Fine-tuning How Homes Can Help the Grid as 'Virtual Power Plants' Real-world tests show that EnergyHub’s ‘dynamic load shaping’ tech can get thousands of thermostats and other devices to ramp up and down like a power plant. This week, EnergyHub is publishing the results of trial runs it conducted this spring and summer with Arizona Public Service in Arizona, Duke Energy in North Carolina, and National Grid in Massachusetts. Over several afternoons and evenings, EnergyHub tested its capabilities to get thousands of smart thermostats — and for National Grid, rooftop solar-charged batteries as well – to help the grid. The company says its approach, known as dynamic load-shaping, will allow it to more precisely manage the 2 gigawatts of flexible capacity it now controls from about 1.4 million customer devices, said Paul Hines, EnergyHub’s vice president of power systems. The company is hoping that the successful test cases will help convince utilities and regulators that “virtual power plants can become a core part of their infrastructure,” he said. Getting customers to turn down their air conditioners, water heaters, and other appliances to deal with rising electricity demand is a lot cheaper than building new power plants. Hines cited a U.S. Department of Energy report estimating that 80 to 160 gigawatts of VPP capacity could be unleashed across the country by 2030, enough to meet 10 to 20 percent of U.S. peak grid needs and save utility customers roughly $10 billion in annual costs. “There’s broad agreement that there’s a need for this stuff,” he said. “But when you talk to grid operators, they still have a ton of skepticism about whether virtual power plants can be a valuable part of the core resource mix.” That’s because traditional demand response programs that pay customers to let utilities turn down their thermostats and other appliances have some well-known features that can make them unreliable, he said. A typical demand response event – say, one reacting to a heatwave — involves two key steps: The first is “precooling,” or ordering thermostats to ramp up air conditioning earlier in the day when the grid isn’t yet stressed, so that homes can ride through the hotter hours ahead. The second is the demand response event itself, during which temperature settings on thermostats are raised to reduce air-conditioning power use when overall grid demand reaches its peak. CLICK HERE to read the full article. |