The growth of virtual power plants, which are large portfolios of consumer-owned distributed resources, is about to get a big boost.
VPPs could meet as much as 160 GW of the 200 GW of U.S. peak demand needs in 2030, and reduce power system costs by $10 billion annually, according to a 2023 report from the Department of Energy. But VPP growth could be limited by the lack of common standards in their aggregated distributed energy resource components, developers and advocates say.
Common standards allow utilities or aggregators to “orchestrate” diverse DER like rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles in a full range of power system services, proponents say.
“Without interoperability standards, VPPs cannot reach scalability, affordability, and reliability as soon or as efficiently as they will be needed” to meet the coming variability, growing load and extreme weather events the power system faces, said Arshad Mansoor, CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, which is leading two standardization initiatives. “Now is the time to bring VPP stakeholders together,” he added.
Standardized interoperability can help simplify and expand the needed adoption of DER and the needed integration of VPPs into utility planning and wholesale markets, the DOE report said.
Para leer más ingrese a: