Welcome to a new week. As promised, we’ve got all the DERVOS deets for you. The conference centered around Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) had everything: battery-themed innuendos, cheese boards, and (of course) plenty of gadgets to charge our devices.
Across talks throughout the day, one message stood out: The grid needs more electrons than ever, and DERs are becoming an essential tool to unlock energy quickly and efficiently.
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Grid queues are moving at an ‘embarrassing’ pace, FERC Commissioner David Rosner said.
The speed problem: It’s time for grid operators to rev up their interconnection processes, Rosner said during last week’s DERVOS talk with energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah. It’s “embarrassing that we can’t do the queues—the paper and engineering piece of that—in a year or less,” Rosner said.
And while we wait? He’s “bullish” on DERs, and noted that “we need things that can be built faster than we're used to.” To tie it all together, it’s key to carry out “better studies” that examine load, generation, and demand flexibility at once.
The data problem: To make DERs truly work, the energy industry needs access to hourly data that utilities usually keep under wraps. “I think we should aspire as a country to free the meter data,” Rosner said…and the crowd erupted into applause.
Plus, a take from Jigar Shah: As the midterm results made clear, ratepayers want lower bills ASAP. DERs can help—but of all the politicians elected Tuesday, “not a single one of those people has ever heard of any of you,” Shah said.
Shah’s advice to the energy community: “Make sure you spend the time educating people about what you do, what your solutions do, how fast they can scale, and how important they are for energy affordability.” 📝
Can hyperscaler-funded virtual power plants lower bills and ease the grid squeeze? PG&E wants to find out.
California’s new gold rush is hidden in homes across the state. In 2024, PG&E territory alone hosted over a third of the country’s behind-the-meter storage capacity. Now, Google is footing the bill to grow this grid gold mine.
The tech titan is funding a PG&E-led VPP pilot in the Bay Area, known as the SHARE program. The aim is to enroll over 20K existing home devices (customers can also receive free or steeply discounted tech like batteries and heat pumps). Over the next year, SHARE will reveal whether hyperscaler funding can add much-needed grid capacity while benefitting surrounding communities.
At this year’s DERVOS, we caught up with Trevor Udwin, PG&E’s VPP and grid optimization manager. He told us what SHARE could mean for other utilities, and laid out his future grid flexibility vision:
The SHARE program stands out because it’s fully funded by Google. How do you think it could impact the country’s broader VPP landscape?
We hope to find that our proof-of-concept may support speed-to-power engagement with large loads. So, it could be a model where hyperscalers are funding this VPP resource.
At the same time, we’re making sure that this has to be rate-reducing, even for those who aren’t participating. Increasing volumetric sales and maintaining relatively stable costs on the grid should have pretty significant downward pressure on rates. We want to make sure that’s actually the case.
Have you run into any challenges in encouraging customers to participate in VPP programs?
That’s the DER challenge of the century—customer behavior is a tricky thing. In California, our ratepayers are generally very engaged. But as we look to see if they're able to adopt new technologies, that provides an extra layer of technical challenges. There's a back-and-forth of wanting to do this with customers, but making sure that the grid is capable of bringing them on.
It looks like electric vehicles are the next major grid asset. What will it take to ramp up bidirectional charging to support the grid?
EVs are a huge potential resource for us. We've decided to pull in a cohort of vehicle-to-grid resources to SHARE—that's a really great opportunity for us to understand the challenges here. For example, what will it take to get customers to plug in at a certain time? And what level of compensation really derives the value and is competitive?
What DER developments are you most excited for in the coming months and years?
Ultimately, being able to use existing behind-the-meter resources and develop new ones that have impact across the layers of the grid, including distribution and transmission. Historically, the way we’ve planned for distribution and transmission in California has been more siloed. We need to work on reducing the barriers to collapsing that stack.
I think we're coming into a new phase of advancement in that direction. The next five years are really an inflection point for us.
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Driven by urgency, data centers are getting flexy. 💪
Large-load flexibility is increasingly becoming a necessity—not just a best practice. That’s according to the experts from Google, CoreWeave, Scale Microgrids, and Luminary Strategies who took the stage at DERVOS last week.
What flexibility looks like: Data centers can carefully adjust their power consumption to avoid straining the grid. That could mean, for example, shifting certain training tasks to off-peak hours.
Google’s perspective: Right now, the company isn’t “interested in economically optimizing its energy costs," said Varun Mehra, Google's technical lead for data center flexibility. Translation: The company is chasing certain, not cheap, power. And to get online quickly, the company is willing to get flexible.
The outlook: The panelists were optimistic that data centers can make flexibility work. Why?
The solutions are there: Easy, available fixes can make flexibility workable for customers, said Angela Kent, energy & climate policy engagement lead at CoreWeave.
“It’s demand-driven,” said Victoria Fleming, chief business officer of Scale. Data center developers, not policymakers or regulators, are leading the charge. That’s out of necessity—and the urgency will only continue to grow.
Regulators are moving fast(ish). The pace of FERC docket decisions is "surpassing anything that I've ever seen,” Kent said.
The bottom line: Flexibility is no longer optional. Take ERCOT, where all-time peak load hit roughly 91 GW this summer. The grid’s large-load queue: more than 400 GW. In ERCOT and around the country, new transmission alone won’t cut it.
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Thanks for reading. Catch ya tomorrow. 🌊
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