What trees can teach us about running a sensible energy ecosystem

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Energy does.

At least, in a manner of speaking. We’ve been taught it since elementary school.

The sun is at the beginning of the food chain. Seeds sprout with water and grow towards the sunlight. Their little green leaves absorb sun rays, and the plant converts that light energy into chemical energy. Herbivores eat those plants to get the energy they need. Carnivores eat those animals to get the energy they need.

As omnivores, humans tend to do as we please. But the most fundamental reason we eat is for energy, and as my short explanation above was meant to convey, plants are a big part of it, whether we eat them directly or not.

Early on (and to this day), we burn wood for thermal energy.

We use the remains of dead plants for fuel, and our traditional power plants burn those same remains (or the remains of animals) to generate electricity. The funny thing is that we often look towards agriculture to solve our hunger problems. Still, maybe agriculture is better suited to solving our energy issues—not by burning plants but by learning from them.

Growing Power and Clean Energy

Imagine you could plant a tree on your roof that uses its leaves to gather sunlight and pump stored energy into your house. You don’t have to cut it down to get energy. It just sits up there and does its job. The roots tangle around the corners of your building and weave themselves into the electricity supply.

Now imagine your whole neighborhood planting these trees. From above, neighborhoods might look densely forested, and you’d probably enjoy the shade in the summer. The whole experience would be strange but beautiful. And clean. The energy would be growing from those trees. 

Now imagine that your tree’s roots are also connected to the roots of other trees in the neighborhood to form a huge network, much like how distributed energy resources connect to modern energy grids, strengthening each other and enhancing energy security.

It’s a nice fantasy, except for the last part. That isn’t part of the fantasy. Trees already do this.

“We often look towards agriculture to solve our hunger problems, but maybe it's better suited to solve our energy issues. Not by burning plants, but by learning from them.”

I moved a lot as a kid. My dad was in the military when I was born. I didn't recognize who he was until he came home from deployment one day. That was enough to set him on the path to retiring from the service. 

He soon took a position at a company where he started at the bottom rung but quickly began climbing to the top—prone to skipping a rung or two when he could. He worked hard, set records, and gave it everything he had. But when climbing the chain that quickly, you’re not likely to stay in one place. So we still moved a lot. 

Many parents worry about the effect moving so often can have on their kids. For me, though, I loved the adventure. We always have a new home to explore and new people to meet. 

I was excited by the variety of people in the world and learned that the places I lived, even just across the United States, could be vastly different—the way they looked, the way it felt to go outside, your mood swimming in a chlorinated pool under the blazing hot sun or in the algae-filled depths of a lake beneath constantly overcast skies. 

Even the air had different textures as it filled your lungs. The look and feel of seasons offered completely different expectations.

Of course, the trees stood like pleasant sentries along the highways, welcoming you to each new landscape. The tall pines of the Northwest laid plenty of shade for the less resilient vegetation to grow while offering them the sun's radiation. That Jurassic plant life gave way to the dry, humid climate when we lived in the desert. But there were always trees—pine, palm, and everything in between.

Pando The Trembling Giant

Despite all our moving, we always found our way back to Utah. I had plenty of family on both sides that lived there, so no matter the season, we’d come up with an excuse to see aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Beehive State.

Utah is widely known for its diverse and beautiful landscapes, perhaps the most famous being the snow-covered Wasatch mountains or the collection of breathtaking red rock arches in southern Utah. 

What’s less widely known is that Utah is also home to what was once considered¹ the largest living organism on the planet: Pando, the Trembling Giant. It’s a forest right about in the middle of the state.²

Why does this forest have a name, and why is it singular? Because it is one big organism. This “forest” is made up of approximately 47,000 genetically identical trees that are literally just mature branches of one single, ancient tree. It isn’t only one of the world’s most massive organisms but also one of its oldest, over a million years old.

Until fairly recently, we were largely unaware of the underground workings of trees.

However, scientists now find that many trees worldwide are linked in interconnected networks. And this discovery has revealed that, among other things, what’s going on down there facilitates “tree communication, memory, and learning.” These resilience trees demonstrate similar to how distributed energy resources facilitate reliability in a modern energy system.

They’re still unraveling all the implications, but scientists have already found that resiliency is one big reason trees appear to do this. Trees connected to these networks tend to live longer than those in isolation. And not just when conditions are nice—especially when they aren’t. Many have started to refer to these as “wood wide webs,” which strikingly parallel one of the biggest recent innovations in our power generation and energy supply models today.

The Problems of An Aging Grid and Peak Electricity Demand

You would be hard-pressed to imagine a world willing to give up all the convenience of energy to better the planet itself. Only the most zealous are willing to transition to a life completely off the grid. And even if everyone wanted to, it’s not feasible. 

