This is the Catery Daily podcast for Thursday, April 3rd, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown. Home-based or small electricity co-ops can exist in tension with larger producers of electricity.

One provides residential or small-scale electricity. The other makes the grid more stable.

Lynn Kiesling is director of the Institute for Regulatory Law and Economics at Northwestern University.

We spoke last month in Louisville, Kentucky about how best to resolve that tension.

I think you and I have probably talked about this in a different forum, but the same new energy production, if it's rooftop solar, it's the main one I'm thinking of. I view that as a tremendous opportunity

to have the vast majority of the electricity that I consume

being generated during the day,

stored in a battery in my basement.

I was looking up the capacities of various batteries.

Generac has one, 36 kilowatt hours, which is not too shabby. But that opportunity for me,

for a large facility that produces electricity, that's a threat.

And so how do you evaluate that tension that exists right now?

It's a substantial tension.

And I think the last time we talked about this,

the technologies for solar were not as mature and the costs had not fallen as much

as they have. You know, in the past five years, the costs of producing solar panels and the

energy efficiency, you know, the bang for the buck that you get out of solar panels has improved a lot.

And you get this other feature that you just alluded to of it's local, it's mine, you know, I have some self-sufficiency, I can control it.

I know what I can and cannot rely on. So it's more reliable for you.

Storage has come down in costs very dramatically. And we're at a real junction right now in power systems

and modernizing power systems where the opportunities to do what you just described

...