Meet the Honorees: Duncan Campbell, VP of Project Analysis, Scale Microgrid Solutions

The Environment+Energy Leader Honoree program is an annual list that recognizes the environment and energy “doers” who break trail in creating new solutions, programs, platforms, best practices and products to help their companies – or other companies – achieve greater success in commercial and industrial environment and energy management. E+E Honorees Introduces… is an ongoing series that will feature one E+E Honoree from 2022 each week. See the complete list of 2022 Honorees here.

Meet Duncan Campbell, VP of project analysis with Scale Microgrid Systems, a company that builds commercial and industrial microgrids in a “completely new way,” explains Duncan. “Most companies start from a blank sheet of paper on every project — what combination of solar, batteries, generators, controllers, dispatch strategies, demand response programs, etc. should be used? While this may seem like typical engineering practice, by definition it produces a first of its kind project that has never functioned as one cohesive system before. Invariably, this leads to poor outcomes.”

Conversely, he says, Scale has developed a menu of pre-engineered component options that can be combined in any permutation. “Before evaluating at any particular project, we put immense effort into designing this system of component parts. Ultimately, this allows for projects to be quickly developed with less risk, and results in better performance.”

He adds, “For the first time ever, microgrids can meet a customer’s specific needs without necessitating one-off projects.”

Can you tell us a bit about what your team does?

Duncan Campbell: Scale’s Project Analysis team builds the internal project development tools that characterize these standardized options and make it possible to quickly design the best possible project for a customer. Using our tools, in just a few clicks our origination team is able to design projects, calculate utility savings and grid services value, simulate energy resilience outcomes, estimate construction and opex costs, generate financial projects, and ultimately price microgrid-as-a-service contracts for customers.

Tell us about your biggest energy management challenge and how you are addressing it.

DC: The world faces the dual challenge of preventing the worst impact of climate change and adapting to that which is already occurring. Mitigation (the prevention side of things) gets a great deal of attention, and for good reason. However we also need to address adaptation. Notably, our infrastructure was designed for a narrow band of operating conditions that never considered climate change.

In the power sector this has been made evident over the past several years. Take for example the record high 121 F temperature achieved in LA County that resulted in brownouts in the summer of 2020. For reference, consider that the most conservative max temperature value offered by the American Society of Heating and Cooling Engineers (ASHRAE) for designing air conditioning systems in the area is 91.4 degrees, which is supposed to cover 99.6% of hours in a year.

What I love about the work we do at Scale Microgrid Solutions is that we address both adaptation and mitigation. Not only do our systems reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus prevent additional climate change, they also make communities more resilient to the increased rate of public infrastructure failure that climate change will bring.

What was a successful project or implementation you worked on at your company that you can share? Please don’t hesitate to point out people in your organization who helped make it a success and who also deserve recognition.

DC: Scale’s Project Analysis team has recently built a new design and optimization tool that solves several fundamental microgrid development issues the industry has faced since its inception. All of the off the shelf, technology-agnostic microgrid design and optimization tools have long suffered from the same weaknesses: 1) they don’t estimate real project costs, 2) they don’t reckon with complex integration designs, and 3) they don’t utilize realistic financial models that the project finance community deems bankable.

Over its short lifespan, this new tool has dramatically improved our company’s abilities. Thanks to our standardized microgrid menu, we’ve always been able to develop projects better and more quickly than our industry peers. With this new optimization tool that advantage is even more enunciated.

I’d like to mention that Gauri Dixit and Dhruva Rao of my team were essential in creating this tool. They did all of the hard work — I mostly just pretended to understand how everything works.

What trends do you expect to see in the market in the next few years? What challenges will the industry face and what technologies or organizational changes will overcome them?

DC: I think the most disruptive trend in the electricity sector will continue to be the growing importance of distributed energy resources. Solar, wind, batteries, smart controls, networking technology, optimization models, etc., are all rapidly reducing in cost. Yet simultaneously, the cost of power transmission and distribution is flat or even rising in some cases. As this dynamic continues, value creation on the power system will migrate to the edges of the network, co-located with or near load.

The ramifications of this are under-appreciated. We should expect new loads to site next to existing energy projects, so as to avoid T&D costs. This will benefit both the project (contracted revenues above the wholesale price) and the industrial facility (cheaper power). Similarly, existing loads that cannot be moved or must be sited in a particular location will build their own power sources for the same reasons.

Layer in an immense amount of new demand to electrify transport and heating, which will only intensify this dynamic, and you can imagine a power system a few decades from now that is incredibly different from today’s. And since power is the fundamental input to society, the world we live in will likely be quite different as well.

Tell us about a favorite hobby, passion or book you’ve read recently that has had an impact on you and your work.

DC: My favorite hobby for the past few years has been helping organize a group called the DER Task Force, a grassroots community of folks working in distributed energy (professionals, academics, entrepreneurs, activists, etc.) that are trying to make an impact on energy policy and our industry’s direction. At a high level we use content and events to aggregate a community of awesome people, and then the community does cool stuff like commenting on Texas’s post-grid-collapse energy regulatory proceedings or raising $65k for emergency power in New Orleans after Hurricane Ida.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncansandersoncampbell/
Twitter: @duncan_c

Editor’s note: nominations are now open for this year’s E+E Honorees. Nominate a colleague — or yourself — for the 2022 E+E 100 today.