Assessment of Strategy and Execution for 16 Companies

As Australia surpasses three million rooftop solar installations, households looking to buy a battery storage system or electric vehicle can be part of a new kind of power plant bringing about faster, cheaper decarbonisation. In the future, so-called ‘virtual power plants’ that harvest distributed renewable electricity and demand response will play a major role, says a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

Origin Energy says it will build the massive Eraring battery over two stages, and is also aiming to grow its in-house “virtual power plant” to 2GW or more to provide a “very low cost” replacement for the country’s biggest coal generator.

VPPs have been lauded as a major part of the future energy mix in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). When the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) announced its VPP demonstrations project in 2019, AEMO predicted there could be 700MW of VPPs by 2022.

The UK’s first electrically-chargeable vehicle (EV) virtual power plant (VPP), run by ev.energy, has been awarded an additional £295,000 (€352,000) in funding, taking its total finance pot to £754,000. Provided by Innovate UK, the money will be used to scale the VPP, which will help stabilise the country’s power grid as electromobility accelerates.

Deploying 80-160 GW of virtual power plants (VPPs) by 2030 could expand the US grid’s capacity to reliably support rapid electrification while redirecting grid spending from peaker plants to participants and reducing overall grid costs.