I Toured a Virtual Power Plant video [CNET]

What are virtual power plants and can they help save the aging US power grid? CNET’s Jon Reed visited one in Vermont to see how they work.

A virtual power plant is a connected network of devices that can function kind of like a traditional power plant. It can come in many forms including a lot of home batteries connected together that can all be simultaneously discharged onto the grid. It can also take the form of thermostats or EV chargers. The utility company can use a virtual power plant to adjust that demand during a heat wave or a major weather event. If you have a virtual power plant that’s got thousands of home batteries in it, the utility can store that energy that’s produced during the day and then let it out at night and that avoids having to turn on a natural gas plant. A virtual power plant can say, hey, during these hours, don’t charge your car and they can turn off your charger so that you’re not idly charging your car when it could be putting an unnecessary burden on the grid and potentially causing blackouts. Virtual power plant itself is actually a very simple technology. These programs are operated around the country from a laptop. It’s just a matter of clicking on software and suddenly you’ve released a bunch of energy from a bunch of batteries or you’ve set a schedule for thermostats to reduce the amount of demand on the grid. I visited a virtual power plant in, in Vermont run by Green Mountain Power which is one of the first in the country to use tesla power wall batteries in a virtual power plant. This power plant uses thousands of tesla power wall and other types of home batteries to soften the load on one of those hot summer days when everyone gets home at six o’clock turns on the air conditioner and the demand on the grid spikes, there may be money in it for you. A lot of utilities will offer a credit on your bill if you participate in this, if you say, hey, power company, 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 US grid has a lot of problems at the moment. Electric vehicles is a big thing that’s energy demand that was not on the grid before and now everyone’s going to be charging their cars. We also have electrification in homes and offices and buildings where heating that might have been natural gas is now starting to pivot to electric. Virtual power plants can be part of the solution to what faces the US electrical grid. Virtual power plants can even out some of those peaks in demand that could cause issues. They can buy us time to make those billions of dollars of improvements that are gonna be needed to make sure the grid is resilient and sufficient going into the future.