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March 29, 2026
Hi Friend,
Headlines say US manufacturing is back. But that depends on what you mean by “back.” A wave of announcements is one thing. Getting projects financed, sited and actually built is another.
To understand what’s really happening, I went straight to someone making these calls in real time. Didi Caldwell advises industrial companies on where to build—and what she’s seeing right now is reshaping the entire siting equation.
There’s money. There’s policy support. There’s demand. What’s missing is far more basic: power. Not just affordable power—available power, on the timeline projects require. As Caldwell told me, the question has shifted. It was: Where is electricity reliable and cheap?Now it's: Where can we actually get it?
That problem is showing up everywhere. Smaller projects can’t interconnect. Larger ones are getting outbid by data centers.
And like data centers, manufacturers are becoming all about "speed to power.” That metric alone can determine whether a manufacturing facility project moves forward.
It's hard to miss the big opportunity this presents for distributed energy. But onsite energy may not be able to serve a large swath of these energy-hungry manufacturing facilities without some price innovation.
Check out what I learned writing today's feature: The Factory Boom Is Real—Until You Try to Plug It In
And hey, I've got some news that's clearly good for distributed energy. We all know that government policy is a strong market maker and breaker for energy of all kinds. New data from Pew Charitable Trusts shows that the states gave distributed energy significant support — of the record-breaking kind — in 2025. Check out our story: States Deliver a Record Year for Distributed Energy Policy: As the federal government pulled back, states pushed forward
Thanks for reading! Elisa Wood
From the Magazine
- States Deliver a Record Year for Distributed Energy Policy
- Fast Power. New Money. How the Data Center Race is Remaking Distributed Energy
- Good Times Ahead for Home Solar…Just Not This Year
- What Makes a Community Microgrid Actually Work? Start by Listening, Not Engineering
- Maryland Governor Proposes $100 Million Distributed Energy Auction
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Stuff We're Reading Around the Web
Tribal Microgrid Gets 100-MW Boost with New Tech Center
A 14-year-old off-grid tribal microgrid in northern California is about to get a data-center-scale boost as part of a project being built by Colusa Indian Energy, a tribal energy company, and Texas-based Strata Expanse, a data center developer.
The microgrid will serve a new technology center to validate next-generation AI workloads. It will plug into the existing microgrid, which the partners will expand to 100 MW over the next 18 months. The microgrid is on the land of the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Indian Community.
The project’s technology partners include DDN, Supermicro, NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD.
The announcement was made during the Reservation Economic Summit 2026 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where tribal nations gather to discuss economic development opportunities and innovation.
More here.
Grid Resilience is a $5.8 trillion market: JP Morgan
Global grid spending increased from $300 billion in 2020 to $480 billion in 2025, according to JP Morgan, and will reach $5.8 trillion between 2026–2035, with 12% ($700 billion) projected for digital-related grid capex.
The US alone will spend $1 trillion over the coming decade on grid reslience, with the bulk of it, 63%, on the distribution side of the grid.
In Europe and the Asia Pacific, spending will be even greater — about $1.1 trillion in Europe and $2.6 trillion in the Asia Pacific, with two-thirds from China.
More here.
Bad News and Not so Bad News for Residential Energy Storage
A new Wood Mackenzie report forecasts that the home energy storage market will contract by 2% this year. But that’s better than last quarter’s forecast, which expected a 6% contraction.
The uplift reflects interconnection backlogs, a rise in prepaid third-party ownership momentum as an alternative to customer ownership of batteries, and higher standalone storage assumptions lifting Arizona, California and Texas forecasts, according to WoodMac’s US Energy Storage Monitor for 2025 and Q1 2026.
WoodMac expects commercial and industrial storage to grow 39% from 2025 to 2030, due to emerging markets like New Mexico and Connecticut, and steady-growth states like California, Massachusetts and New York. And utility-scale storage is expected to double over that time frame, with average annual growth of about 16%.
Army Solicits Bids for Microgrid in Puerto Rico
Bids are due April 17 for a U.S. Army solicitation seeking a microgrid for Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico's greater San Juan metro region.
The project will include 8 MW of diesel generators, an optional 4-MW battery system, a microgrid control system, electrical interconnection switchgear, interconnection circuit wiring, and modifications to the existing electrical distribution system, as necessary to establish the Fort Buchanan microgrid network.
The microgrid will also include existing generation — a 4.65 MW solar array and two 275 kW wind turbines.
The request for proposals can be found on Sam.gov.
Clean energy supply chains are growing fast—but they’re also fragile.
That’s the key takeaway from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) new Energy Technology Perspectives 2026 report, which finds that most clean energy tech relies on a small number of countries—especially China.
Electric vehicles, batteries, and solar are particularly vulnerable to supply chain concentrations. And IEA sees little changing soon.
IEA conducted a stress test that found that every major supply chain has at least one weak spot.
And the economic stakes are real.
- A one-month disruption in Chinese battery exports could cut global EV output by $17 billion
- A similar hit to solar supply chains would reduce global PV manufacturing by about $1 billion per month
Meanwhile, demand is surging.
The global market for key clean energy technologies—currently about $1.2 trillion—could nearly double to $2 trillion by 2035, or even approach $3 trillion under stronger policy support.
More here.
Read more of our stories on Energy Changemakers and Microgrids Now.
3 Must Listen Podcasts
Are We Expecting Too Much from Virtual Power Plants?
Host Elisa Wood talks to three big thinkers in the electric power industry: Lorenzo Kristov, Kay Aikin, and Mark Paterson, who explain what it will take to create a democratized electric grid. Our guests also take on common grid fictions, such as the belief that virtual power plants offer an “easy button” for managing distributed energy. They offer a vision for a decentralized grid and describe programs in Colorado, Maine, and Australia paving the way.
Off Grid and Urban: An Apartment Building that Signals the Future
Veteran energy innovator Steve Pullins, CEO of ResSET, unveils his latest venture, a highly unusual sustainable apartment building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, set to be entirely off-grid. While foregoing a grid connection isn’t typical, especially for a city building, Pullins maintains it’s time to think of the electric grid as just one of several energy options, not the default.
Called South Town, the project strives to reduce housing costs using several novel strategies, including providing a shared electric vehicle fleet for building occupants. Pullins also designed the energy system based on the kilowatts actually used by appliances — not the generic nameplate ratings — which led to significant energy savings.
An Energy Economist on the Abundance Agenda
Right now, the term "energy abundance" seems to be everywhere. It springs from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance, which argues that we have too many rules and procedures bogging down the construction of clean energy, housing, and other needed infrastructure. While the book has created debate in both the power industry and political arenas, this episode moves away from the politics of abundance to focus on the economics of abundance.
Energy economist Mariko Geronimo Aydin explores how the abundance agenda fits into an industry where markets traditionally make money via scarcity, not abundance. Mariko offers unique insights into thinking about energy abundance from an economist's perspective and shares the innovative work happening at the Earthshot Foundation through their Gridiron Dialogues.
Thank you for spending time with Energy Changemakers today!
