Voltus President and Co-founder, Matt Plante, joins Julia Bunte-Mein from The Seeds to discuss the electric grid of the future, the DER technology and policy to get us there, lessons learned from the Texas and California blackouts, and what makes Voltus special.
Read more about The Seeds and its creator, Julia Bunte-Mein, here. Learn more about becoming a Voltan here. More questions? Email info@voltus.co.
Author: Matt Plante, President & Co-founder
On Monday, March 9th, 2020, during Veritas (our weekly all-hands call), we hired our 67th employee (Lauren Stenstream, Indomitable Controller), we named Luke “Snakeman” Talltree the Voltan of the Week (Luke installed our technology at seven new customer sites that week), and we celebrated International Women’s Day. Oh yes, and we announced that we were moving our first ever customer conference, scheduled to be held in Times Square on April 1st, to a virtual meeting. On March 9th, 2020, the world had changed.
We’ve now been living in that changed world for over a full year. 8760+ hours. It’s a year – for obvious reasons, for many reasons, for countless virtual conference reasons – that we don’t ever want to repeat.
Yet today, we hired our 104th employee (Jesus Martinez, Production Technician), we were publicly lauded by one of the world’s largest companies for helping them manage February’s Texas energy crisis, and we closed a deal with an important partner. Oh yes, and we hired Jon Wellinghoff, the former FERC Chairman (since you’re reading an energy blog, I suppose that last clause was unnecessary).
2020 threw haymaker after haymaker…and we came out stronger. The following seven reasons help explain why, and we hope they will help others lead through times of adversity as well.
We did something else today: we booked an actual, physical, in-person location for VoltusFest, our semi-annual company-wide off-site. We’ll be in Austin, where we’ll share, support, make mistakes, innovate, get after it, celebrate, and, yes, love. We can’t wait. We cannot wait.
We’re hiring. View all open positions at www.voltus.co/join-us
Voltus, Inc., the world’s leading Distributed Energy Resources (DER) technology platform, announces a historic win in its battle to ensure the equal treatment of all DERs in wholesale power markets. Yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) responded to Voltus’s October filing by taking steps to unify the treatment of all DERs under Order 2222, ensuring that demand response (DR) can fully participate in wholesale markets as part of DER aggregations without discriminatory state and local barriers.
“FERC’s clarification provides an immediate opportunity for demand response to deliver reliability, economic, and sustainability benefits to every state that is part of a wholesale power market,” said Voltus Chief Regulatory Officer and former FERC Chairman, Jon Wellinghoff. “DER aggregators like Voltus will be able to help customers and DER partners access states that previously restricted demand response from coming to market.”
In his opening statements at today’s meeting, FERC Commissioner Neil Chatterjee lauded the Commission’s decision to prevent the state opt-out provision in Order 719 from “serving as a barrier to demand response resources participating in mixed aggregations.” Chatterjee also stated, “Our responsibility is to make sure our federal wholesale markets deliver reliable low-cost energy services to consumers and the way to get there is to make sure emerging technologies can enter the market, period.”
Voltus celebrates the significance of this step for energy consumers nationwide. “We’re very grateful that FERC removed this barrier to full DR market participation so quickly,” says Gregg Dixon, Voltus Co-founder and CEO. “The benefits of this decision will result in significantly lower wholesale electricity prices, a more reliable grid, and a better environment for all.”
About Voltus, Inc.
Voltus aims to be the Distributed Energy Platform that fulfills the promise of the energy transition. Voltus represents the “potential of us” to better manage energy through simple, cost and risk-free programs for Distributed Energy Resources. To learn more, visit www.voltus.co.
Voltus Media Relations
Kelly Yazdani
Director of Marketing
703-340-9353
kyazdani@voltus.co
3 March 2021, San Francisco, CA
Voltus, Inc., the leading platform for Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), announced today the release of CashDash 2.0, the financial transaction engine of its DER operating system, VoltApp. With the release of CashDash 2.0, VoltApp becomes the only auditable DER platform in the world, allowing Voltus and its partners to monetize every type of behind-the-meter DER with an automated “meter to market to money” customer experience. According to Voltus CEO Gregg Dixon, “VoltApp is the transaction platform that unlocks the full value of DERs, from smart thermostats and electric vehicles to battery storage and distributed generation. VoltApp provides a direct connection between these DERs and every wholesale electricity market in North America.”
