The US state replacing power plants with home batteries
3 hours ago
- Vermont's Green Mountain Power (GMP) has installed home battery systems in over 5,500 homes, forming a virtual power plant that has become the state's largest power source.
- Virtual power plants aggregate distributed energy resources like home batteries, rooftop solar, and EV batteries to reduce grid demand, replacing the need for fossil fuel peaker plants.
- The GMP program offers two batteries for $55 per month over a 10-year lease, providing outage protection and cheaper, cleaner energy compared to gas generators.
- Vermont has faced increased extreme weather and outages, with seven of GMP's ten most damaging storms occurring in the last decade.
- GMP's virtual power plant provides about 110MW of power, equivalent to a small natural gas plant, and saved customers $11 million last year.
- Virtual power plants are seen as a future grid solution, offering resilience, lower costs, and a two-way grid where customers become both consumers and producers.
- Barriers to virtual power plant adoption include utility financial incentives that favor building infrastructure, but states like Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey are pushing for their use.
- GMP aims to offer energy storage to all its customers and expand its virtual power plant by 2034, including leveraging EV batteries for vehicle-to-grid technology.