Photo: Hiro Yamagata, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
From Living on Earth: “VPPs are networks of small energy-producing and storage devices, such as solar panels and batteries, that are pooled together to serve the electricity grid.”
What to do about an old electrical grid that is having trouble keeping up with energy innovation? Steve Curwood, host of the environmental radio program Living on Earth, talks to the Brattle Group’s Ryan Hledik about using “virtual power plants.”
“Steve Curwood: Electric vehicles aren’t just useful for getting you and me from Point A to Point B. With smart policies they could also help decarbonize the grid. That’s because renewables like wind and solar don’t produce electricity around the clock. So there’s often a mismatch between when the power is being generated and when it’s being used. And until it’s needed, the big batteries in electric cars and trucks can help store some of that precious power.
“That’s part of the strategy called virtual power plants. A recent report by the consulting firm The Brattle Group estimates that virtual power plants could save utilities and their customers as much as $35 billion over the next decade. Ryan Hledik is a principal at the Brattle Group and joins us now. … So what exactly is a virtual power plant? Please explain how they would operate.
“Ryan Hledik: So a virtual power plant is basically a collection of customers [who] have been recruited into a program and are participating in that program and being provided incentives to participate in order to provide some of these services to the grid. It’s basically this idea where customers have a lot of flexibility in their demand for electricity. Customers who are buying electric vehicles have the ability to change when they’re charging that car to a degree, customers with smart thermostats can manage the thermostat in a way that changes when they’re cooling their home.
“So one example of this could be if you’re a customer who had made an investment in a battery at your home because you wanted to use that battery as a form of backup power during an outage, you could be paid by your local utility or another company to actually allow them to control that battery on a limited number of days per year, limited number of hours per day, to provide services to the grid from the battery. By doing this, the really interesting opportunity that we’re seeing here is, first of all, it’s a way to directly pay customers to participate in the decarbonization transition. And then in addition to that, instead of going out and building a [gas] plant that might only be used 100 hours per year, we’re able to tap into an investment that’s already been made for other reasons … and get more use out of that. …
“By encouraging customers to shift their charging to those off-peak hours in the middle of the night, when demand is low, or even in the middle of the day, when maybe there’s solar power that’s being curtailed, because you have more than you need, you can shift the charging load of the EVS into those hours to provide benefits that you otherwise wouldn’t have if the customers were to just simply drive home from work and plug their electric vehicle into the wall when they got home.
“Curwood: But what if somebody wants to get in that car right now and then wants to drive the 200 miles to Aunt Thelma’s because she called saying she has an issue?
“Hledik: That’s right and one of the important characteristics of virtual power plant programs is they are designed with constraints on how they’ll be used to make sure that customer comfort and convenience is maintained. So in the case of an electric vehicle, virtual power plant, you could have a program designed such that customers are always ensured that even if their utility is going to manage how that vehicle is charging overnight, that they will be starting the next day at 6 am with a full state of charge in their EV. …
“Curwood: What kind of money could we save in this country if we use virtual power plants rather than trying to just expand the traditional grid infrastructure?
“Hledik: We looked into the answer to that question in our study and what we found was if we reached a pretty significant but achievable level of virtual power plant deployment by 2030, we could save $15 billion to $35 billion over the ensuing decade, relative to if we were to make investments in those more conventional gas peakers and utility-scale batteries. …
“And we estimated that over that same 10 year period, at the level of deployment that I described, there can be an additional $20 billion of benefits associated with improved health and avoiding other detrimental effects that are associated with carbon emissions. …
“Curwood: What are some of the other ways that we could take advantage of that baseload that right now goes to waste? …
“Hledik: Providing customers with an incentive to shift their electric vehicle charging load into [off-peak] hours is one opportunity. But another example would be if customers were to pre cool their homes during that midday period, so that they didn’t need to run their air conditioners as much during the evening period. That’s one way to shift some of their electricity consumption to the middle of the day.”
More at Living on Earth, here. No firewall.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
There is some inherent danger to this system: when a hacker gets into those systems, they can cause a nationwide blackout. There is already talk that all converters of Chinese solar panels might have a backdoor that would allow the producer to turn off all the converters that are connected to the internet. When you have a national grid that starts to depend upon the capacity those solar panels deliver, you will get a meltdown of the grid.
It’s a good point.