Mari McClure, CEO and president of Green Mountain Power. Photo courtesy GMP.
by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine, VermontBiz.com
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? In Vermont, the more important question might be: Does it cause a power outage?
Climate change is real, climate change is here and because of climate change, Green Mountain Power, along with its president and CEO, Mari (pronounced “Mary”) McClure, 43, stand on the revolutionary edge of our energy future.
Think about this year’s major weather events: the March snowstorm that left up to 4 feet of heavy, wet snow in southern Vermont; May’s heavy frost that destroyed most of the state’s apple crop. the Great Vermont Flood in mid-July; heat waves over the Fourth of July and Labor Day holidays.
To be sure, this year’s weather has taken a serious toll on even the hardiest of Vermont residents. And the immediate future promises more of the same.
With most of its power lines exposed, Green Mountain runs approximately 77% of the power in the state. It services about 270,000 customers in 202 municipalities, spanning 7,500 square miles. So keeping the power flowing in all kinds of weather is among GMP’s top priorities.
That is why, under McClure’s leadership, GMP is transitioning from a traditional utility into a technology company.
McClure, who was a basketball star in high school and college, is using the skills she learned on the court to shape Vermont’s sustainable energy future.
“I’m not sure I can overstate the impact basketball has had on my life — even today,” McClure told me when we met at GMP’s district office in Brattleboro. “The highs and lows have shaped my leadership. At the core of it all is being part of a team. Being deeply understanding of the value and necessity of every member of the team is a profound thing.”
“Resilience” is one of McClure’s favorite watchwords.
“It means staying connected no matter what,” she said. “In the face of extraordinary weather and climate change, our customers have access to technology that keeps the power on when they need it most. Resilience has always been an important part of my life, and this has informed all my work at GMP as CEO. It is the focus that the team and I are bringing now in the face of climate change, which is the biggest hardship of our time.”
Photo: Mari McClure, CEO and president of Green Mountain Power. Photo courtesy GMP.
GMP’s investments in new technology go wide. It owns solar fields. It is building an all-electric community in South Burlington. It is developing microgrids. It is burying power lines. It is helping customers to install heat pumps, solar panels and electric storage batteries. And it is offering rebates on electric vehicles.
“For over 100 years, we were an electric distribution utility,” McClure said. “For the past decade or so, we were an energy transformation company, offering new products and services on the edges of our traditional business. Now we are fast becoming a technology company.”
The future, as McClure sees it, is an energy delivery system that is two-way, 100% carbon-free and supported by a strong distributed grid.
“Our customers will be both consumers and producers, and we will connect it all together to maximize value and minimize cost,” McClure said. “Technology will be at the heart of what we do.”
McClure, an attorney who has worked for GMP since 2010, took the helm in September 2019 when the company’s former CEO, Mary Powell, resigned. Powell is now the CEO of Sunrun, a leading residential solar, storage and energy-services company.
“It has been so wonderful to watch the incredible success Mari has been able to achieve in combatting climate change and leading the nation in delivering an innovative model for what a utility can do to improve the lives of those they serve, through rapid innovation and scaling fast,” Powell said of her successor. “The world is in a better place having someone like Mari at the helm of GMP.”
GMP has a well-earned reputation for operating on the cutting edge. In 2014, it became the first utility in the country to earn B Corp certification. Years ago, the company was leasing heat pumps and Tesla Powerwalls. Now it is out of the leasing business, and the wait for Powerwalls is about two years.
“We are still in the heat pump business,” McClure said. “We just transitioned from directly installing and leasing to instead providing direct incentives. We did this because the market fortunately matured — our program gave it a lift — and then we were able to instead transition to reducing the upfront costs for customers with incentives, which they told us they liked.”
GMP is wholly owned by Énergir, an energy company based in Montreal. Its leadership team, however, works independently to set the company’s vision and strategy and manage operations.
“Local management and decision-making, with strong connections to the communities we serve, is crucial to our success. I wouldn’t do this job without it,” McClure said. “Énergir is very supportive of our work, including our transition to becoming a technology company that delivers clean and resilient energy to Vermont. We are also regulated by the Vermont Public Utility Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Gov. Phil Scott thinks of McClure as a visionary partner.
“Mari has brought drive and focus to GMP, and she truly cares about Vermont and our values,” Scott said. “During times of crisis, she is always willing to step up and partner with me and my team. Whether it’s responding to severe weather events or, during the pandemic, serving on my Pandemic Employer and Technical Support Team, she follows through and delivers for Vermonters. GMP is fortunate to have someone with her leadership and work ethic at the helm.”
