Comment by 7thaccount
2 days ago
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this isn't novel and something that's been talked about for a long time. The industry term I've most heard is "prices to devices". You of course need retail to participate more in the wholesale markets, but there are a lot of barriers - some technological, some regulatory. Some companies did this in ERCOT, but there was a big backlash when customers got $20k bills after Winter Storm Uri as they didn't understand what they were signing up for.
The FERC passed Order 2222 which is a bigger step in that direction by forcing the regional wholesale markets to allow aggregators to aggregate up the smaller stuff that is normally considered noise.
> Some companies did this in ERCOT, but there was a big backlash when customers got $20k bills after Winter Storm Uri as they didn't understand what they were signing up for.
It would be a bit weird but you could have your home supply at a fixed-ish rate and your EV on a separate meter riding the raw market.
If you can prevent too much cheating.
And while not making money, there has been a lot of talk around Virtual Power Plants, that is unifying the larger demand devices to help stabilize the grid in times of peak demand.
Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are essentially the same thing as the Distributed Energy Resource Aggregators (DERAs) I mentioned above. I guess a VPP is technically a more general term and could also refer to the same concept under different structures like in a micro grid.
The industry has a ton of jargon (literally thousands of acronyms amongst the US regional markets) and in many cases there are 8 terms that mean the exact same thing.
Not sure I follow but seems like a weird thing to mention. The DERA is the who, the VPP is the what. Similar but far from essentially the same thing.
3 replies →
Interesting, thanks. That doesn't sound like bad news at all.
No I guess not. It can sometimes be a little sad though when you think you've come up with some grand new idea and it's been done.