Viridity Energy Raises $15M From Mitsui & Co. for “Virtual Power Plants” : Greentech Media.
This is a pretty fascinating area and falls broadly under Demand Side Management which I’ve been banging on about.
In this case a company presents to the grid as an aggregator, not of generation, but of deferrable loads. So when energy prices rise and more generation needs to be switched on, the aggregator turns off loads instead. The result is the same as if equivalent generation had been connected.
There is a lot of potential in this field, and a few little projects popping up in Australia. The idea isn’t very new now, but there are some hardware requirements to make it work properly. It appears from the above that at least some people are hard at work on this.
