Virtual Power Plants

“It used to be that VPPs were really kind of like a summer peaking resource, and now they're a summer and winter peaking resource, and that kind of points in the direction that we're all moving.”

“Now it's a resource because of that repeatability that you can use operationally, and you can be confident that if you need to use it, you know, today I think maybe dozens of times per year, but moving toward hundreds of times per year, that repeatability just…”

“We have a million customers who participate in our programs with us. We've got two gigawatts across all the utilities in the winter and two and a half in the summer.”

“I think scale is the other thing, right? I mean, I think Stacy talks about there being a threshold like somewhere around 50 megawatts where, you know, you are actually at the scale of a, an individual beaker plant, and that's kind of the that's kind of the hur…”

“As long as it's repeatable and reliable forecasting of how long, how much notice do I have to give it, because everything has notice, how long can I run it, And then, what do I need to know about it afterwards, and when can I run it again? That's what they nee…”

“Well, I only know my utilities very well. And I'd say we are like a strong level two. And as you heard before, obviously we've got a lot of devices in zero and one.”

“I've talked to our energy control center director around, like, what would it take for us to be integrated into the energy management system? Where, you know, is that what this looks like when you actually have parity with power plants? And the answer is yes. …”

“The other nice thing about not getting specific, that specific about technologies is that it'll, it'll, it'll, it's legitimate under the Federal Power Act, which is FERC's guiding principle, right? And so to the extent that there are attempts to do things like…”

“This notion of, like, on-site versus off-site can be a little bit more flexible if you're willing to take into account the fact that as long as you're co-locating at the constraint, that's solving the problem, and now you have more tools in your toolkit, inclu…”

“It absolutely should be more affordable if the alternative is going out and building a new natural gas power plant. For one, not only are you going to, like, open up the catalog and see that it's backordered till twenty-twenty, or sorry, not twenty-twenty, twe…”

“There are real VPPs now. Hundreds of megawatts in scale that are being dispatched to actually make a difference on the grid in some places.”

“So it does take some work to get it, and you're right, no one's done it at a, at any real scale yet but I think we're gonna see it pretty soon.”

“There is going to continue to be, you know, more and more of a challenge that our system tries to struggle to grow to meet that demand, not just on the aggregate basis, But really on the distribution and locational basis, and I think that's also what's very un…”

“When you give individuals control, large, long system, and you have hundreds of thousands of customers or a million customers, you know, stochastically we can predict, you know, how these things will perform in aggregate. And so actually having control the ent…”

“We believe that a VPP similar capacity resource would be 60% of the cost of a natural gas peaker investment. And honestly, that's probably outdated because now we know that natural building natural gas peakers are even more expensive.”

“And it would be, and the VPP would also be 40% of the cost of a utility scale battery investment.”

“Unless we're talking, you know, in the 25 to 50 plus megawatts in terms of actual resource, it's harder for energy partners to see it as meaningful”

“We see the distributed capacity procurement concept as a part of the virtual power plant. Moment. I think a DCP is just one way to achieve that outcome. And the assets would be installed on customer locations. They're paid for by a utility as part of their inf…”

“We also view our virtual power plant as a significant saver for our customers, essentially, right? We didn't have to go to the market and buy, Expensive power on the real-time market. And we didn't have to start a traditional power plant or conventional genera…”

“Like, I can show you data from literally tens of thousands of events showing that this thing is 99.9 plus percent reliable.”

“So today we're nearing 200 megawatts in our virtual power plant. The bulk of that, as Seth said, is thermostats. By far this summer we achieved 163 megawatts with the thermostats.”

“And over time, that kind of creeps you toward what I think will be a 24, seven, three 65 kind of expectations of VPPs.”

“This isn't kind of the old demand response where you just push a button and then, like, you know, whatever you got. We're able to really kind of plan what load profile we want to provide, and we can schedule that accordingly. We can schedule those devices acco…”

“The one thing is I would say if you're in California and you're a regulator, the rest of the country exists. And if you look at what's going on, there are lots of examples of how you could be doing this a lot better.”