CashDash 2.0 gives customers the ability to forecast, audit, and report on the value of their DERs across all energy markets. Supported by 30-second telemetry data, VoltApp automatically connects to and settles financial performance with the market, while providing full digital payment processing and line item automation. All of Voltus’s customers and partners gain immediate access to CashDash 2.0.
“This solves many of the problems that have held back our investment in DERs,“ said Jim Mullin, Director of Energy Procurement at JBS. “Our team now sees, in real-time, the value of managing JBS’s energy every hour of the year. This allows us to budget and forecast the value of JBS’s operational flexibility. It’s what we’ve been asking for for years.”
The power of VoltApp extends beyond Voltus’s direct customers. This transaction platform is used by third parties who want to access the very same markets that Voltus serves. “Rather than building out their own resources market by market, DER type by DER type, we’ve built for our partners a set of common services for any DER to interact with all markets,” says Neil Lakin, Voltus’s Chief Technology Officer.
The need to easily monetize and unleash DER capability has never been more apparent. February’s ice storms across Texas triggered rolling blackouts throughout ERCOT, MISO, and SPP, as generation capacity failed to keep up with demand. Also, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark Order 2222 calls for the unified treatment of DERs in all wholesale markets nationwide, opening up new markets and states to DERs. “The market for our product is exponentially larger than even we believed when we started Voltus. We’re now serving classes of customers and we’re in markets that we never contemplated in our original business plan,” explains Lakin.
As DERs, powered by VoltApp, take a more and more prominent role in power markets, the grid moves closer toward the clean energy transition. Says Dixon, “When DERs are given unbridled access to wholesale markets, we will see a massive shift from central power stations to energy on the edge and an energy internet of things that becomes the new paradigm of power. The benefits of this paradigm are undeniable. Just like our current paradigm of computing is superior to the mainframes and “dumb terminals” of the 1970s, DERs are simply a superior model for a reliable and resilient electric grid.”
About Voltus, Inc.
Voltus aims to be the distributed energy platform that fulfills the promise of the energy transition. Voltus represents the “potential of us” to better manage energy through simple, cost and risk-free programs for distributed energy resources. Our commercial and industrial customers generate cash by allowing us to maximize the value of their operational flexibility in energy markets. What’s more, there are significant community benefits that accompany working with Voltus – a cleaner, more reliable energy future and dollars invested back into your business. To learn more, visit www.voltus.co.
Voltus Media Relations
Kelly Yazdani
Director of Marketing
703-340-9353
kyazdani@voltus.co
Authors: Gregg Dixon, Jon Wellinghoff, Dana Guernsey
The three central US power grids, ERCOT, SPP, and MISO, which represent 270,000 MWs of electricity demand (34% of total US demand), faced catastrophic power outages last week. While the pundits and critics point fingers and place blame, we believe this energy crisis could have been significantly alleviated in a sustainable way that ensured reliable power while costing consumers less.
The answer lies in the power, no pun intended, of distributed energy resources (DERs) that largely lie fallow all around us, or more accurately, in the WiFi home thermostat, the remotely controllable on-site generator at the grocery store, the EV in the garage, the rooftop solar panels, the building management system at the mall, the cogeneration system at the food processing plant, and the countless other Internet-connected devices that consume, produce, or store electricity in our modern, digital economy. We now need the courage of lawmakers and regulators across the political spectrum to recognize the potential of these resources, and to acknowledge that no one answer, no one technology, will solve our energy problems, just the same as no one technology or resource type is to blame for them. The power of DERs is by very nature their diversity. Much like a well balanced financial portfolio, the electricity grid also becomes far more resilient and reliable when harnessing the power of decentralized and diverse resources.
Taken together, DERs today have the potential to deliver 54,000 MWs of power to the grid in 30 minutes or less, often in seconds, across the ERCOT, MISO, and SPP grids. In the future, as more and more DERs are networked together and instantly controllable, we will see many multiples of this potential available to consumers and grid operators alike, representing the full potential of the “energy Internet of Things.” In the 20th century, we built our electric grid to ramp supply up and down in order to meet variable demand. In the 21st century, the energy Internet of Things will also allow us to adjust demand to meet supply just as effectively. The possibilities are endless and here today.
