![]() ![]() Donate NowĮnvironmental advocates have warned the public to be skeptical when oil companies tout their clean energy investments. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. ICN provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. He was part of sonnen’s management in 2019, when the company agreed to be purchased by Shell, the London-based oil giant. Richetta started at sonnen in 2016 following some time at Tesla, where he was sales manager for the Powerwall battery storage system. The utility Hawaiian Electric is working with the energy company Swell Electric on an 80-megawatt virtual power plant that will serve customers on three Hawaiian islands.In Vermont, the utility Green Mountain Power has a virtual power plant with more than 4,000 batteries in customers’ homes and businesses, and is in the process of expanding the program.Also, in California, sonnen is working on a virtual power plant with Baker Electric Home Energy, aiming to sign up 5,000 households by the end of 2025.In California, the utility Pacific Gas & Electric is working with Sunrun, a solar and battery storage company, to enroll 7,500 customers to be part of a virtual power plant with capacity of up to 30 megawatts.Some other projects, all from the last two years: The Rocky Mountain Power program is one of many virtual power plants across the country. Customers receive credits on their bills for the electricity they contribute. Then, at times when electricity demand is highest, the utility has the ability to draw electricity from the batteries to support the grid. They have purchased a sonnen battery system, which starts at about $10,000, and received rebates that start at $1,920. So far, about 3,500 customers have signed up. Rocky Mountain Power, the utility serving parts of Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, is working with sonnen on a virtual power plant in which the utility provides a rebate to encourage customers to participate. Here are some specifics on how this idea translates into action: ![]() Instead, that battery can be a building block for serving the entire grid. The purpose of a home-based battery shouldn’t be to just “sit there all year until there’s a power outage,” Richetta said. This week, I spoke with Richetta to get his view of a moment in which sonnen is part of several major initiatives that are helping to popularize virtual power plants. The company is among the market leaders in home-based energy storage in Europe but is a smaller player in the United States. Since its founding in 2010, the company has been a leader in emphasizing how batteries can serve a larger function than just backup power, and it has developed software to manage groups of batteries. But the company made an impression on me because of its entrepreneurial nature and its vision of how batteries can reduce the need for conventional power plants. The resulting story had a lot about Wildpoldsried and made only a brief mention of sonnen. I’ve been following sonnen for a while and in 2019 had a tour of its global headquarters in Wildpoldsried, a village in Germany. So what is it? A virtual power plant is like a swarm of bees or the Power Rangers’ Megazord or any other group of parts that join forces to do big things, which in this case means stabilizing the grid. Yes, sonnen has a lowercase “s,” the kind of frustrating-at least for copy editors-branding that seems appropriate for virtual power plants, a concept whose name does little to explain what it is. This combination of renewable energy and groups of batteries is “a recipe for the grid of the future,” said Blake Richetta, CEO of U.S. And most of the electricity from the batteries is generated by rooftop solar. The batteries in virtual power plants add megawatts of capacity to the grid when electricity demand is at its highest. This summer could be the first one in which virtual power plants-networks of small batteries that work in tandem to function like power plants-are large enough to make their presence felt by helping to keep the lights on during the hottest days.Īfter years of pilot projects, utilities and battery companies now have networks with thousands of participants in California, Utah and Vermont, among others. ![]()
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