Top Innovators
Jason Delaney, Kerri Carnes, and Elizabeth Lawrence represent the Virtual Power Plant team at Arizona Public Service Company.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Jason, describe the innovation that led to your team winning the Maria Telkes Top Innovator Award for Distributed Energy, how it works, and what the benefits are to Arizona Public Service.
Jason Delaney: Arizona Public Service Company delivers reliable, affordable and clean energy for approximately 1.4 million customers in Arizona. The Customer to Grid Solutions team at APS serves as the bridge between what our customers want and what the grid needs by providing exceptional service and expertise to integrate innovative technologies.
The programs in our demand response portfolio help customers manage their energy use by participating in programs, while impacting the grid. Our DR portfolio includes a variety of technologies like smart thermostats, behavioral DR, and storage devices.
The team has been responsible for scaling our DR portfolio, which has grown into a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). With almost eighty thousand thermostats enrolled in Cool Rewards — a smart thermostat program for residential customers — we're capable of shedding more than one hundred ten megawatts of energy demand. That's the equivalent of a small power plant, or fifteen thousand homes. This year, we achieved more than one hundred seventy-five megawatts of capacity from our entire DR portfolio.