MAC MCQUOWN
Owner, Stone Edge Farm
Mac McQuown decided to take on the global energy challenge -- getting greenhouse gases out of our energy system. An engineer and a business whiz, Mac calls himself a “data dog.”
His son, Morgan, describes Mac as “freakishly curious about everything and a mastermind who brings people together to accomplish a greater goal.”
Mac’s approach to any challenge is to gather many people with different talents. So he turned his vineyard, Stone Edge Farm, into a microgrid and the nucleus for a brain trust focused on creating a new energy system. Researchers from our universities, national labs, and startups have accepted his generous offer to test their theories and innovations on his microgrid with real-time conditions and loads. And that has enabled them to get to market quickly. We will meet some of them and learn about their innovations.
In just a few years, Stone Edge Farm MicroGrid has evolved into a living laboratory with 28 distributed resources. One of the most exciting is his use of hydrogen to store the energy produced from solar.
The collaboration we see at Stone Edge Farm runs throughout the series. It is seen in our universities and research labs and internationally in the research world.
Mac is the thread that ties over 30 individuals, our heroes, who are making it possible to have a carbon-free energy future. These people are academics, state reps, utility CEOs, scientists, innovators, VCs, and policymakers.
They have made what seemed impossible, a reality.