virtual power plants
also referred to as: virtual power plant · vpp · vpps
28 statements across 10 episodes · 21 bullish · 1 bearish · 11 people on the record · first statement Jan 31, 2022 by Mary Powell · across every show →
Everything said about virtual power plants, oldest first
Jan 31, 2022
Jan 31, 2022 positive
Powell: Scaling virtual power plants is a cultural, not technical, challenge
“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…”
May 23, 2024 positive
Shah: Zero-backfeed VPPs bypass utility permission hurdles by only offsetting load
“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…”
May 23, 2024 neutral
Shah: Full VPP software integration costs roughly $35 million per utility
“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?”
Dec 2, 2024 positive
Carnes: Arizona Public Service VPP avoids expensive real-time power market purchases
“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…”
Dec 2, 2024 positive
Carnes: Modern virtual power plants allow precise scheduling unlike legacy demand response
“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…”
Dec 2, 2024 bullish
Dec 2, 2024 bullish
Dec 2, 2024 positive
Dec 2, 2024 negative
Frader-Thompson: California energy regulators are lagging behind other states on VPPs
“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.”
Jan 9, 2025 positive
Lafarge: Distributed capacity procurement is essentially a utility-led VPP
“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…”
May 6, 2025 neutral
May 6, 2025 bullish
May 6, 2025 positive
Brown: Large VPPs remain predictably stable even with individual customer control
“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…”
May 6, 2025 bullish
Brown: Locational grid strain will favor VPPs over central power plants
“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…”
May 6, 2025 bullish
Sep 12, 2025 positive
Sep 18, 2025 bullish
Oct 2, 2025 positive
Guernsey: Co-locating capacity at grid constraints helps solve data center bottlenecks
“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…”
Oct 2, 2025 bullish
Guernsey: Virtual power plants deploy faster and cheaper than new gas plants
“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…”
Oct 30, 2025 positive
Clements: Excluding virtual power plants violates Federal Power Act non-discrimination rules
“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…”
Mar 10, 2026 positive
Phillips: VPPs require energy management system integration for power plant parity
“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. …”
Mar 10, 2026 bullish
Mar 10, 2026 neutral
Phillips: Grid operators only need reliable parameter forecasting from VPPs
“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…”
Mar 10, 2026 bullish
Mar 10, 2026 neutral
Frader-Thompson: VPPs need roughly 50 MW to interest utility control rooms
“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…”
Mar 10, 2026 neutral
Mar 10, 2026 bullish
Frader-Thompson: VPPs will be dispatched hundreds of times per year
“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…”