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Tesla’s virtual power plant (VPP) in California delivered 100 MW of power to help the grid not use gas peaker plants yesterday.
It’s peaker plant season in California. Heat waves are hitting the region, people are cranking up their ACs, and it is putting quite a load on the electrical grid.
Tesla has been using virtual power plants to aggregate its distributed energy systems, rooftop solar and Powerwall, to provide grid services and get more value for their customers.
A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants.
In 2021, Tesla launched a VPP pilot program in California, where Powerwall owners would join in voluntarily without compensation to let the VPP pull power from their battery packs when the grid needed it.
It helped Tesla prove the usefulness of such a system.
Following the pilot program, Tesla and PG&E, the electric utility covering Northern California, launched the first official virtual power plant through the Tesla app.
This new version of the Tesla Virtual Power Plant actually compensates Powerwall owners $2 per kWh that they contribute to the grid during emergency load reduction events. Homeowners are expected to get between $10 and $60 per event.
Later, we reported that Tesla’s California VPP expanded to Southern California Edison (SCE) to now cover most of the state.
The VPPs have been growing since. Tesla announced that it had one of those “emergency load” events yesterday, and its VPPs provided over 100 MW of capacity during the event:
If the event lasted an hour, it would have generated over $200,000 in revenue to Tesla’s Powerwall owners in the VPP programs.
Tesla is gradually launching those programs in more states and countries, and it is scaling them as it deploys more Powerwalls.
The company has now deployed over 600,000 Powerwalls around the world.
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