Conservative Foundations Lead to Largest Utility-Run Behind-the-Meter Solar-Battery Virtual Power Plant in the US
A showcase technology and regulatory strategy partnership - Rocky Mountain Power, Utah. And, recommendations from its battery provider Sonnen, for VPP in Texas.
Wattsmart Battery Program: A Future-Ready Grid “Our goal is to have thousands of customers and hundreds of megawatts enrolled in Wattsmart.” - Rocky Mountain Power, Canary Media 2022 3,000 + customers in 2023. Updated Numbers coming soon.
Sonnen’s most sophisticated U.S. VPP serves Utah, where Rocky Mountain Power customers in the utility’s Wattsmart battery program enjoy upfront and ongoing participation incentives. With at least 4,000 enrolled batteries and a 2024 capacity target of 100 MWh, the Wattsmart battery program is big enough to influence Rocky Mountain Power’s capacity planning and secure distributed resources’ place in future integrated resource plans, Richetta said. -- Utility Dive. Note: Rocky Mountain Power today has opened the program for qualification by other battery companies. Today, Fortress and Torus batteries are also eligible. A guideline is available for additional OEMs to participate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VPP Syllabus Cross-Reference: This piece is a case study presented in connection with my syllabus, Energy Independence Problem-Solving: Critical State Policies for VPP. Principles - Virtual Power Plant State Advocacy I. Virtual Power Plant programs must be advocated for in non-partisan terms and examples of these programs from conservative jurisdictions must be widely shared to break myths about their critical role in electrification-driven economic growth, electric ratepayer welfare and states’ energy independence. II. Given recent data reports about central grid power supply risks from independent reliability organizations like NERC, conservative-leaning states face material risks of the loss of centralized generation and stand to benefit substantially from distributed grid policies. III. Virtual Power Plant programs are energy security programs, and therefore national security programs IV. Distributed energy as a strategic grid security objective is directly analogous to the evolution in the Department of Defense’s strategy to move away from centralized and concentrated intelligence infrastructure to a distributed, dispersed, adaptive, decentralized model in the U.S. and globally and employ self-supply redundancy options at US base installations to reduce reliance on commercially sourced power. Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in 2019 from the Acting Asst. Secretary of the Navy (Energy, Installations, and Environment) is a fitting narrative of this phenomenon. V. Whether or not state policy and utility policy moves quickly, people will move quickly to create their own home microgrids with distributed energy. Even mild-weather events, in addition to more severe new weather patterns, are causing longer outages on the distributed poles-and-wires that connect customers to their utility local substations. VI. Voters seeking energy security and energy independence should be the primary drivers of consensus-building among utility companies and industry partners - all advocates and policy experts in this space must actively connect them with legislative bodies who are non-experts and are hearing staid messages about “utility safety” and “least cost generation planning” without hearing the whole story and understanding what their voters really want and need.
UTAH CASE STUDY
The Rocky Mountain Wattsmart Battery DR Program - is a showcase project from a Berkshire Hathaway family of utility companies that originated on the basis of conservative principles: specifically, public-private partnership and free-market environmentalism. The project started in 2017 as a partnership among (i) the utility (ii) a local developer (iii) The Wasatch Energy Group and (iv) Sonnen, a battery manufacturer and integrated DERMs provider. Together, they created the policy and technical basis to create the Soleil Lofts project, a 600 solar-and-battery-powered apartment complex. Now, the program is available in two states to utility customers well beyond this original neighborhood. Wattsmart is the largest direct utility controlled behind-the-meter battery network in the USA, performing several daily grid services. Wattsmart directly compensates customers throughout Utah and Idaho for their participation in the Battery Grid Management System and the value stack of their battery.
The Wattsmart Roadmap:
Rocky Mountain Power developed a Battery Grid Management System (BGMS) in partnership with Sonnen that allows Utility to connect with and dispatch customer-owned batteries to keep the power grid stable and avoid power outages.
The BGMS is connected to the western energy grid and automatically reacts in real-time (within 50 seconds), based on system needs (Frequency Detection Grid Service and seven other services are provided today from the hive of VPP solar-battery premises).
Residential equipment from Sonnen for Soleil Lofts, and now other battery suppliers qualify with the expanded program for utility customers.
Sonnen worked with the utility to integrate real time monitoring and control between the fleet of residential batteries and the utility’s grid management system utilizing the OSI (monarch) (a type of SCADA platform) so the batteries could provide multiple grid services.
Wattsmart is a first of its kind in the USA, due to the fact that the local utility directly dispatches the battery network every day, for a full stack of grid services. The Wattsmart battery fleet is available as a flexible grid resource 24 / 7.
The utility worked with its regulator to ensure that the program value is embedded in its integrated resource planning. This allows the utility to directly tie the offsets that the VPP provides to traditional energy generation and assign a certain number of MWs of response in its dispatch planning permanently to the Wattsmart VPP asset group - directly offsetting the need to dispatch central generators for the same need.
Wattsmart currently includes 14.3 MW / 31MWh of firm dispatchable customer owned Sonnen and non-Sonnen batteries, directly integrated into RMP’s grid resource planning system.
The program is available to Utah and Idaho customers today.
S/O to Sonnen US CEO Blake Richetta, whose Linkedin posts proved useful to dig up important information about this program.
Sonnen also presented on this model at the Texas ERCOT ADER Task Force in Texas in 2021 - check out the list of grid services achieved in their Utah Soleil Lofts program:
ADER Presentation from Sonnen et al.
ADER Presentation from Sonnen et al.
What I loved about Sonnen’s presentation, which I was present for personally as the Vice Chair of the Texas Aggregated DER Task Force, is that the company made recommendations for the competitive Texas deregulated model to create VPP value, which is very different than what Sonnen did with Rocky Mountain Power, a vertically integrated utility that owns generation and does not have retail competition. These are absolutely critical recommendations - some have been implemented and others haev not. Successive ADER pilot phases in Texas should review economic incentive opportunities and M&V metrics to make ADER qualification and participation easier in a far more complex operational environment than we deal with in a utility-controlled A-Z model like Utah.
— Arushi Sharma Frank