Under McClure’s leadership, GMP in 2022 was named to Time’s list of “100 Most Influential Companies” and to Fast Company’s “Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in North America.” This year, Smart Electric Power Alliance honored GMP as a nationwide leader in energy transformation for the second time in three years.
McClure has also won her share of individual honors. These include Top 20 C-Suite Sustainability Champion (GreenBiz Group, 2020); 100 People Transforming Business (Business Insider, 2021); and Top 100 Women Impact Leaders (Real Leaders magazine, 2021).
A 5-foot-10 ball of energy, McClure knows how to command a room, a trait that serves her well as the leader of a company that employs 520 people across 15 district office in every part of the state.
During our conversations, McClure demonstrated a wicked sense of humor, a strong sense of responsibility to her customers and almost no ego.
“I make mistakes every day,” she said. “I drive too fast. I’m divorced. I don’t call my parents enough. I don’t take enough vacation. Sometimes I get frustrated and take it out on somebody. I mean, I’m such a normal human being and I make all the same mistakes everybody else does.
“But I take very seriously what we do. When you’re in this business, failure is life-threatening. I don’t take that lightly. I don’t ever want to have to point to a mistake in that way. What we do is very serious. We provide electricity for people in their homes and offices. People rely on electricity in their lives.”
By most metrics, Vermont has taken a leading role in the fight against climate change. For example, the state reached the notable number of 10,022 electric vehicles in July, according to Department of Motor Vehicles
registration data tracked by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources and the nonprofit Drive Electric Vermont.
McClure herself sits right on that cutting edge. That extends to the vehicle she drives: a black Ford F-150 Lightning, which can power her laptop and phone while hauling the wood she cuts from her own land — or her house, when there is an outage.
Hoosier and Hoops
McClure was raised in the basketball-mad state of Indiana and started playing at about 3 years old. She quickly became a superstar.
As a freshman in high school, she made the varsity basketball team; during her senior year, she was named team captain. McClure also captained the women's basketball team at SUNY-Buffalo (now known as the University at Buffalo) during her junior and senior seasons and was voted team MVP her senior year.
“What I remember most about her is her commitment to excellence,” said Cheryl Dozier, who coached McClure during her last three college seasons. “Despite having some pretty bad knees, she was probably one of the toughest kids — if not the toughest kid — I ever coached. She’ll probably kill me for saying this, but her kneecaps used to pop out of place. The trainers would slide them back in, and she’d be right back in the game.”
Photo: McClure was captain of the women’s basketball team at U-Buffalo. Photos courtesy GMP.
McClure was a natural leader, Dozier recalled.
“She was extremely competitive, but dedicated to the team,” Dozier said. “She would do anything I needed, or anything a teammate needed. She just wanted to win. And we won a lot. We didn’t win a championship, but we had a couple of 20-win seasons. And she was one of the kids that catapulted the program and allowed us to recruit at a higher level. It helped put Buffalo on the map.”
McClure graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, she worked as an assistant women’s basketball coach at Colgate University before returning to the University at Buffalo to earn a law degree. Her first job post-law school was at Downs Rachlin Martin in Brattleboro, Vermont.
“She joined us as an associate lawyer,” said Peter Kunin, the managing partner at DRM. “She worked in our business law group, which helps entrepreneurs set up companies, foreign corporations or partnerships. It helps them with raising capital and raising money to fund their businesses. She negotiated contracts for clients and helped with purchases and sales of privately held businesses, essentially acting as a business adviser on legal matters and helping our clients solve complex problems.”
Kunin praised McClure’s “kindness, generosity and modesty.
“She very quickly demonstrated an aptitude for learning and an ability to grasp complex issues, understand them, drill down and propose solutions within the parameters of the law,” Kunin said. “In her dealings with people, she stood out because she is such a kind person. And she’s very generous with her time with people, helping them, teaching them. She took the time to get to know people at all levels of our organization. And she’s very modest about her abilities. There’s not a trace of arrogance in her. It’s just not part of her DNA.”
DRM was “thrilled” to have McClure for four years, Kunin said.
“Mari is very happy to have other people grab the spotlight even though she’s the driving force behind the success of a project,” Kunin said. “So very, very much a team player. She was well-liked here at DRM, and she’s succeeded in really making a difference at Green Mountain Power in her various roles. It has not surprised people.
“We kind of knew and expected that she would do important things for the state of Vermont. We don’t claim credit for her or the fundamental attributes that make her a leader, but we’re happy to see her succeed.”
When McClure moved over to GMP, she worked in almost every department before becoming president and CEO.
