Some 200 California households will help design VPPs that prioritize their needs in a Living Laboratory project. The goal: to vastly scale up VPP participation.

Hello, everybody! Welcome back to California Wire. This week, I’m going to be talking about virtual power plants again — but not the ones set up by utilities and tech giants or run by solar-battery vendors like Sunrun and Tesla. Instead, I want to dive into a pretty radical new concept: letting participating households design VPPs themselves. 

On Wednesday, the Agile Electrification Project, led by the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, launched a new phase of research on a potentially groundbreaking project meant to do just that. 

Over the next 12 months, some 200 volunteer households that have solar panels, home battery systems, electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and other connected devices by various manufacturers will work with researchers to develop the ground rules for a set of hypothetical VPP programs. 

Their decisions — about how much electricity they’re willing to share, under what conditions, and in exchange for what incentives — could serve as a data gold mine for policymakers, utilities, and companies trying to build VPPs for the millions of Californians who might be interested in them, but aren’t participating in the handful of options currently available. 

So says Andrew Krause, CEO of Northern Pacific Power Systems, a California-based solar, battery, and home electrification contractor and co-lead of the Agile Electrification project. ” he asked.

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