Virtual Power Plants with Viridity Energy

THE INNOVATION:

Helping consumers – organizational customers with controllable and flexible assets – become ‘prosumers' on the Smart Grid through software that makes grid technology available on the customer side of the meter, making them an important part of keeping reliability on the system.

Laura Manz
Senior VP, Western Region

Viridity Energy
http://viridityenergy.com/

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• [For example] the University of CA-San Diego campus has gas turbines, fuel cells, solar panels, chiller tanks,  and so we work with all of the assets to have them work together [so the customer can] decide - what is the most reliable and most economic way for me to deploy my resources?
• We work with an aggregation of high-rise buildings in downtown Manhattan, and we can actually send a signal into the building management systems and have them give the grid some relief.
• [Sue:] So, you are helping organizations turn into mini-utilities, even as they are trying to meet their own energy resiliency and/or independence needs. [Laura:] Right, we help them become virtual power plants.   And so the genesis of the technology is on the bulk grid… but it stopped at the customer meter.  We are now moving that technology past the edge, to say: how do we use the same smart systems, the same good ideas, the same management of energy, in a way that customers can decide when it’s a good time to be buying, or selling, or using their own resources within their microgrid?
• You don’t need a lot of investment before you can become your own prosumer.  So our first example … was to pre-cool the books in the Law Library at Drexler University, and use the thermal properties of that to ride through the peak of the day.  So you can actually peak-shift with something as simple as a law-library full of books…. So it’s taking that technology and saying OK, what else can I create storage out of, without necessarily having a battery on my premise?   …There are a lot of things that have those thermal properties…
• Changing nature of ‘the peak’: When renewable power becomes prevalent, you have all the fuel you need in the sun at the peak of the day, so our notion of the day being a high-priced time is not the same as it used to be…. [changes the whole profile].  What you really need are assets that can move very fast and very flexibly for short periods of time over what we might call the cross-over period….to fill in those gaps and not have to start another power plant, which might be a dirtier mix, to just get you through those few hours.
• Even where there are not open markets, utilities are becoming partners with customers as solution providers… The customers now have a revenue stream, or a value stream, to put more capability in.   So it’s a pretty exciting time to see this all coming together.
• My background is electrical engineering, and I used to keep the lights on for a living. I was grid operator, but never got to work on the customer side of the meter…. It’s really lovely to see the technology allow customers to benefit from knowledge that we’ve had for a long, long time .