How VPPs Can Replace Fossil Fuel Peaker Plants

In North America, a primary challenge of power grids is meeting peaks and rapid changes in electricity demand. These peaks are increasingly common due to variability of wholesale renewable supply and retail demand, and fossil fuel peaker plants are the traditional means to meet them. These peaker plants can sit idle for as much as 99% of the year waiting to respond to those peak hours, making them among the most polluting and expensive resources on the system. Demand response (DR) is one solution. Yet a far more compelling proposition is virtual power plants (VPPs) that can aggregate and orchestrate a diverse portfolio of distributed energy resources (DER) Learn more about:

• Two markets–New York and Texas–and how replacing peaker plants with VPPs in these states may make economic sense today despite their vastly different regulatory environments and cultural differences.

• Why VPPs are cleaner alternative to conventional fossil fuel peakers used to meet spikes in electricity demand and which tend to have a disproportionate negative impact on disadvantaged communities due to high air emissions
• How VPPs are more resilient and flexible since the resources integrated into the VPP are decentralized and distributed, which means there is no single point of failure.
• Data proving that VPPs can be less expensive to operate than peaker plants