“I feel like there’s nothing she can’t accomplish,” said State Treasurer Michael Pieciak. “She’s one of the most competent leaders in the state of Vermont. And it’s not just competency. She is sort of a visionary as well. She’s the kind of leader and kind of person who you could throw any issue at, and she’ll figure out a way to untangle it. She’ll solve it and do it in a creative way and also do it in a way that everybody felt good about and was successful.”
Pieciak, who played football in college, understands how McClure’s athletics background bolsters her leadership abilities.
“It means understanding that everybody has a role,” he said, “and teamwork goes both ways. You, as the member of the team, have to recognize your role and execute it well. And as the leader of the team, you have to understand who will be successful in which roles. You have to explain (to each employee) their role and get them to buy into why their role, even though it’s not the superstar-in-the-limelight role, is important to the overall success of the team.”
Lisa Ventriss, a former president of the Vermont Business Roundtable who has known McClure for many years and currently sits on the GMP board, also makes the connection between sports and leadership.
“I can tell you that Mari is a very effective leader,” Ventriss said. “She has taken a very successful part of her previous life as a collegiate athlete and applied it to her professional life as CEO. She really is a player-coach, if you will, of people and organizations.
“She works to bring out the best in her senior leadership team. She lets them do their thing and work towards goals. She doesn’t appear to be micromanaging them. She’s a good communicator. She does not dominate. She tells you what the goals are, what the plan is and then people go and execute them.”
McClure is “definitely driving the energy bus in Vermont,” Ventriss said.
“She’s bringing all of that innovation, all those ideas to Énergir,” Ventriss said. “Obviously, it’s a conversation that goes both ways. But Mari is definitely creating the plan in concert with the parent company. She’s very much in charge of delivering on those plans.
“I think she’s absolutely the person for the times,” she added, “but these times are short-lived. This is a period of time that we’re really going to have to work hard through for another decade. I think she’s got the energy and the vision and the drive to do that. We’re very happy to have her.”
McClure lives in Jericho with her spouse, Amanda Kennedy, who works in real estate, and their four sons.
“I have four amazing boys in my life, from two relationships,” McClure said. “Two are teenagers and two are in elementary school. The older boys play hoops. And who knows, maybe the younger ones will too! I love watching them thrive. Amanda and I love music and travel, and we love working around our property doing all the Vermont-y things that we all do, like cutting and stacking wood.”
Early Life
McClure is the youngest of three children. Her father worked in the auto industry and her mother was a teacher at a Montessori school. Both of her parents are now retired and living in Tennessee.
McClure wryly suggests that her parents decided to torment her by calling her Mary, but spelling it “Mari.”
“My parents decided I was unique, even though I told them they’re torturing me my whole life,” she said. “I have asked for the origin of the spelling, and there really isn’t one. All I get is, ’We thought you were unique.’ I’ve only met one other person in my life with that spelling. I have to correct people all the time, everywhere, in anything I’ve ever done. Now, I’ll respond to anything with an “M,” because I’ll get Maria or Marie.”
Taking the letter M theme further, McClure’s two older brothers are Mitch and Mike.
Without hesitation, McClure calls her parents the most influential people in her life.
“That is largely for their kindness and their discipline,” she said. “They were always looking to help others. As a kid, that wasn’t always clear. But when you get older and you realize the demands on adults, you think back to how your parents were.
“I don’t know how, for instance, my parents managed two demanding jobs and a middle-class family,” she continued. “They really prioritized others. I learned the importance of that. And then they’re very disciplined. My mother is a teacher, and we had the highest standards placed on finishing things you’ve committed to. I learned from my parents the importance of keeping your promises and your commitments, particularly to your teammates and other people.”
McClure’s love of basketball was born in the state of Indiana, where basketball hoops are ubiquitous.
“That’s a big state for basketball,” she said. “Most of my extended family, including my parents, are from Indiana. In Indiana, basketball is in the water. There are a lot of opportunities for youth, particularly at a really young age, to get involved. My parents are both lovers of basketball. My dad played in high school. My brothers played. So I found myself surrounded by lots of sports, but in particular basketball. I loved it once I started playing it. There was no slowing that down.”
The family moved to Michigan when McClure was 11. It was a difficult adjustment for her.
“My father started his career in the automotive plants for General Motors, and he sort of worked his way through and became a quality control expert,” McClure said. “Then he got hired in a place outside Detroit. So we moved, which was devastating for me because I had such roots down there with basketball, and I really wanted to play in Indiana. Moving away was very hard at that age.”
In Michigan, the family landed in Rochester Hills, a wealthy city best known for being the childhood home of the singer Madonna. She and McClure went to the same high school, Rochester Adams, although at different times.
