Next 7 years will be “Watershed years” for VPP deployments

​In an increasingly complex and intermittent electric grid with high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs), VPPs will help manage 10 to 20% of the US peak demand by 2030. Also remember that Peak Demand is often the most expensive and we rely heavily on fossil-based generation. 

If we need to have a meaningful impact on the climate, we have to accelerate the adoption of VPPs in the US and scale these enabling technologies can be scaled for a global impact. 

VPPs have historically emerged from the Demand Response era and the current mindset need to evolve beyond the traditional DR centric approach to scaling VPPs.

1. Mixed Asset VPPs - Bringing homogeneity in a heterogeneous DER landscape is going to be the toughest problem.

2. Customer Enrollment - Currently companies which recruit customers after the point of sale of a DER is extremely cumbersome.

3. Open Standards- While a lot of promising work has gone into Standards over the past decade, every single protocol out there fail to sufficiently address the customer onboarding experience. We have to move away from “Out-of-Band” enrollment models and develop solutions similar to Plaid or Zelle. Leverage modern standards such as O’Auth coupled with a Smart Grid standard such a OpenADR, IEEE 2030.5 is the key market gap. 

4. Customer Privacy and Data- VPP Platforms only need to know what is the “Current and Forecasted Flexibility and Asset Availabilities”, leaving the private and PII data where it belongs, but with the right controls to share it with VPP aggregators or Utilities. 

5. Customer Value- Individually a thermostat participating in a DR might fund 10 Grande Americano’s at Starbucks. But when the whole home is enrolled in a VPP with Storage, Thermostats and EVs, might help cover the cost of your next Smart Phone!

6. Value Stacking is easier said than done- While the DERs and VPP Platforms can provide ancillary services, resource adequacy, it’s often hard to dual-enroll customers. Dual enrollment into various market revenue streams should be seamless and intuitive. Think of how enrolling in medical insurance doesn’t preclude one from enrolling in a Dental or Vision insurance plan. 

Read the report here, originally shared by Vish Ganti, Product Leader in VPP space :  https://liftoff.energy.gov/vpp/