So, just what are these DERs and how do we take full advantage of them to help prevent catastrophe in our era of climate change while acting as the backstop and balancing resource that renewable energy needs to fulfill its promise and potential? Let’s take a look at a number of use cases, measure potential, and talk shop about how to tie it all together. Here are some jaw dropping examples:
The most affordable, most resilient, and the most sustainable model for computing is the distributed, networked model. This is why the mainframes and “dumb terminals” of the 1970s have given way to cloud computing today. The same promise holds true for the “original network:” the electric grid. Central power stations and “dumb loads” will be complemented by distributed energy resources converging with cloud computing to create an energy internet of things that will deliver one of our generation’s greatest, positive impacts. And, just as cloud computing has created incredibly equitable outcomes, this energy Internet of things will do the same.
About the Authors:
Gregg Dixon is the CEO of Voltus, Inc. Voltus is building the distributed energy platform that accelerates the energy transition, connecting every device that uses, produces, or stores electricity to the electricity grids that value them. With 20 years of experience in distributed energy resources, Gregg and his teams have brought more than 12,000 MWs of distributed energy resources to market around the world.
Jon Wellinghoff is the CEO and founder of GridPolicy Consulting. As a former FERC Chairman, Jon brings more than 40 years of leadership experience in federal, state and local energy policy, regulation, and market development to help solve today’s most pressing electric grid challenges.
Dana Guernsey is the Vice President of Product and Energy Markets at Voltus, Inc. With nearly 15 years of experience developing and operating distributed energy resources in electricity markets around the world, Dana is among the world’s leading experts in distributed energy resource productization and electricity market development.
Voltus Media Relations
Kelly Yazdani
Director of Marketing
703-340-9353
kyazdani@voltus.co
That’s the value of economic loss occurring in the ERCOT region of Texas right now, based on the load sector weighted average of the Value of Lost Load (VOLL), the result of a study commissioned to London Economics by ERCOT in 2013. The weighted average VOLL is $22,243 per megawatt hour (MWh) in ERCOT. Over the past three days about 20,000 MWs of electricity hasn’t been delivered per hour that otherwise would be delivered if not for the effects of the polar vortex. You can do the math on the rolling economic impact.
$180 million per hour is the economic impact to power producers not operating to deliver that 20,000 MWs of power per hour if you apply the ERCOT locational marginal price (LMP) cap of $9,000/MWh. And for many of the 127 retail electricity providers (REPs) in ERCOT who sell a fixed price electricity product to consumers, and who don’t hedge their supply, they are likely facing bankruptcy.
For consumers who have been consuming electricity during the past few days, and who have been buying electricity at the LMP, their power bill for three days will likely exceed their entire annual budget for electricity spend. Griddy, in an act of transparency, proactively communicated this situation to their customers. When the dust settles, these central US power outages will likely prove to be the most costly power outages in human history, measured in dozens of lives lost and tens of billions of dollars, far exceeding the effects from the 2003 blackout that hit the Northeast US.
While the pundits and sideline snipers are eager to blame and point fingers, rest assured that ERCOT, or any wholesale power market operator (SPP and MISO currently) in a similar situation, is doing their level best to balance the needs of consumers, regulators, suppliers, and politicians, all of whom establish the electricity markets upon which our livelihoods depend more and more. Now is the time to offer solutions to help electricity market operators deal with the cataclysmic challenges of climate change, the effects of which will accelerate and produce more frequent, similar situations. We can no longer “wait and see.”
The good news is that power market operators have an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal to ensure power quality, resilience, and affordability right now . . . distributed energy resources. 200,000 MWs of these resources lie in wait in the US alone. Much like the mainframes and “dumb terminals” of the 1970s, our current power grid is characterized largely by central power stations and “dumb loads.” The internet now offers a single standard upon which every digital device can choose to connect, creating a platform for massive innovation and unlocking the value of networks. Voltus dreams of a single electricity transmission superhighway, a single wholesale power market, and an interconnected system of distributed energy technologies operating in conjunction with central power stations, grid operators, and local utilities who have the systems they need to ensure that our modern, digital economy has uninterrupted, affordable, clean, and resilient power.