Despite her apprehensions, McClure quickly fell in love with the area. “It was a wonderful place to grow up, and it had a lot of sports,” she said. “Obviously, the Midwest is a big basketball part of the country.”
At McClure’s suggestion, I called her old high school coach, Fran Scislowicz. Now retired, but still coaching varsity softball, he was flattered that he had made such a strong impression on McClure.
“Mari came to us as a freshman,” Scislowicz said. “She started playing varsity basketball as a 13-year-old at Rochester Adams. She was competing against 17- and 18-year-olds. It’s very unusual to be that young and to be that gifted and talented. She was one of the better players ever to come out of Rochester Adams. When she arrived that freshman year, we had a really good returning team. She knew she was going to have to work very hard to get on the court. And that is what she did. She spent hours in middle school preparing for her varsity basketball career. And when she got here, she was a young, real tall, thin, wiry point guard for us.”
The team had a winning season and almost contended for a state championship.
“We ran 24-2,” Scislowicz said. “We went to the Final Four of the whole state of Michigan that year, and that doesn’t happen very often. That was the start of Mari’s career as a young player.”
Even then, McClure was a team player, Scislowicz said.
“She was the kind of athlete who looks to assist and help teammates at all times,” he said. “She didn’t care who got the praise or who got the credit. She was there just to support. And she did that for all four years. Her drive really started to show at an early age. As she developed her leadership skills during her junior and senior years, her ability to relate with younger players really helped her.”
The team went on to win four straight league titles.
“Mari was just the most level-headed person,” Scislowicz said. “You would never know who she was when she walked down the halls, because she would always deflect any of the praise to her teammates. I knew she was going to become one of those special people. She was so team-oriented back then that I’m sure her employees now are her team and she probably leads the same way: She pours it into them and lets them have the success.”
Because she worked so hard at sports, McClure never held a paying job in high school.
“I remember distinctly a conversation with my father,” she said. “I wanted to go somewhere, maybe it was for spring break. I asked if I could get a job for a short time to help pay for it. And he said to me, ’You know, you have the rest of your life to work.’ I think it was because of sports, largely. If I was just sitting home doing nothing, he would have told me to go get a job. But they were allowing me to have my childhood in that way.”
Leaving Home
McClure’s assistant coaching job at Colgate after graduating from Buffalo not only suited her, it laid the groundwork for her future career as well.
“The athletic director at Colgate at the time was Mark Murphy,” McClure explained. “He’s now the CEO and president of the Green Bay Packers. He was a lawyer. I said, ’Mark, I think I want to be an athletic director.’ I saw how he led that athletic department and all the coaches. I liked the idea of building something relative to all the various kinds of sports. I liked the influence I could have on a lot of student athletes.
“At this point,” she continued, “I’m 23 years old, out of college and living in Hamilton, New York, in the middle of nowhere. I’m watching and learning from Mark’s leadership and thinking to myself, ’That’s something I would love to do.’ And he indicated that a law degree is a great way to get into NCAA compliance. That was the path he took.”
So McClure returned to Buffalo and got her law degree. “And then I had loans,” she said. “Law school was very expensive. And as you know, the years go by quickly. It’s a three-year program. And I needed a job.”
Coming to Vermont
It seems that pure chance — or fate — brought McClure to Vermont.
“I’m walking by the bulletin board, and I see a job posting for a firm in Burlington, Vermont,” McClure said. “They’re hiring a first-year business law associate. And I say, ’That’s cool.’ I liked what I had read about Vermont. I had read about civil unions in my law school classes. And I liked how Vermont was small, yet on the edge of all the important innovations. Every time you saw a major change in society, or big a innovation, somehow Vermont was connected. So I said, ’I’m going to apply for that.”’
Downs Rachlin Martin offered McClure an informal interview.
“I wasn’t paid by the firm to come out,” McClure said, “but they invited me for an interview with them. I eventually got the job. That’s the long story of why I’m not an athletic director.”
McClure enjoyed doing corporate law.
“I didn’t have the litigator mindset,” she said. “At DRM, we had a very teamwork-oriented mindset. Business lawyers and their clients tend to want to get a deal done. And if there are lawyers on the other side of whatever deal it is, they also want to get the deal done. Both lawyers and both sets of clients are seeking a similar outcome. You might have negotiations, but you have a similar outcome. That resonated with me more than sitting in a trial and having an adversarial set of circumstances.”
Green Mountain Power, as it turned out, was one of McClure’s corporate clients. “I knew many of the team at GMP at the time I did business law,” McClure said. “So I helped GMP with corporate stuff, financings, contracts, governance, things like that.”
In 2010, McClure joined the utility.
