That gap led them to create Sulis Energy, an energy solutions provider that has built microgrids for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the Orcas Center, a community and performing arts complex on Washington’s Orcas Island.

Sulis currently has 16 microgrid projects in various stages of development.

“The one thing that we found that's really critical to a project being successful is finding that anchor in a community who's interested in a multidisciplinary application of the project,” Virta said.

That anchor can be a local government official trying to balance decarbonization with improving resilience, but it's frequently the local emergency manager who ends up making a project happen, Virta said. Their existing relationships with faith groups, nonprofits and other community organizations are often what help identify where a project should be sited.

Cascadia and Sulis map a project's potential value across four areas — grid needs, community growth plans, climate resilience and emergency preparedness — to show communities how a distributed energy asset helps them meet their specific goals.

"Where can we find a place where there's a need at a grid level, at an economic business level, and also at a community level?" McSherry said.

The feasibility study is the mechanism that guides a community through that process — surfacing what resilience means to them, mapping the economic and technical hurdles, and grounding all of it in the specific geography and assets available.

For Virta and McSherry, it’s the essential first step in turning an idea into a microgrid that supports the grid and the community. But getting utilities to that table hasn't always been simple.

Working with the utility, not around it

Cascadia and Sulis intentionally focus on what Virta calls the "missing middle" — commercial- and industrial-scale projects that sit at the distribution level. "We like to call it the dance," Virta said. "The distribution system's the dance — it's where all the fun happens."

It's also where things get complicated.

Building at this scale can mean working directly with dozens of individual utilities, each with its own rules around interconnection, transmission congestion and resource adequacy. Historically, that's meant an oppositional relationship between the renewable energy industry and utilities. But that's starting to shift, Virta argued, because utilities are no longer just weighing intangible goals like decarbonization — they're facing a concrete capacity problem, and distributed assets are part of the answer.

Realizing that potential at scale requires standardization, McSherry said — shared agreements on interconnection, telemetry, dispatch and funding, so utilities know what they're getting, and communities and contractors know what's expected of them.

It also means designing these assets so they're not sitting idle waiting for a disaster: a microgrid that only activates during a once-a-century earthquake is a wasted resource, when it could otherwise be lowering costs for ratepayers or easing strain on the local grid day to day.

"If we could crack that nut and work really closely with the utilities and demonstrate how we can provide value to them, it makes it much easier for us to work as three collaborative partners — the community, the contractor and the utility — to build out Grid 2.0," McSherry said. “If we're oppositional, then we're going to keep falling over and falling over, because you cannot deploy a large number of distributed assets if every single one is a battle between those three groups.”

Creating microgrid-friendly environments

That kind of standardization doesn't happen on its own — it requires funding and regulatory groundwork. McSherry and Virta said the Pacific Northwest region is at the forefront of community-led microgrids because those states have prioritized both the funding and legislation necessary to create a microgrid-friendly environment.

In recent years, Washington and Oregon have invested heavily in microgrid projects as a way to meet growing demand, manage consumer energy costs and mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and natural disasters on the grid.

To date, Washington’s Department of Commerce has granted more than $77 million to community-led renewable energy projects and microgrids. Earlier this year, the Oregon Department of Energy awarded $12 million to microgrid, solar and storage projects.

While the funding is critical, it’s only part of the picture. The Oregon Public Utility Commission is now working to build the legal structures that will enable these projects to be developed at scale.

Docket AR681 is the rulemaking that will establish the state’s microgrid frameworks as directed by  House Bills 2065 and 2066. Signed into law last July, the bills pave the way for microgrids to provide resilience and advance local energy production and storage — helping insulate communities from rising electricity costs driven by load growth.

Among other things, the laws enable any local jurisdiction — including city, county and tribal governments — to designate microgrid development zones for resilience, economic development or resource adequacy purposes.

Jigar Shah, the director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, said in a recent LinkedIn post that AR681 could establish a fundamentally new approach to how microgrids are built, funded and connected to the distribution grid.

“If we get this right, it won't just be a win for Oregon. It becomes a replicable model for how every state PUC could think about distributed infrastructure investment,” Shah said.

A grid built together

For Virta and McSherry, their work in Washington and Oregon is a proof of concept for something bigger: a grid where communities aren't just customers, but owners and operators of the infrastructure that powers them.

Getting there will take utilities, contractors and communities choosing collaboration over the adversarial posture that's defined the industry for decades — a shift Virta believes is both necessary and already underway.

"There's something so exciting and empowering and galvanizing around energy systems that are owned and operated in communities," Virta said. "And I think that's where the future has to go."