With the release of ILSR’s new report, “Mighty Microgrids,” ILSR is releasing two podcasts with the developers and regulators of microgrids in the United States. This is the second podcast.

In 2014, Chris Villarreal helped write the white paper, Microgrids: A Regulatory Perspective. As a regulatory analyst with the California Public Utilities Commission, he outlined the regulatory questions of microgrid development at a time when the state was mulling over how to allow more distributed, renewable energy come onto the grid.

The questions weren’t small or easy to answer. Microgrids naturally straddle the definitions of utility and customer, of supply and demand, of community- and utility-ownership. Their existence and emergence points to a not-so-distant future when utilities simply manage different communities of distributed power generators, a departure from the historical monopolistic ownership style.

Now Villarreal is a neighbor to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minnesota, working as the Director of Policy for the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. He recently chatted with John Farrell about microgrids, their many uses, and what policies help or hinder their growth.