“I was drawn to the transition of the grid’s energy supply to clean, renewable energy — and away from fossil fuel-based resources,” McClure explained. “It was clear to me that the location of that supply must be much closer to where it is used. So there was the need to decentralize the grid and connect it all together in new and different ways than the old grid ever contemplated. Those big changes weren’t clear yet when I made the decision to come to GMP, but I wanted to be a part of that important work as early as I could.”
Taking the Reins
McClure is famous for bringing a basketball style of management to GMP.
“It takes a lot of people figuring out how to come together to produce a work product,” McClure said. “It’s the same thing that is happening on the basketball court. Of course, what we do at GMP is more critically important to society, just from the standpoint of keeping people safe. But it’s very similar in terms of the skill sets I have to deploy to get the job done well.”
In order to win a championship at the collegiate level, McClure added, you have to play a whole season with the goal of winning.
“That’s what most teams want to do,” she said. “You win. And we won. We didn’t win the NCAA championship or anything like that. But we won a lot of games. And in order to win a championship, you really do have to bring together a team of people that are all rowing in the same direction and who are purpose-driven to achieve a common goal.
“Most importantly,” she continued, ”you have to figure out a way to deploy their talents and not their egos. And that’s one of the most important things I do at GMP, an organization where there are very talented people. Whether it’s a group of lineworkers or our technology team based in Rutland, I’ve got to take super-talented people, help them see and believe in a common purpose and deploy their talents and not their egos.”
GMP’s teams respond to weather events happening throughout the state. It seems like an endless struggle, but McClure is more focused on crafting a long-term strategy.
“I’m just drawing up plays, finding the best people to run those plays and having them run it together as a team,” McClure said. “And that is not easy. But it is so important. It’s the difference between a team that wins a championship and a team that doesn’t. And it’s the difference between an organization that (struggles to succeed) and one that gets really good outcomes for their customers.”
Climate Change
Climate change has become one of society’s most pressing problems, McClure said.
“Climate change used to be hard to talk about,” she said. “Now everybody sees it all around. And what’s really more important is, what are we going to do about it? I’ve been at this organization going on 14 years, and there’s no doubt that we’ve seen climate change happen over time here, particularly in the last five years. Before, if we experienced an extreme weather event, it would quickly exit the state, giving us and others an opportunity to go out and fix the lines. Now, the storms are coming in and they don’t necessarily leave right away. So we are having to deal with much more extreme and frequent weather.”
Photo: GMP employee works through deep snow last winter. Photo courtesy GMP.
As an example, McClure pointed to the very wet snowfall last year.
“When we got precipitation, the snow that came down wasn’t light and fluffy Wet snow is very heavy. It sits on the trees. It sits on the lines. It knocks over things. This past winter, in the southern part of the state — Brattleboro, Wilmington, Halifax, Sunderland — we’ve never seen anything like that heavy wet snow. It was like cement was falling from the sky. So we’re out restoring the power lines, and our crews are coming up upon 4 feet of snow. How are we even going to get to this infrastructure when it’s in the middle of a field?”
Resiliency
Climate change has required McClure and GMP to develop new strategies for the future. First and foremost, the company is seeking to bury power lines whenever and wherever it can.
“Historically, the cost of ’undergrounding’ our lines was astronomical compared to the cost of the overhead lines,” she said.
“You just couldn’t justify it from a cost perspective. Now, the technology allows for much longer spans under the ground than there used to be. The technology has gotten better and cheaper.”
As roadside vegetation gets higher with a longer growing season, the cost of keeping it trimmed and mowed grows as well; that makes it even more cost-effective to bury the lines.
“When looking at the cost of underground compared to the cost of the overhead, it’s now becoming much more cost-effective to put it under the ground,” McClure said. “Of course, in Vermont we’ve got ledge and other parts of our geography we have to deal with. But one big aspect of our planning over the next five to 10 years is to underground a significant portion of our lines in central and southern Vermont.”
The biggest transformation — and the one in which Vermont is leading the nation — is helping the public become energy producers as well as energy customers. It is the idea behind the electric truck.
“This is about battery storage,” McClure said. “It’s tying the electric vehicles into the grid. This is where you really get customers having energy independence and resilience at the same time. Imagine a world where you’re in a small town like Dummerston and you have an outage on the grid 10 years from now. But you have an electric vehicle. And that vehicle keeps your house lit up while the grid gets fixed.”
The Microgrid
A microgrid is essentially a small grid that can operate independently from the larger grid during outages.
“It allows those customers within it to stay powered up even when the larger grid is damaged by severe weather,” McClure said. “This all ties into our conversation about resiliency, and insnovative ways to keep everyone connected.”
