December Virtual Press Briefing: DER and Virtual Power Plants: The Easiest Supply Boost

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The next virtual press briefing in the United States Energy Association’s monthly series will examine distributed energy resources, virtual power plants and transactive energy. The briefing is set for Dec. 11 at 11 a.m. ET.

“All of a sudden, distributed energy resources and virtual power plants have come of age, after being a pipe dream of environmentalists,” says journalist Llewellyn King, who has organized and will moderate the briefing.

“You have to look no further than the big news from NRG Energy and Renew Home out of Texas last month,” he adds.

In a joint announcement, NRG and Renew Home, a Google-backed company, said they had signed an agreement to build a 1-gigawatt virtual power plant on the NRG system in Texas.

Other utilities across the country are diving into DER and contemplating the assemblage of demand-side management, solar rooftops, home batteries, scattered wind generators, and even plugged-in EVs into a vast energy matrix that will constitute a VPP and be as reliable to the utility as any other dispatchable power source.

“I am delighted that we have been able to put together an impressive panel of experts from Renew Home, EPRI, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Anterix, Holy Cross Energy, Bloom Energy and SmartPower," King says.

As usual at USEA virtual press briefings, a panel of senior journalists who cover energy will question a panel of experts. They are intended to give reporters some news they can publish that day and to inform them for future reporting.

Mark Menezes, President and CEO of the USEA, and a former deputy secretary of energy, will give opening and closing remarks, and will offer his expertise during the briefing.

These briefings on Zoom are open to the media and the public. They last about an hour and a few questions are taken from the audience via the chat function. Recordings are available afterward on the USEA and Energy Central websites.

King believes the mounting interest in VPPs is coming at a critical time when demand is rising — and some predictions of future demand show an easy outstripping of supply, driven by data centers.

“DER is seen by many as the low-hanging fruit, and it is time to start harvesting,” says King.

The Experts:

Jason Fuller, Group Leader Electricity Security, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Morgan O’Brien, Chairman, Anterix and Co-founder, Nextel
Cisco DeVries, Executive Vice President, Renew Home
Bryan Hannegan, President and CEO, Holy Cross Energy
James Roth, Vice President of Federal Government Relations, Bloom Energy
Brian Keane, President, SmartPower
Irene Danti Lopez, Technical Expert, EPRI (Paris)
Margaret Murphy, Snr. Manager Load Management Solutions PG&E

The Reporters: