Episode 59: Marco Krapels of Enphase on EVs, VPPs, and Unlocking America's Hidden Energy Capacity

Imagine your EV sitting in the driveway overnight - not just charging, but powering your home, supporting the grid, and earning money while you sleep.

That's not a distant vision. It's what Marco Krapels, Chief Marketing Officer at Enphase Energy, says is coming soon. 

Marco is my latest guest on Scaling Clean. He's spent decades shaping the clean energy industry, from early EV charging infrastructure to some of the sector's hardest-fought policy battles. Now he's focused on turning millions of homes into grid assets.

Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

🔹 Your EV may soon become an energy asset.

Marco believes bidirectional EV charging could change the role of EVs. Instead of consuming electricity, EVs could store energy, power homes during outages, and provide flexible capacity to the grid when demand spikes. As a Mach-E owner myself, I found this fascinating.

🔹 Utilities and distributed energy don't have to be opponents.

The solar industry spent years fighting utilities over net metering. Marco believes the next era is about partnership. As utilities face growing demand from electrification and AI-driven data centers, distributed energy resources can help solve capacity constraints faster than traditional generation.

🔹 We have a deployment problem.

The U.S. already has untapped energy potential. 10 million homes with 10 kW of solar and 10 kWh of storage could unlock roughly 100 GW of dispatchable capacity. As electricity demand surges from AI, data centers, and electrification, the challenge may be less about building new generation and more about deploying the solutions we already have.