I visited a virtual power plant
A virtual power plant is an interconnected network of devices that can function similarly to a traditional power plant. It can take many forms, including many home batteries connected together that can all discharge to the grid at the same time. It can also take the form of thermostats or EV chargers. The utility can use a virtual power plant to adjust demand during a heat wave or major weather event. If you have a virtual power plant with thousands of home batteries, the utility can store the energy generated during the day and release it at night, avoiding turning on a natural gas power plant. A virtual power plant can say, “Hey, don’t charge your car during these hours,” and they can shut off your charger so you’re not idly charging your car when that could put unnecessary strain on the grid and potentially cause blackouts. The virtual power plant itself is actually a very simple technology. These programs are run from a laptop across the country. All you have to do is click on a piece of software and you’ve released a bunch of energy from a bunch of batteries or set a schedule of thermostats to reduce demand on the grid. I visited a virtual power plant in Vermont run by Green Mountain Power. It’s one of the first in the country to use Tesla Power Wall batteries in a virtual power plant. This plant uses thousands of Tesla Power Wall and other types of home batteries to mitigate the load on one of those hot summer days when everyone comes home at six o’clock, turns on the air conditioning, and demand on the grid shoots up. Maybe there’s money to be made for you. A lot of utilities offer a credit on your bill if you participate. They can say, “Hey, utility, if you need to, you can turn my thermostat up a couple of degrees or if you need to, you can take some of the power that’s stored in my home battery, like a Power Wall that you have in your house.” The U.S. power grid has a lot of problems right now. Electric vehicles are a big thing, meeting energy needs that weren’t on the grid before, and now everyone will be charging their cars. We also have electrification in homes and offices and buildings where heaters that used to run on natural gas are now being converted to electricity. Virtual power plants can be part of the solution to what’s coming to the U.S. power grid. Virtual power plants can smooth out some of these spikes in demand that could cause problems. They can buy us time to make the billion-dollar improvements that will be necessary to ensure the grid is resilient and sufficient well into the future.
