What’s the best way for home batteries to help ease summer grid stress? This California utility is trying out two different models with Tesla and Sunrun.
As a demand-response manager for California utility Pacific Gas & Electric, John Hernandez knows all about how hundreds or thousands of battery-equipped homes can be remotely controlled to serve the grid’s needs, much as central power plants do. These aggregations of controllable home solar-plus-battery systems are called virtual power plants, or VPPs for short.
The question is, what kind of power plants should these VPPs be modeled after? This summer, Hernandez’s team at PG&E will be testing two types of VPPs that use similar tools but different methods to help keep the grid stable during hot summer evenings.