If you’re a company selling smart thermostats, batteries, EVs or EV chargers (or managing fleets of them), you’ve probably already seen the value of residential demand response (DR) in certain utility territories. DR adds much needed capacity to the grid, boosts your margins, adds stickiness to your product by giving customers a recurring incentive payment (and/or energy savings), and lets your customers actively participate in the energy transition. 

Cool, right? 

But here’s the catch: Utility programs are geographically limited, and partnering with them can be slow, complex, or just impossible in many places, especially if an RFP cycle for a utility program has just ended and your company didn’t secure a spot in it. 

Enter: Voltus. 

Voltus helps Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), distributed energy resource (DER) providers, and EV companies build residential virtual power plants (VPPs) by leveraging both utility and wholesale market DR programs—even in regions where utilities don’t offer their own DR programs. It’s recurring revenue. It’s grid resilience. And it’s easier than you think!

Here’s how to launch your own residential demand response program in six (somewhat!) easy steps. 

1. Set up participation incentives

The first thing to consider: What’s going to motivate your customers to join and stay in the program? Incentives. 

We’ve seen programs take off with as little as a $20 sign-up bonus or a $10 retention reward for sticking around each year. Other programs have had success with sweepstakes-style models where participants are eligible for a bigger prize simply for opting in. 

Voltus will work with you to design an incentive structure that aligns your goals and helps you balance customer engagement with revenue opportunities, based on the total value available from grid services. Best part of all: You don’t need a revenue-depleting budget.

2. Make onboarding and payments simple 

To participate in DR, you need access to your customers’ utility data for registration and settlement. After each DR event, the market requires meter data to prove that load was reduced to a specific kW number; if there is no proof that this happened, there is no revenue to give to a customer. 

Getting this data is the most challenging part of launching a demand response program for any DERM or OEM provider. Without it, participation is impossible.

Voltus solves this issue by providing a streamlined integration for customers to share access to the required utility data as part of the sign-up process. Voltus then collects the required data to manage market enrollments and settlements so your team doesn’t have to worry about it, and customers have a seamless experience. 

3. Launch and market the program

Once your sign-up process is live, it’s time to enroll customers. 

You handle the outreach (via your channels and brand voice) and Voltus collects and aggregates the data to develop a broader portfolio that maximizes performance and minimizes risk. 

4. Voltus registers customers in market programs

Voltus then navigates complex DR program rules and eligibility requirements to enroll your customers into a flexible and optimized program “stack,” comprised of utility and wholesale market programs, depending on what’s available in each territory. 

The objective: Provide an easy way for your customers to participate in demand response. 

5. Customers are dispatched when there are events 

Once customers are enrolled, Voltus monitors the wholesale market or utility for signs of an event. We optimize participation in multiple programs at once by only dispatching for the most financially lucrative events. Voltus automatically sends a dispatch notification to our partners, who would then pass it on to their end-customers. 

6. You (and your customers) get paid 

Once customers are enrolled and participating in events, Voltus earns money for the capacity or energy provided by the residential aggregation and shares it with you and your customers. 

For your business, this could mean: 

• New, recurring revenue streams for your business
• Higher profitability per device, customer, etc. 
• A differentiated value proposition for your customers

And, as we mentioned at the top, residential DR with Voltus could help you increase sales, improve retention, and even expand into new territories where utility programs aren’t available. 

Parting Advice

Residential DR doesn’t have to be complicated or slow-going. Voltus makes it simple to set up a virtual power plant, tap into existing grid programs, and start earning revenue. 

Ready to get started? Contact info@voltus.co to start building with us.