Historically, Vermont gets electric power from wind, water, nuclear energy, natural gas and the sun. It is close to 100% free of fossil fuels and will be almost 100% renewable by 2030.
All of this electricity flows through the Independent Systems Operators New England power grid.
“ISO New England is the regional grid operator,” McClure said. “Let me give you a basketball analogy. We’re part of a team in the region. Vermont’s grid is interconnected to other states’ grids. So, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, everyone is feeding into this grid.”
In February 2021, when Texas was hit with a series of serious storms, most of the state lost power for weeks. That was because Texas is not connected to a multi-state grid; it could not import the power its citizens needed.
“If Vermont was in some sort of trouble the way Texas was, our grid is interconnected to other regions,” McClure said. “We’d be able to access big power if we needed it. Or vice versa, if we needed to play a part to help other parts of the region. ISO New England is the keeper of all that.”
Green Mountain Power is responsible for generation, transmission and distribution in Vermont. But that will be changing, McClure said.
“Instead of a big, centralized grid, we will have a decentralized grid,” she said. “You, as a customer, will now have a two-way relationship with the grid. We will have generation assets on the distribution system. The generators are in people’s driveways, in people’s basements and on people’s roofs.”
This will make for many microgrids.
“All over the state, we’ll be able to generate and distribute the power right where it’s needed in communities,” McClure said. “Storage was a big game changer for this model. We were never able to store electricity, except in the kind of little batteries that you put in your Walkman. But we now can store electricity for much longer periods of time.”
In the future, individual customers will generate and store their own electricity.
“When the greater grid goes down, we’d have these microgrids all over the state,” McClure said. “And customers would stay powered up while we fix the grid.”
This future might be a hard sell in some towns, where it is difficult just to get a permit to build an apartment house. How do you sell people on having a large solar field, for example?
“We were just in Dover,” McClure said. “They’re getting a permit to underground. We’ve got our teams deployed all over the state. Our employees live in these towns. They’re the customers, the consumers, the neighbors of all these people. And that helps. The first thing we have to do is go to towns, communicate with them, tell them what we want to do. We have to respond to their concerns. We have to establish trust. And then we have to deliver. And that’s how we’ll do it.”
Panton
This future is already here, for those who haven’t noticed..
Take a look at Panton, a small town on Lake Champlain in Addison County. The population was 646 in the 2020 census.
In 2021 GMP pioneered the microgrid there — the first in the nation.
“We started there,” McClure said. “We got to know the town, we got to know what their needs were. And we figured out a plan on how to deliver a much more resilient community.”
The plan was to build a solar farm, 4.9 megawatts in size, with a large storage facility attached to it.
“It’s a distribution circuit — the poles and wires that deliver energy to local homes and businesses — that can disconnect from the greater grid during a storm and still keep customers connected using solar power and batteries alone,” McClure said. “No fossil fuel is involved at any point. We started with about 50 customers. That is still true today, but it can expand to include hundreds more in town.”
In the event of storm damage or a prolonged grid outage, the Panton microgrid enables backup power from the batteries and solar panels to flow to a network of customers who are served by the traditional grid. The concept is called “islanding,” and it creates backup power that can work independently from the larger electric system when needed.
“In Panton, the tracker solar panels follow the sun and can stretch the battery backup power for days, if necessary,” McClure said.
The plan is replicable.
“It is the foundation for our Resiliency Zone projects that are helping communities across the state stay connected, even in severe storms,” McClure said.
South Burlington
An interesting variation on the microgrid is the “Resilient Neighborhood” in South Burlington. Here, Green Mountain is partnering with the property development company O’Brien Brothers to build an all-electric, fully storm-resilient, 155-home neighborhood on land the O’Brien Brothers own.
“I’m really excited about this,” McClure said. “They approached us, I think, first to talk about this idea around a zero-carbon home. We’ve been working with them for years to figure this out. This neighborhood is exactly everything that I’ve just described, and we want to bring it to other parts of the state as well.”
There will be low-income housing, market-rate housing, multiuse buildings and duplexes.
Photo: Groundbreaking at Hillside East at O'Brien Farms. Photo courtesy GMP.
“It’s really a neat community they’re putting together there,” McClure said. “That neighborhood will be completely resilient. There will be solar on the roofs and storage in the homes, and it will all be connected to the grid. Electric vehicle charging will already be in the homes, also connected to the grid. So, for example, if a major storm hits that area of the state, those customers are powered up with the solar and the storage while we fix the grid.”
The power will flow two ways.
“Say it’s a super-hot summer day with no weather threat,” McClure said. “If we have a high demand for electricity elsewhere, we’d be able to tap into the stored energy in those homes to lower costs for the greater grid.”
