from Hacker News

A new perspective for US virtual power plants

by kieranmaine on 3/7/25, 5:46 PM with 1 comments

• by ok_dad on 3/7/25, 6:47 PM

  The main problem with VPPs is that the people hosting the DER (distributed energy resource) equipment aren't the customers, they are the resources. The companies using VPPs don't really give a shit about the resource, other than to use their equipment in a vampiric way to siphon off some of the profit from selling the power to the grid. Often, the VPP company will make things worse for the company hosting the equipment, and often the VPP company will finance a battery and solar project, and then the host is stuck with them for decades.

  There needs to be open standards-- and I mean open as in beer, right now the standards are "open" for those who are insiders in the industry only-- for accepting and bidding into the market. There also has to be a regulated and open API standard for site-installed DERs, so that those who host and own the batteries can utilize them programmatically, which is almost impossible today if you're not a big company. Additionally, there needs to be more companies willing to fund DERs for the hosts to install and operate, rather than just allowing big VPP companies to siphon off some of the profits and make everything more expensive with software that, frankly, isn't that hard to build.

  We need to enable decentralized VPPs before all of the VCs snap up all of the VPP and DER contracts. This is like the next water fight, and the big VCs are way ahead of the curve in buying up contracts. Once a building/campus/site is contracted with a DER VPP service company, it's likely locked in for decades.

  FYI, this article is just an advertisement for another VPP vampire.