PLMA: Load Management Dialogues

"With electricity demand growing for the first time in a decade and fossil assets retiring, deploying 80-160 GW of virtual power plants (VPPs)—tripling current scale—by 2030 could support rapid electrification while redirecting grid spending from peaker plants to participants and reducing overall grid costs.“

Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) received PLMA's Technology Pioneer Award this Spring for their work partnering with rooftop solar customers to accelerate their transition to the renewable grid of the future. The Wattsmart Battery Program innovation journey started in 2017 as a partnership between the utility (RMP),  local developer and RMP customer The Wasatch Group, and Sonnen, a battery manufact...

Meet Lee Krevat, a former utility executive with SDG&E and current CEO of Krevat Energy Innovations. Lee hosts a podcast titled “The Climate Champions” in which he discusses the planet’s future with a variety of leaders who are engaged in the fight to mitigate climate change. Each episode includes a discussion of his guest’s actions and initiatives, the forces that drive them to make a differe...

California is in the middle of a regulatory proceeding to lower volumetric electricity rates and replace the revenue with income-graduated fixed charges. The idea was inspired in part by a 2021 UC Berkeley Energy Institute study that found the current rate structures of the investor-owned utilities have rates that are at least double the utility's avoided cost. A successor study released in 2...

One of the critical obstacles to realizing the potential of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) applications is the standardization of the technology that enables efficient, low-cost, mass adoption of V2G business and technology. The current trajectory of EV communications in the U.S. is to focus on standardizing the charging infrastructure without adequate attention to its impact on the adoption of V2G. This p...

Salt River Project (SRP) DR program has over 67,000 devices providing 82 MW of load flexibility, and sometimes much more. During a single event in the summer of 2022, the program delivered 133 MW of first-hour load shift, ensuring grid resilience when it was needed most. The reliability and scale of this resource has led operators and resource planners to view DR as part of the resource stack and...

Gaining Maryland Public Service Commission approval in March of 2022, the SMECO FlexTemp Pilot moved quickly to stand up a flexible load management program directly associated with the management of smart thermostats, during both the cooling and heating seasons. The approach taken for the program was presented during PLMA's Spring 2022 Conference and was titled “Revenue and Emission Benefits...

Time-of-use (TOU) and other innovative rate designs are critical to managing an increasingly complex grid, achieving decarbonization goals, and integrating DERs. To achieve meaningful results, more energy customers need to adopt them. Southern California Edison (SCE) wanted to get its customers on new rates in a way that ensured a positive experience and delivered impact to the business. The utili...

U.S. climate goals for economy-wide net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 require rapid decarbonization of the light-duty vehicle fleet and plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are poised to become the preferred technology for achieving this end. Considerable investments in public and private EV charging infrastructure will be needed to support widespread adoption, however, guidance is still lackin...