Utility Dive: Policy Support, Utility Buy-In Key for VPP Growth, Say Experts from Ford, Energy Hub

Utility Dive covers United's September 2024 webinar about expanding VPPs in the U.S., which was moderated by United’s Chloe Holden and featured panelists from member companies Ford, PowerFlex, and EnergyHub. The article showcases United's advocacy work to overcome barriers to scaling VPPs across the country.

Dive Brief:

• Technologies like device-level submetering and bidirectional electric vehicle charging create opportunities to deploy virtual power plants at scale in the near future, panelists said Sept. 16 on a webinar hosted by Advanced Energy United.
• Successful VPPs like National Grid’s ConnectedSolutions and the California Energy Commission’s Demand Side Grid Support program demonstrate the benefits of simple, flexible and technology-inclusive program design, panelists from Energy Hub, PowerFlex and Ford Motor said.
• But VPP uptake is held back in many markets by a lack of clear state policy directives, regulatory uncertainty, barriers to full wholesale market participation and continued risk aversion among utilities, they added.

Dive Insight:

Virtual power plants have tremendous potential to shape load and reduce stress on the grid during periods of peak demand, said panelist Carter Wood, who works on electric vehicle infrastructure policy at Ford.

Wood nodded to an April study from Brattle Group that found VPPs could meet 15% of California’s projected peak load in 2035, up from 3% today. That level of deployment — about 7.7 GW — could avoid $755 million in traditional power system costs and reduce consumers’ annual electricity bills by $550 million, the study found.

Bringing VPP capacity onto the grid takes far less time than building a new physical power plant, said panelist Nick Papanastassiou, director of market development and regulatory affairs for Energy Hub, a distributed energy resource management platform.

Energy Hub partnered with Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator to enroll more than 100,000 smart thermostat users in less than six months in a VPP that delivered 134 MW of load response in a single hour this summer, Papanastassiou said. 

Alongside stationary energy storage, solar arrays and other distributed energy resources, bidirectional-capable electric vehicles represent a massive future source of potential VPP capacity, said Raghav Murali, head of policy and compliance at PowerFlex, a clean energy infrastructure provider for commercial and industrial users. But achieving that potential would require the right policy and regulatory support in place, he added.