EGN NEWS DESK
New rooftop photo voltaic techniques are price a lot lower than they was once in California, following the state’s dramatic adjustments in net-metering coverage. Even batteries added to these photo voltaic techniques to retailer energy when the solar is shining and feed power again after the solar goes down — a major aim of the state’s new rooftop photo voltaic guidelines — are price much less after current choices from state regulators.
But residents nonetheless have one clear pathway to creating photo voltaic and battery installations repay. They can be part of a “digital energy plant.”
Virtual energy vegetation, or VPPs, use software program to mix the facility of a whole lot or 1000’s of small-scale photo voltaic and battery techniques to imitate conventional energy vegetation. VPPs have been increasing in California over the previous few years, because of a funding increase from a collection of state legal guidelines and regulator choices enacted to forestall summer season night energy shortages like those who pressured small-scale rolling blackouts in August 2020 and almost precipitated extra in September 2022.
From a power-grid perspective, the imaginative and prescient is to have VPPs assist substitute the fossil gasoline “peaker” vegetation presently used to fulfill surging electrical energy demand on scorching summer season evenings. Solar advocates additionally see VPP packages as a strategy to increase gross sales of residence photo voltaic techniques within the state, which have slowed to a crawl as a result of regulators’ choice to sharply reduce compensation from internet metering.
About 100,000 solar-charged batteries are already put in at California properties and companies, including as much as almost 1.7 gigawatts of capability — however solely a fraction of that’s being tapped for VPPs right now.
“Virtual energy vegetation are all potential at this level,” stated Kate Unger, senior coverage advisor for the California Solar and Storage Association commerce group. “There’s a lot potential there. But we’re actually within the nascent stage.”
The query is how shortly these VPPs can develop to harness this potential — and whether or not they can show to utilities and regulators that they’re dependable sufficient to serve the state’s peak grid wants.
Finding methods to carry VPPs to extra California communities
Chris Rauscher, head of grid companies and VPPs for Sunrun, a main U.S. residential photo voltaic installer, thinks his firm has confirmed the viability of VPPs with its undertaking with Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric.
The undertaking, launched final yr, mixed 8,500 residential solar-plus-storage techniques to persistently discharge a mean of slightly below 30 megawatts of battery energy from 7 to 9 p.m. each weekday from August by October — the months when the utility tends to face the heaviest demand for energy after sunset.
Participating prospects obtained a $750 reward card and a free Google Nest sensible thermostat in alternate for giving Sunrun management over their batteries throughout the months of this system. The chart beneath reveals a typical day by day cycle.
“If there was a query about whether or not a digital energy plant may present up day in and time out at megawatt scale, now we have confirmed it resoundingly,” Rauscher stated. What’s extra, PG&E and Sunrun had been capable of provoke the undertaking, enroll prospects and begin controlling their batteries in lower than six months, he stated. “There’s not one other useful resource that may be stood up that shortly.”
The one factor that’s lacking from the equation that might permit this specific Sunrun-PG&E undertaking to interchange a energy plant is guaranteeing its longevity. Like lots of the VPP alternatives now taking root in California, this undertaking was created in response to grid emergencies, and it received’t be prolonged until state policymakers, regulators and utilities take motion to do so.
This lack of a regular assist construction for digital energy vegetation is a downside for many VPP initiatives throughout the state, Unger stated. It’s a severe barrier to increasing the tech to the purpose the place it could possibly meet its potential as a widespread different to the large-scale assets that the CPUC and utilities presently rely on.
That’s a main missed alternative, clear power specialists say.
That’s as a result of the distributed power assets that make up digital energy vegetation — rooftop photo voltaic, batteries, electrical automobiles and sensible home equipment — can do a lot extra to assist prospects than massive energy vegetation can, in response to Rafael Reyes, senior director of power packages at Peninsula Clean Energy, one of many neighborhood alternative aggregators that procure clear power for a rising variety of the shoppers of California’s massive three utilities.
“We clearly wish to present grid advantages…and scale back our prices.” But, he added, “we even have a lot of energy outages in our service space, so resilience is of significance.” PCE’s territory in San Mateo County is considered one of many elements of the state which have skilled a number of wildfire-prevention grid outages over the previous few years.
“And utility charges and payments are simply astronomical — there’s no different method about it — and we wish to use [distributed energy resources] to make electrification extra inexpensive.” Rooftop photo voltaic and batteries can scale back the price of charging EVs and working electric-powered warmth pumps, two key applied sciences in California’s decarbonization roadmap.
But discovering methods to seize the grid worth of solar-plus-battery techniques to cut back their upfront price for patrons is difficult, stated Peter Levitt, PCE’s distributed power assets packages manager. For PCE and different neighborhood alternative aggregators, the very best present possibility is utilizing them to cut back their resource-adequacy prices, he stated.
“Resource adequacy” is how California utilities, neighborhood alternative aggregators and different energy suppliers seek advice from the method of securing sufficient grid assets to fulfill peak demand in future years. In California, the intervals of highest energy use happen throughout scorching summer season evenings when air conditioners are blasting, and solar energy has light from the grid. In the long run, the state plans to make use of utility-scale batteries to alleviate grid stress, however useful resource adequacy right now is essentially provided by fossil-gas-fired energy vegetation.
As the state’s grid has grow to be extra harassed, the price of securing sufficient energy to make sure that resource-adequacy necessities are met has been “climbing at a actually regarding fee,” Levitt stated — about two to 3 occasions greater than a few years in the past — “and it actually spikes in the summertime months.”
But below a 2020 choice from the California Public Utilities Commission that shifted some resource-adequacy duties from neighborhood alternative aggregators to investor-owned utilities PG&E and Southern California Edison, PCE and different neighborhood alternative aggregators can’t instantly receive the worth of native load reductions that VPPs can present.
To get round that barrier, PCE labored with the California Energy Commission, which is the state power company in control of setting resource-adequacy necessities, to show that its VPP-based batteries had been certainly persistently lowering peak energy calls for.
Once that was confirmed, the California Energy Commission allowed PCE to subtract that from its load forecasts, lowering the quantity of energy provide it needed to safe to fulfill resource-adequacy necessities, he stated. That, in flip, results in decrease prices for all its prospects, not simply those that take part in digital energy plant packages, as a result of the prices of useful resource adequacy are handed alongside to all prospects of their electrical energy charges.
That’s a new and totally different strategy from the standard technique of responding to grid emergencies by asking prospects to cut back power use or present backup energy, a tactic referred to as “demand response” that’s way more generally deployed within the state right now. Instead, these VPPs proactively scale back peak energy calls for to cut back the danger of grid emergencies ever occurring within the first place — and scale back the state’s reliance on fossil gasoline because the grid useful resource it depends on to fulfill these peak calls for.
Distributed assets like VPPs aren’t handled as if they’re as dependable as utility-scale energy vegetation and photo voltaic and battery farms right now, PCE’s Reyes stated. But California’s plans for utility-scale clear power development are stalling within the face of crowded transmission-grid interconnection queues, and distributed assets may circumvent that downside.
“At some level, it’s important to begin asking the query, ‘Are [distributed energy resources] an alternative choice to California reaching its power storage targets?’” he stated.
The prospects with residence solar-plus-battery techniques that PCE is working with are a part of a broader 20-megawatt contract that Sunrun launched in 2020 with PCE and two different neighborhood alternative aggregators (CCAs) serving prospects within the San Francisco Bay Area area. All three CCAs have used the load-modification technique that Levitt described above to make the undertaking economics work, Rauscher stated.
