Updated November 6, 2024: Alex Gonzalez of Utah News Connection published an accompanying Public News Service broadcast for this piece. Listen to the full audio here.
Utah News Dispatch reports on the growing interest in virtual power plants (VPPs) and quotes United's Brian Turner, who emphasizes VPPs' potential as a cost-effective and flexible solution to rising electricity demand.
Just about every week, Shawn Grant, who works for Salt Lake City-based Rocky Mountain Power, gets an inquiry from another utility looking for information about the company’s Wattsmart battery program.
“We want to do something. … How did you guys do it?’” Grant, the company’s customer innovation manager, says he’s often asked. “We’re always fielding those questions.”
The program pays customers with solar who opt to install battery storage systems for the ability to use that stored electricity to help balance flows on the electric grid.
For customers, the benefits come in the form of lower electric bills and backup power in case of an outage. For Rocky Mountain Power, which has 1.2 million customers in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, the program allows the company to harness the collective power stored in those distributed batteries to shave electric demand when it spikes rather than calling for more generation from a traditional power plant, among other uses.
“We’re using every battery every day to reduce demand on the grid,” Grant said.
The concept is known as a virtual power plant, and grid operators, utilities, state regulators and lawmakers across the country are increasingly exploring the possibilities. They are seen as a cost-effective way to aid an electric grid that in many parts of the country is increasingly embattled by power plant retirements as well as difficulties building new, cleaner generation and the transmission lines they need — all at a time when huge projected electric demand increases loom.
“We’re now in this load-growth era,” said Robin Dutta, acting executive director at the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association, a solar and storage industry group focused on Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. “When you’re mitigating peak demand growth at the source, that’s perhaps the most cost effective way to modernize the grid.”
Nearly 800,000 American homes installed a new solar or solar and energy storage system in 2023, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. That growth set a record, with about 6.8 gigawatts installed, a 12% increase from 2022. Electric vehicles, another potential grid resource as a store of energy, also broke a sales record last year, despite consumer uptake being slower than some expected.
“These are devices that people are buying anyway because they’re faster, better, cheaper and virtual power plants allows everybody to leverage these devices while putting some money back in the pockets of people that bought the thing in the first place,”said Brian Turner, a director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group
The U.S. Department of Energy found in a report last year that large-scale deployment of virtual power plants “could help address demand increases and rising peaks at lower cost than conventional resources, reducing the energy costs for Americans — one in six of whom are already behind on electricity bills.”
They’re not a new concept, the DOE noted, adding that most existing virtual power plants are so-called demand response programs. In Virginia, for example, the commonwealth for years has run a program that enrolls hundreds of public facilities (airports, universities, K-12 schools, municipal buildings, water treatment plants and others) that agree to reduce or shift their electric demand to relieve strain on the grid. The DOE report says deploying 80 to 160 gigawatts of virtual power plants by 2030 could save about $10 billion in annual grid costs and would “direct grid spending back to electricity consumers.” At that scale, virtual power plants could meet between 10 and 20% of peak electric demand. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a research nonprofit focused on sustainability, called virtual power plants “a valuable and largely overlooked resource for advancing key grid objectives,” including reliability, affordability, decarbonization and electrification, among others.
However, many states are starting to take notice of the potential:
Experts who study and run the nation’s electric grid are worried about the pace of the energy transition. Old coal and gas plant retirements are accelerating, driven by economics, state clean energy policies and utilities’ own decarbonization goals. At the same time, massive backlogs in the queues to connect new power resources — overwhelmingly wind, solar and battery projects — in the regional transmission organizations that run the grid in much of the country mean big delays in replacing that retiring power generation. And after roughly a decade of flat electric demand, load growth is projected by many experts to explode as a result of transportation, industrial and home heating electrification, as well as a surge in data center development, among other factors. Throw in the fact that the construction of new transmission lines, essential to get excess power to where it might be urgently needed, has also stagnated and a problematic picture emerges.
“Most utilities in the country are planning on pretty significant load growth,” said Turner from Advanced Energy United. ” They could plan to build a new peaker plant or they could plan to ‘build’ VPPs.”
That’s where utility incentives come into play.
Generally speaking, Turner said, utilities that operate transmission and distribution systems are more friendly to the idea. Companies that also own their own generation – and make a sizable chunk of their income from guaranteed profits on building new plants – might not like the idea of a program that erodes the business case for a pricey new facility.
“That’s why we have utility commissions,” Turner said. “They exist to say to the utility that virtual power plants are a cheaper option for the ratepayer and therefore you should implement it.”
However, even companies that might have resisted the idea are facing such dire electric-demand growth scenarios that virtual power plants may be attractive ways to get more flexibility out of the grid more quickly than building new generation.
“This is a way to get the capacity online faster and oftentimes cheaper,” Turner said. “Meeting that load growth is a real challenge in a lot of places.”
Read the full article here.