Virtual power plants: the ‘sandwich’ for the grid

If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants. 

That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other distributed assets into dispatchable power plants.

The US already has tens of gigawatts of VPP capacity, mostly in the form of “bring your own device” programs that harness thermostats or water heaters for demand response services. But there are new models emerging that harness rooftop solar, batteries, and EV charging to enable bigger, longer-lasting load shifts.

“I like to say that the term VPP is kind of like the term sandwich. There are lots of different kinds, they're full of different ingredients, and they serve lots of different purposes,” said Jen Downing, an engagement officer at the DOE, who leads the agency’s work on the space. 

The concept of VPPs has been around for nearly 30 years. But as the US faces a dramatic increase in peak demand by 2030 – and with distributed resource capacity set to double – the urgency for deploying them has increased.

“We're going to need clean, firm [power]. We're going to need more transmission capacity to transport that electricity. But one way to address that increase in peak is to use distributed energy resources to either serve that peak locally or to shift that peak outside of peak hours. And so that's where VPPs come in,” said Downing.

This week on The Carbon Copy, we spoke with DOE’s Jen Downing about the different ways that virtual power plants are getting built – and the need to build many more.

Read our show notes and all our industry coverage at Latitudemedia.com.