What kind of virtual power plant would you choose?

Hello, everybody! Welcome back to California Wire. This week, I’m going to be talking about virtual power plants again — but not the ones set up by utilities and tech giants or run by solar-battery vendors like Sunrun and Tesla. Instead, I want to dive into a pretty radical new concept: letting participating households design VPPs themselves. 

On Wednesday, the Agile Electrification Project, led by the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, launched a new phase of research on a potentially groundbreaking project meant to do just that. 

Over the next 12 months, some 200 volunteer households that have solar panels, home battery systems, electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and other connected devices by various manufacturers will work with researchers to develop the ground rules for a set of hypothetical VPP programs. 

Their decisions — about how much electricity they’re willing to share, under what conditions, and in exchange for what incentives — could serve as a data gold mine for policymakers, utilities, and companies trying to build VPPs for the millions of Californians who might be interested in them, but aren’t participating in the handful of options currently available. 

So says Andrew Krause, CEO of Northern Pacific Power Systems, a California-based solar, battery, and home electrification contractor and co-lead of the Agile Electrification project. ​“What would happen if we put customers in a simulated environment, tweaked the rules, and found compelling, sophisticated program designs that give people agency to achieve their desired outcomes?” he asked. His hope is that ​“homeowners will self-organize around the right programs if they have a sense of control.” 

To discover what these households want out of a VPP, Agile Electrification will send surveys to the participants in what it calls its Living Laboratory. Some questions will deal with standard VPP issues, like how often people are willing to have their air conditioning turned down during heat waves, or how much battery power they want to keep in reserve in case of a possible blackout. 

But they’ll also explore what motivates households to share their energy, said Thomas Familia, a former utility energy analyst and postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University working on the project. Some may want to maximize their financial benefits. Some may want to use more clean energy. And others may want to help neighbors who need to run lifesaving medical equipment. 

“We want to make it clear there’s a personal relationship between the VPP and the household itself,” he said. 

Those surveys will guide the Agile Electrification team in developing a range of hypothetical VPP programs. Balto Energy, a San Diego–based startup with software that tracks and analyzes home energy usage, will collect and share the data on how each home’s virtual participation in those programs would alter their hour-to-hour electricity usage profiles. 

How can utilities and grid planners make use of this collective VPP feedback? That’s where the testing facility DERConnect comes in. The UCSD-backed lab uses advanced grid-simulation software and hardware to extrapolate how Living Laboratory households’ shifts in energy use would impact the state’s real-world grid. ​“We pipe those responses back to DERConnect, and they simulate the impact on the grid,” Krause said. 

Virtual power plants could help prevent that, but to do so, they need to rapidly and dramatically scale up. Utilities and heavyweights like Sunrun and Tesla will continue to play vital roles in bringing VPPs to their full potential. But plenty of critics question whether households in these programs are being paid their fair share for the energy flexibility they’re providing. We need ideas like the Living Laboratory to open the floodgates of participation — and to give us all a stake in the outcome.