Infrastructure.

In January 2026, Lakatos will move from Group CEO to his new role as executive chairman with emphasis on future strategies.

Lakatos seems to have no illusions about the size of the undertaking in persuading European institutions to sign onto the creation of an energy bank or the potential lethargy of government and established entities.

Lakatos’s concept of an energy bank is remarkably far- reaching and has no exact precedent anywhere. However, there are echoes of when Henry Kissinger created the International Energy Agency in 1974.

At that time, it was believed the IEA would act, in part, as an oil bank and that it would take an active role in opposing OPEC and monopolists controlling oil, after the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973. As time wore on, the mission of the IEA changed and it became more of a noticeboard agency than an executive one.

The story of the buffeting volatility of the European energy markets is told in MET Group’s own revenues.

Last year, it reported consolidated revenue of $17.9 billion. But in 2022, the year of the great shortages, its revenues were a staggering $40.5 billion. Its 2023 revenues were also high at $24.5 billion.

Interestingly, the call for an energy bank comes at a time when thought leaders are seeking to enhance the idea of European identity.

At a fall meeting of the Jean Monnet Association in France, at which I was present, there was a detailed examination of how those living in the 27-member European Union could feel a greater sense of common European identity. More clearly defined, Europe-wide institutions would help, the association’s members thought.