Today, our distributed energy resources are operating at full tilt to help ERCOT, SPP, and MISO. Our Texas teammates are on the front lines, bringing value to our customers, and operating the virtual power plants that these market operators are making use of right now. Our team and technology is built to unleash the massive benefits of distributed energy resources in every market in the world.
Let’s go!!!
Gregg Dixon
CEO & Co-founder
greggdixon@voltus.co
Image Credit: USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/texas-weather-power-outage-rolling-blackouts-leave-millions-dark/6764764002/
Voltus CEO, Gregg Dixon, and Suncast’s Nico Johnson are back to talk about the 4 Horsemen of Distributed Energy Resources
The interview is also available on Suncast’s website: https://mysuncast.com/suncast-episodes/325. You can subscribe to Suncast via iTunes.
Interested in becoming a Voltan? View all open positions at https://www.voltus.co/join-us/
Voltus CEO, Gregg Dixon, joined Nico Johnson to talk leadership, building a business, the challenges of growth, the importance of culture, and the future of distributed energy resources.
The interview is also available on Suncast’s website: http://www.mysuncast.com/
Interested in becoming a Voltan? View all open positions at https://www.voltus.co/join-us/
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt
Gregg Dixon sat down with Chris Wedding of ENTREPRENEURS for IMPACT to talk DERs, COVID, hiring, and the personal habits that contribute toward success. Read the entire interview here.
Flexible load, responding to real-time price signals: an energy economist’s dream come true. Customers avoid paying electricity prices that drive the costs of production higher than the value of the widgets being made, simultaneously reducing demand on the system and associated costs.
In practice, however, economic curtailment can be
For certain businesses that can provide fast-response load curtailment, Operating Reserves (OR) is a better alternative, resulting in lower net electricity costs without the frequent hassles of economic curtailment.
Tricky to get right
Accurately predicting price spikes, especially with enough notice to drive curtailment decisions, is not straightforward. System operators tend to either under- or over-forecast electricity prices the majority of the time. Forecasts are often biased high, and often by a significant margin when actual prices turn out to be low.1, 2
In addition, earlier price forecasts leading up to a given hour can vary wildly based on shifting expectations of system conditions (imports/exports, renewable generation output, etc.). From one hour to the next, a price spike that very afternoon could go from looking implausible to imminent. Sophisticated modeling services can help improve accuracy, but the reality remains that predicting price spikes is just tricky to get right.
Operationally challenging
Curtailing load to avoid high prices can impose operational challenges. Periods of sustained high prices may merit prolonged shutdowns. Very brief load reductions would be required to avoid isolated price spikes, and are likely not worth the shutdown/startup costs and operational hassle.
A better alternative
In fast-response OR programs, loads help balance real-time supply and demand on the grid by curtailing when called upon by the system operator. Businesses get paid to be available to reduce their load, and they are called upon at most a few times per month. Operating Reserves participation is open to customers regardless of retail rate structure, not just to those who are exposed to real-time rates.
While a business on real-time rates does end up using “expensive electricity” to produce its widgets, payments for being available for OR are linked to the real-time price (i.e. you get paid more to be available when prices are high). On net, electricity costs minus OR revenues generally turn out to be less for a customer participating in OR than for the same customer tracking prices and curtailing economically (even assuming they do hit the majority of high-priced hours accurately). To achieve the same net electricity costs through economic curtailment, a customer would need to curtail for hundreds of hours per year!3
Take home
If you want to minimize electricity costs and your business can provide fast-response load curtailment, Operating Reserves is in short a better alternative. The end result? Lower overall costs for much less curtailment.
Notes
1All figures are illustrative, based on a case study for Alberta, Canada.
2Peak shaving to avoid system capacity charges is a separate electricity cost management strategy. This article focuses purely on energy ($/MWh) related charges.
3Assumes 60% customer accuracy for avoiding price spikes.
Nicole Irwin-Viet
Energy Markets Manager
Interested in learning more about how your business can earn cash in Operating Reserves programs? Chat with our team below or email info@voltus.co to get started.
