My path widens - why I am excited about VPPs
I have now spent more than two years researching my way into clean energy and the burgeoning climate tech space. After appreciating the scale of this immense landscape, I decided to focus on a few specific areas to develop a level of expertise and ultimately advance my own career path: electrification, transportation, and clean energy infrastructure.
These topics are sufficiently broad and continuously evolving to keep me engaged for the next decade and will offer ample opportunities to introduce and develop software product solutions to complement and bolster the substantial hardware deployments already underway.
Connecting electrification and transportation
A short list of enticing but off-limit(!) topics that continue to tempt me:
Geothermal energy
Clean hydrogen
Carbon removal
Long-duration storage
Battery innovation
Methane reduction
Food waste
As I continued my research (and struggled to ignore so many other exciting things happening around me - see sidebar), I was delighted to find increasing overlap in two of my chosen areas of interest.
I have documented in a number of articles on this site that outline my journey to explore the EV charging path and how I ultimately landed on the potential for electrifying vehicle fleets. Fleet electrification represents a solid overlap between implementing broader electrification strategies and addressing leading GHG emissions concerns in the mobility sector.
Converting entire fleets to run on electricity provided a suitable problem space of significant scale (for me). But as is the case in so many areas of energy and climate, it was not so neatly confined or encapsulated. Fleet electrification as a sector is quite messy and indeed has larger dependencies. I quickly came to understand the corresponding challenges of creating a new robust charging infrastructure as well as the additional logistics challenges that fleet operators would encounter. That ultimately led me to link in my final area of interest.
Connecting my third piece
One of the primary challenges of electrifying fleets and other major areas of transportation is the additional load it will place on the grid. The need to charge millions of electric vehicles every day is not something the current infrastructure was specifically designed to handle. Through my research and discussions, I realized that electrifying transportation at scale will highlight a number of electricity infrastructure problems. But the power sector was already facing its own set of challenges with respect to renewable energy.
I was already ramping up on clean energy infrastructure and much of that investigation centered on what it will take to greatly reduce the grid’s reliance on fossil fuels. I had written several articles about topics ranging from solar power, intermittency challenges, and long-duration storage and these had steered my attention to how we will integrate clean, renewable power generation into the grid to replace coal and natural gas energy sources.
But in exploring fleet electrification, I ultimately landed on an even larger opportunity: balancing the new load from charging millions of EVs on an electricity infrastructure that is simultaneously incorporating intermittent solar and wind power. For me, this connects all three of my areas.
We must electrify mobility while also decarbonizing the grid
My own renewable path has widened as I explore this expanded problem space.
DERs & Virtual Power Plants
Since the beginning of this year, I've been sorting my way through a range of exciting topics from distributed energy resources (DERs) & microgrids to demand response (DR) & grid services and that path has led me to the promising solution area of virtual power plants or VPPs.
After first writing about DERs a year ago, I am diving back in to better understand the part that software products/platforms will play in this space. I am convinced there will be an explosion of new, distributed, clean energy assets over the next 10-20 years. I want to help realize the massive potential of harnessing those resources to accelerate the clean energy transition.
More articles coming soon as I proceed on my renewable path.