We didn’t understand how to forage for food and stay warm without a central heating system. We need electricity and must deal with the devil to get it. How we’ve handled this for over a century is proving increasingly problematic in our modern world.

Electricity is one of those things you don’t notice (or appreciate) until it’s gone. It’s become such a fundamental part of our lives that we hardly know how to function without it. 

Earlier this year, Texas was hit with an unprecedented winter storm that knocked out the power and destroyed homes.⁵ Literally. The grid operator struggled to keep up with the surge in electricity demand, leading to a catastrophic power outage. The pipes froze, then burst, then destroyed. People lost everything to a few days of bad weather.

 How I Kept My Home Powered Through Recent Blackouts

However, not everyone was without power during the outage. What happened in Texas was a stark example of the benefits of solar and battery systems today, not in some hypothetical future.

For those homeowners with solar panels and battery systems, the crisis went almost unnoticed. When the grid went out, their backup power switched on instantaneously. And when the sun came up, their panels recharged their batteries using renewable energy, providing energy services that their regular utility couldn’t. 

This approach to powering homes worked so well in contrast to traditional power plants that it became part of the national conversation in a way it never quite has before.⁶

It’s clear that this works for individual homes. But what about entire communities? Some homeowners even use their solar and battery to charge their electric vehicles, showing the increasing synergy between clean energy and transportation sectors.

The Rise Of Virtual Power Plant

While natural scientists are uncovering the knowledge of ancient tree systems, solar innovators are applying similar principles to clean energy through virtual power plants—along with heat pumps and solar arrays—leveraged by grid operators to optimize energy usage.

A virtual power plant sounds silly, right?

The first thing I imagined was a little virtual power plant inside a computer game—something like crypto-currency—one of those things that is what it is simply because we say it is. But the truth makes a lot more sense than that.

"Virtual power plants reduce costs for all energy consumers by decreasing the need for massive investments in poles and wires while eliminating the need for distant, expensive, and polluting fossil fuel plants…"

- Lynn Jurich

A virtual power plant (sometimes abbreviated to VPP) is a power plant that is not in the shape of a power plant, hence the word virtual. The idea of a virtual power plant is similar to that of a solar farm, which is usually just a massive field of solar plants that produce electricity and send it to the users.

Solar farms are great. They tap into limitless renewable energy constantly raining down on our planet and ship it off to homeowners just like a utility would. As far as the user is concerned, it’s electricity as usual. The problem is that solar farms take up a lot of space. They occupy massive fields that can take up a lot more area than your usual smoke-belching power factory and they still require that the electricity be transported over long distances before it’s used.

The concept of a virtual power plant is to essentially take that solar farm idea but spread it across available roof space in a community and control the flow virtually. It’s like that otherworldly fantasy of planting trees on your roofs that we began with. But here’s the cool part: the idea of a virtual power plant is not a fantasy, it’s already working.

As these distributed energy resources become more common, homeowners might even be able to use the stored energy to charge electric vehicles, further enhancing the benefits of such a renewable energy system.

Building a Virtual Power Plant for a more resilient energy grid.

Sunrun alone has a dozen of these programs active or in the works. People who have solar are already contributing to the cause. By tapping into the shared network of solar owners out there, communities can come together to offer clean power to not only their own homes but to the broader community suffering from the terminal decay of aging grid systems. And it’s power generated right in the communities that use it. 

Distributed energy resources like the virtual power plant can also help with demand response and load management. Clean energy, less space. And just like a wood wide web, the solar arrays would take the energy they need, and share the rest with anyone who is lacking. Everything is great and no one would be the wiser—except when it counts.

When It Counts

Remember that Texas winter storm I mentioned earlier. Those with solar wanted to share and did the best they could. Many without it lost their home. Now imagine that your power goes out, your pipes might freeze, and a moment later your lights flicker back on. You shrug and get back to making some hot cocoa because a winter like you’ve never seen before makes you feel chilly just looking at it, but not because your heater isn’t working.

Essentially, when something interrupts power transmission flowing from the nearest single power plant, you’re out of luck. But if something disrupts power in a community run by a virtual power plant, the VPP can draw from the other power-generating panels and battery systems throughout the community to help compensate for any losses. It’s a better way to generate and distribute power, particularly as a demand response program during peak demand. Plus, it’s clean, it’s limitless, and it’s affordable.

It might sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. The only caveat today is that it’s not widespread. We still have a lot of work to do before we can get them operating across the nation, such as outdated energy infrastructure that a large portion of the country suffers from right now. And it needs buy-in from local administrations, utility companies, solar owners, non-owners, and everything else.

But the barrier isn’t science, or technology, or anything that you would think would pose the problem. Mostly, it’s just people deciding they want something to be better when they’re so accustomed to the status quo. But once people really consider the future virtual power plants can give us, building a true world-wide energy network isn’t that far-fetched... or far off.