Getting More Out of Distributed Resources: Finding Technology and Strategy Differentiation in Virtual Power Plants

Virtual power plants (VPPs) – aggregations of distributed generation, storage, and loads – have great potential as tools to balance supply and demand in the face of increasing renewables and recover additional value from underutilized energy assets. However, the developer landscape is crowded, and discerning between VPP technology platforms can be challenging. We develop a framework for comparing VPP platforms on their deployment scale and flexibility, and find that few have reached meaningful scale today, and even fewer have done so with highly flexible platforms. We also highlight examples of business model differentiation among VPP operators.