“See, the problem with alerts is they only work a few times. Then it's like the, you know, the kid who cried wolf doesn't have an impact. You have to make it tangible by giving them a monetary payment or charging a higher price.”

“One, Everything needs to be opt out. This notion that we need to spend 700 dollars to, like, talk to people and beg them to opt into something is looney tunes. Like, when you hook up something, it's automatically opted into a VPP, and then we should give you a…”

“Our estimates is that this would cost roughly thirty-five million dollars per utility to put all the software layers in place from the venture-backed companies that have created them to be able to, you know, actually fully integrate this whole suite, right?”

“And so if you make a simplifying assumption, which is that no one is backfeeding anything into the grid. Right? Right? That the batteries you know, basically use case here is to make your home go off grid. Right? Sort of an energy efficiency play. So your home…”

“We may have influence at the Department of Energy, but we didn't think we had so much influence we could erase the term VPP from the market.”

“If we want any chance of building a grid powered by a hundred percent zero carbon resources and do it affordably and reliably, we need to triple capacity of VPPs.”

“People misunderstand the word virtual to mean, you know, not real. When these are hard assets on the grid, it's not phone calls anymore. It's software integrations, and it's large aggregations of small resources that really add up to something very valuable.”

“For a utility, procuring peaking capacity from a VPP can be 60% cheaper than procuring it from a natural gas peaker plant.”

“But what's even more striking is that the money that is spent on virtual power plants, the majority of those costs are actually participant incentives.”

“Well, depending on how you define it we have about 30 to 60 gigawatts of capacity in VPPs today.”

“But if we can triple the capacity of VPPs between now and 2030, we could serve 10 to 20% of peak load nationally through virtual power plants. And if we did that, because they are a lower cost solution, we'd be saving about ten billion dollars per year.”

“I think when you have virtual power plants bidding into wholesale markets and earning a price that represents the value to the bulk power system, It's an incomplete price, because it's not taking a, it's not taking account of the value to the distribution grid…”

“And so I think what you'll end up seeing is utilities recognizing the value that they can get out of these VPPs and procuring VPPs directly.”

“The utility business model of compensating CapEx spending with maybe a seven to nine percent margin and passing through OPEX at cost to the consumer does not give utilities the right incentives to choose low-cost options such as VPPs”

“But in my opinion, solar plus storage attachment rates in the U.S. Are, like, not high enough yet for batteries to really, like, be a potential game changer in VPPs.”

“I think VPPs have quite a unique role to play in helping alleviating those very localized pain points. And we're not even there right now. We're just talking system wide capacity is pretty much like the limit as to how much VPPs have been able to contribute in…”

“I mean, it outlined kind of how tripling the current rate of VPPs could, and I quote, support rapid electrification while redirecting grid spending from peaker plants to participants and reducing overall grid costs.”

“Today we're adding, and we're adding two gigawatts a month to our homes and businesses of things that you can control with an app on your phone, right?”

“This is why we have a three-year backlog on distribution transformers. It's not because we have a shortage of distribution transformers in this country. It's because everybody wants to fix the problem using 19 eighties approaches instead of virtual power plant…”

“Yeah, so Sonnen it was actually 88% of the batteries they've installed in the U.S. Are part of some sort of virtual power plant or grid, grid interactive program, which is just a wild statistic compared to the norm for the market where, you know, most people a…”

“Convince them to put batteries in and have them sign up for programs like Smite is doing right now, what we call the virtual power plant, that you offer them incentives to sign up if they have a batteries from, you know, some simply just say, hey, I am going t…”

“Sunrun does have 12 virtual power plant projects in place.”

“Well, I mean, I say often culture eats strategy, and I actually think what we have, we Is way more a cultural challenge than a technical challenge. So again, in my experience, there's no end, there's no, like, bottom to the rabbit hole you go down when what yo…”