IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Virtual power plants or VPPs are one of the hottest topics in the energy industry today. In fact, investments in VPPs are expected to total over $68.6 billion by 2025 -- this according to Navigant Research, who has published a new white paper on the topic.
Software advancements are enabling greatly expanded capabilities in the distributed energy resources (DERs) that can be aggregated into VPPs, which are now capable of responding to the needs of the power grid at the sub-second speeds required for instantaneous grid balancing.
Titled Stacking Values with Virtual Power Plants in Today's Digital Power Grid: Moving Distributed Networked Energy Into the Mainstream, the paper was authored by Navigant's Peter Asmus and covers:
- The expansion and convergence of VPP market segments
- New distributed energy resource architectures
- Physical VPP grid and market interaction values
- ROIs on VPPs
The white paper also provide case study information on stacking customer and grid values by combining loads with batteries and covers the importance of VPPs relative to load diversity, fast-acting ramp rates, the possibility of zero fuel costs and capital cost reductions.
Finally, the author delves into VPPs and the Energy Cloud, providing interesting and grounded insights into how and why VPPs will be necessary as the fleet of distributed energy resources continues to grow and become more diverse. If you haven't read this interesting new white paper, we encourage you to download it here.