The customers give unused power back to GMP for a financial incentive.
“You’ll have storage in the basements, and then we’ll have our own big storage units as well,” McClure said. “We can keep that neighborhood completely functioning — technically, indefinitely — while we fix the grid.”
The idea can extend to the entire New England grid.
“Say Vermont does everything right,” McClure said, “and Boston doesn’t. Let’s say Boston doesn’t have enough supply to meet their demand. You’ve probably heard of this happening in other parts of the country — they’re called rolling blackouts. The phone rings in Vermont, and they say, ’Vermont, congratulations! You’re a part of our regional team; you need to shed a certain amount of megawatts because there’s not enough supply in the region.’ Well, what would we do? We can take the O’Brien neighborhood completely off the grid and the customers don’t notice because they have solar storage. In that sense, Green Mountain Power moves from being a 100-year-old-plus electric utility to a technology company. And that’s what’s happening.”
The Power Plant in Your Driveway
Electric vehicles will play an important role in the future of energy production.
“Electric vehicles are one of the key strategies to us,” McClure said. “They basically help all of Vermont to become one big microgrid.”
Much of Vermont is old housing stock, with places having perhaps only a small 60-amp or 100-amp panel for power. It would be very expensive to ramp up the power supply to the point where it can recharge a truck.
“Maybe they can’t afford that,” McClure said. “In that case, it has to become a part of our business.”
The electric car or truck will be the microgrid of the future.
“All manufacturers are going to make those vehicles,” McClure said. “Our virtual power plant is sitting in your driveway. It has to get hooked into your house in such a way that it keeps your house in power as well as helping the greater grid.“
To illustrate her point, McClure told a story about one Christmas Eve when she was working late due to a storm and the resultant power outages.
“I drove up the driveway and Amanda knew I was on my way home,” McClure said. “So she had all the holiday lights on as I came through. It was just this beacon of light and I thought, ’My God, all my neighbors will think I have some special connections, when it’s really just my truck sitting there.’ That was when I had a glimpse into what this is going to be like for Vermonters — and particularly rural Vermonters — in central and southern Vermont, who need it the most.”
At present, the technology to charge an electric truck like the F-150 Lightning at home is expensive. GMP is working to change this.
“Right now, you essentially have to put a substation in your garage,” McClure said. “Number one, it’s really expensive, which most Vermonters are not going to be able to afford or not going to want to do anyway. And second, it’s so much equipment. So we’re working with innovators who see the same future we do. How do we at GMP figure out a way, through innovations with these folks, to bring this in a much more simplified way? We don’t have it yet, but it’s coming. I see it happening within the next five years.”
A common complaint about EVs is that they are difficult to charge away from home. In response, GMP plans to install many more charging stations around the state.
“We’ve got 15 offices all throughout the state, and we’re bringing fast charging to all of those,” McClure said. “Our fleet can use them and so can our customers. But we have a plan to have fast charging within 20 minutes of every Vermonter, off the highways and in rural parts of the state.”
Eventually, gas stations will understand that they should be offering electric charging as well as gas.
“Some of the best places to charge are rest areas, because you can go in and sit down,” McClure said. “Because it takes a little longer than filling your tank with gas. But over the next five years, that’s going to get faster and faster.”
Powerwalls
The goal right now is to get a storage battery to every home in Vermont.
GMP customers who sign up for the Powerwall Program can lease these batteries from the utility for $55 per month — significantly less costly than purchasing a battery on one’s own, because customers in the program agree to share stored energy with GMP during peak energy use times, such as heat waves.
During those times, energy can be expensive and carbon intensive. By putting energy back on the grid, customers can reduce costs and carbon emissions for all of GMP’s customers.
A second program, Bring Your Own Device, enables customers to buy a battery of their choosing from a local installer and receive an incentive up to $10,500 from GMP. The pilot program currently has a long wait list, which continues to grow with each extended power outage. Last spring, after multiple major storms, GMP asked the Public Utility Commission to lift the program’s initial limit of 500 customers. In August of this year, the commission agreed, and installations are ongoing.
“To date, about 2,900 Green Mountain customers have more than 4,800 batteries in their homes,” said Kristin Carlson, GMP's vice president for strategy and external relations. “During energy peaks, GMP networks stored energy together, along with utility scale batteries and devices like car chargers, into a virtual power plant of about 50 MW of stored energy. Combined, this growing stored energy network has saved GMP customers up to $3 million a year for the last few years. It offers seamless, cost-effective home battery backup power, which also helps to lower costs for all GMP customers through energy sharing.”
