Rooftop Solar & Virtual Power Plants Take Center Stage As Oil & Gas Wilt
This article was originally published by Clean Technica on 13th September 2024.Another storm, another black eye for oil and gas as Hurricane Francine leaves a trail of destruction in its path across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Louisiana. What to do? Advocates for rooftop solar panels and virtual power plants have one answer. With the addition of energy storage, solar-enabled ratepayers can power their way through an emergency individually with clean kilowatts, and they can also lend a hand collectively by enrolling in a virtual power plant.
Money Talks: Rooftop Solar Meets Virtual Power Plants
The virtual power plant phenomenon has been building momentum for about 10 years now, and it’s about to go mainstream. In one early iteration, ratepayers get a tipoff from their utility when electricity demand is at risk of surging. If enough of them dial down their consumption, the local utility can avoid brownouts and blackouts.
In effect, ratepayers collectively act like a virtual power plant and reducing, if not eliminating, the need to build additional (and expensive) real-life power plants to handle spikes in demand. The electrification movement has added even more fuel to the virtual power plant fire, by drawing heat pumps, home energy storage systems, EV charging stations and other electrical appliances into the equation (see more VPP background here).
Now that rooftop solar panels and home energy storage units have reached mainstream mass, virtual power plants can handle more sophisticated tasks, and utilities are beginning to reward ratepayers who harvest clean energy from their rooftop solar panels and contribute those kilowatts to the collective grid when needed.
In Texas, for example, the diversified energy firm Vistra has just tasked its TXU Energy branch to launch a new incentive program called Battery Rewards, in partnership with the leading solar installer Sunrun.
The TXU Energy & Sunrun Battery Rewards program will “aggregate power stored in residential, solar-connected batteries, forming a virtual power plant to dispatch energy back to the grid when it’s needed the most,” the partners explain.
The virtual power plant is being formed on an opt-in basis. Vistra and Sunrun seem confident that the financial incentive will provide ratepayers with enough motivation to participate. They also emphasize that the ratepayer continues to control their own energy storage system, in case they need to deploy it at home.
