Virtual Power Plants
Neil Veilleux is Senior Director of Market Development and Regulatory Innovation for Uplight.
Brien Sheahan is a former Chairman and CEO of the Illinois Commerce Commission and Chairman of the NARUC Task Force on Innovation.
Uplight recently acquired AutoGrid as electrification and digitization are changing the needs of an increasingly distributed and decarbonized energy system. The acquisition centers on the need for active energy customer participation to help provide reliable and flexible capacity as a tool to optimize the modern electric grid, which translates into use of Virtual Power Plants, or VPPs.
This works because AutoGrid is a clean-tech company with software providing a platform to augment energy assets as VPPs across all customer classes, device types, and use cases. It allows energy and utilities companies to take advantage of the forecasted growth in distributed energy resources and use VPPs to help with demand.
Uplight's Neil Veilleux and former Illinois Commerce Commission Chair Brien Sheahan examine The Regulator's Dilemma in Part One of a three-part series of articles. This article looks at the challenges regulators face from rising load growth (due to electrification, data centers, et cetera), retiring fossil fuel dispatchable assets, increasing renewables, and how these trends place increased strain on the grid. They require a new solution that is cost-effective and reliable: enter VPPs.