Not all of GMP’s innovations have succeeded. “We start small and scale or fail fast,” McClure said. “That’s our motto when we bring new programs and services to Vermont. Our Powerwall program started small. We learned and tweaked, and it was successful. So we scaled it. We’ve had programs before that didn’t work. There was a time where we were offering smart thermostats and smart metering for the homes — something that would turn the lights on and off. But it didn’t have a lot of uptake and it failed fast. We’ve got to be innovative. That means you have to be able to take risks where appropriate, and you have to be comfortable with failure and adversity.”
The Cost of Power
If consumers buy into an all-electric future, doesn’t it mean that GMP will make more money? Not really, McClure said, because in the end it will mean less expensive electricity, not more.
“What we are proposing is going to result in lower energy costs for the consumer,” McClure said. “You electrify your home. You’ve got an electric car. You’ve got electric heat. You’ve got storage. Maybe you have solar, or maybe you might not need it. Imagine so many Vermonters having all that! What we’ll end up doing is lowering a ton of our operational costs. We don’t have to respond to storms, so you won’t see that storm surcharge anymore. The way we deliver power completely changes the system. It has to lower costs, first and foremost. I couldn’t do this job otherwise. I wouldn’t feel pure about it.”
McClure’s house is completely electric.
“If you look at my electric bill, of course it’s gone up,” she said. “I’m using more electricity. But I don’t ever stop at a gas station. I might pull up and get a coffee or something, but I don’t have to get out in the cold and pump gas. And my gas bill is completely eliminated. We used to be on heating oil. The guy who delivered it was a wonderful person. I loved him. It was so sad, the last day he left. Because I got rid of my oil tank. I’m only on heat pumps now. And my heating oil bill was not only astronomical, it was riding a commodity wave. Whatever the cost of oil was, it was the cost of oil. So I don’t have that anymore.”
Going all electric also means you don’t have to cut, stack and carry firewood anymore. The point is that heating oil, cord wood and gasoline will disappear from your monthly expenses.
“Your biggest expense is your transportation,” McClure said. “When you switch that over, you’re going to save. So while your electric bill might go up, I’m not profiting. It lowers the cost for everybody else in the state and lowers costs for the grid. If you go electric, I want the energy bill in your house to be lower than how you currently live. That is the most important thing we can talk to Vermonters about. The more people switch to electric, the more the cost goes down.”
McClure is after a 100% renewable, clean and affordable future.
“The programs we’re designing both bring resilience to your home and lower costs for the system, or we don’t do them,” she said. “That’s the key. And we’ve got to show, as part of our filings with our regulators, how energy costs come down for folks with the electrification. I don’t want Vermonters to think that once they go electric, we’re just going to jack up their rates.”
Microgrids, according to McClure, can also protect Vermonters from outside pressures. The war in Ukraine, for just one example, affected the price of gas.
“I want to get Vermont to a place where those energy costs come down,” she said. “I’m focused on how we get a generation closer to load in Vermont. We are still a part of that regional team. We participate in conversations around what’s going on in the region. We care a lot about what’s going on in the region. The most important thing for me is how do I get Vermont resilient? How do we, as we roll out this distributed future, play a part in getting our customers into the decentralized grid — with storage in particular, and their electric vehicles in particular. It’s a real concern that we share, and we’ve got to deal with it as a state.”
The Future
People often make the mistake of looking at the old system when they ask if the grid will still work in a new microenergy environment.
“They’re thinking of that one-way centralized grid,” McClure said. “What we’re trying to accomplish here is a two-way grid, where your car, or your Powerwall in your home, or whatever, is both generating and putting out onto the grid. You can’t think of what the future looks like by looking backward at how the old grid worked.”
McClure was first attracted to Vermont because it is often on the cutting edge. It still is, she said.
“For a small rural people, we are often leading on innovations and important cultural changes,” McClure said. “And our team, our regulators and the whole community in the energy space are leading right now.”
The time to argue about climate change is long gone, McClure said.
“I don’t have to convince anyone anymore of climate change and the impacts it’s having on weather,” she said. “I also don’t have to convince anybody of the importance of their energy in their home. Everybody’s connected. It’s a much different world than it was 10 years ago.
“I never want anyone to be out of power,” McClure added. “Our programs, like battery storage, microgrids like Panton, resiliency zones and our existing undergrounding, prove that it works. Our team has never been more motivated to accelerate it. With the support of and in partnership with our customers, our communities and that Vermont spirit that manages to innovate despite all odds, this revolution is much closer than you think.”
Joyce Marcel is a journalist in southern Vermont. In 2017, she was named the best business magazine profile writer in the country by the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. She is married to Randy Holhut, the news editor/acting operations manager of The Commons, a weekly newspaper in Brattleboro.