“I think the biggest thing is that customers don’t care about virtual power plants,” he offers with a laugh. “There’s an old saying that they spend six minutes total each year worrying about their electricity. Customers just want hot showers and cold beer.”
And if they can support a more reliable grid and make a couple of bucks at the same time? Everybody wins.
In the meantime, Sunrun’s head of grid services and virtual power plants is sharing his vision of the future- one in which EV batteries are taking tremendous strain off of the grid. He tells me about a conversation he had with an Uber driver the previous night. Rauscher informed the EV driver that through his company’s bi-directional charging pilot, he could make money just by plugging in his car to charge.