BtM Demand Flexibility – Virtual Power Plants

At our April meeting, NorCal AEE was pleased to present guest speaker Mr. Adam Sheer, who spoke about Behind the Meter Demand Flexibility – Building Virtual Power Plants. Adam is the Director of Customer Solutions at Recurve, a cutting edge firm focused on creating a Carbon-free energy grid by integrating behind the meter demand flexibility resources. He has years of leadership and experience connecting research and analytics to program planning, developing building-level customer targeting strategies utilizing smart-meters to connect energy efficiency and demand side-programs. Adam received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Colorado-Boulder, was a postdoctoral fellow from Sandia National Labs, and has published more than 30 articles in scientific journals that set the foundation for the next generation of climate technologies.

In the push for decarbonization, more and more distributed and variable generation renewable energy sources are coming online, which provides added stress on the grid. This stress can be managed effectively without costly transmission and distribution upgrades through very specific time and location based price signals.

Meter-based pay-for-performance approaches that pay time-varying incentives for aggregated load impacts are currently being administered by many utilities in the country, where hourly load impacts are determined via open-source CalTRACK methods through the OpenEEmeter which help with consistent and transparent measurement and valuation of demand flexibility. This information helps scale up demand flexibility, which helps manage energy in the short term and generation capacity in the longer term, effectively building virtual power plants.