Summary
Co-hosts Pam, Ben, Charles and James are joined by listener Pegah in part one of the InDERmediate Virtual Power Plant (VPP) hackathon. In this episode the team embarks on their journey to roll up their sleeves and build a VPP within two hours live on the podcast. After the obligatory attempt to define the nebulous term “Virtual Power Plant”, the team begins to answer the key questions required to build a Virtual Power Plant.
These questions are:
What type of customers to serve - Residential or Commercial and Industrial?
What type of devices will the focus? ie. Solar and Batteries
What location to operate in? ie. California
What markets to operate in - Utility markets via time of use and demand response or wholesale markets
Episode chapters:
(0:00): Introduction
(3:30): VPP outline in 2 hours
(4:38): What’s a VPP?
(8:20): Key questions
(9:39): Resi or C&I?
(16:40): What devices?
(36:56): Location criteria
Help us out!
Subscribe, share and rate the show wherever you’re finding this podcast!
Give us feedback: We’d love to hear from you via email, inDERmediate@gmail.com
Follow us on social media
Relevant links we found helpful
VPP insiders group and supporting #vpps slack channel within DERTF
Challenges and Opportunities for VPPs (what I know so far...) by Clint Amadeus Chan
https://www.purepower.com/blog/why-energy-storage-is-more-difficult-to-scale-than-solar-pv
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/solar/overview
From Pam
Music
Our incredible intro/outro music is the song Ticking, by artist TIN
You can stream the whole song and the rest of their catalog here:
Episode transcript
I think Pam's audio is unbelievably loud.
Yes, Pam, you're too excited.
The game thing?
Yeah, yeah.
You need less game.
We fixed it, though.
Pam's just really excited.
She's just really excited.
I think that's just her indoor voice.
What are those things that we have now available that can be worked in quite a different way
into the economy of the United States?
which are concerned primarily with the design of nuclear power plants and this type of thing.
We do not know what the magnitude of the side effects will be.
Hi, I'm Pamela Wildstein.
I'm Wyatt Makaronsky.
I'm Ben Hilborn.
I'm James Gordey.
You're listening to Intermediate.
Intermediate.
Intermediate.
To Intermediate.
Intermediate.
The place for people trying to get into or already working on distributed energy resources
and clean energy.
This is the podcast that makes it easy to learn how the grid actually works beyond the
office.
Okay.
We are live.
As live as we're going to get.
Welcome to what will 100% be the messiest intermediate episode to date.
Let's go around the table very quickly and just say who's on the mic, say a quick hello,
and then we can dive into trying to build,
trying to figure out what it takes to build a VPP
in two hours or less.
Who are you?
I'm Ben, I work in energy finance
as well as on Durham's systems
and yeah, love hanging out with you guys
every time we do this.
James, who are you?
Hey, it's James Gordey, your co-host.
Excited for this.
Excellent.
Pam?
I'm Pam Wildstein.
I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan.
And also excited for this, particularly to have toasters in this VPP in some way, we
have to get toasters in.
Yes.
I think toasters is like a thing here.
I'm Charles, Charles Orchinski.
I am currently working in energy finance at Generate Capital, and I'm also very interested
in project development.
So, I am keen to figure out if we can make a VPP make money.
Amazing.
And last but not least?
My name is Pega.
I have a few years of experience working in a lab at university that was about clean energy,
and that's where I was exposed to VPP and DERs.
But then my professional background is mostly ML
and product development.
I'm very excited to learn more about VPPs in this session
and contribute in building one.
Well, thanks, Pega, and welcome to the show.
Yeah, and I just want to say shout out to Pega.
So we put this out in the DER Task Force Slack channel
and just asked for help
because we're literally just doing this
and hit record and trying to do the best we can.
And Pega just reached out and said,
That sounds really cool.
How do I join?
And here they are.
Easy.
Amazing.
So what are we trying to do?
What does it mean to build a VPP in two hours?
What, how are we gonna put a little,
nice little box around this
and what do we want to have at the end of this?
Well, it won't be real because we have no money.
Oh, yeah.
Minor details.
And since you want the electros from the Power Grid game, I have a lot of those.
So to address Ben's question, I think we were going through in the lead up to the show trying
to figure out what to do.
Do we structure like a normal education episode?
And I think one thing we highlighted was just, there's a lot of material and a lot of buzz
for sure.
A lot of buzz around VPPs, but we said, I think we could cut through the buzz and try
and figure out what's real and help people learn
how to engage more with actually building in this space
if we just tried to build one,
at least understand how to build one ourselves.
And so I think what we're trying to do
is either we're going to be successful or not
in the next two hours, but we're going to try
and build a VPP or know how to build one.
And we're going to share the Google Doc,
which outlines what we did.
And we're going to share this recording
and hopefully this helps to get more people
building in this space.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Do you guys want to start with the definition of a VPP?
Oh, yeah.
What's a VPP?
Just keep using acronyms.
Yeah.
What's a VPP, Pam?
Oh, I didn't say I was going to do it.
I'm going to set a timer because I don't want this to take two hours.
We could absolutely spend two hours.
What's a VPP and what's a DERMS?
NDE aggregation.
Oh, my goodness.
Charles.
Charles or Pega, why don't one of you guys take it away?
Okay. A VPP stands for virtual power plant. All right, children, I'm going to tell you
that this is a bedtime story. A VPP is a virtual power plant. It is an aggregation of a number
of distributed energy resources in intermediate DERs, and it is when you get them working
all together from a technical and commercial perspective so that power can
be produced in one place and sold in another place either physically or
synthetically using market mechanisms that allow everybody to keep the lights
on and socialize their power use with their neighbors, people in their
community, or more broadly on the technical side it also has useful
applications for utilities as grid support and regionalize energy support for utilities
and grids.
So it also facilitates much broader electrical stability, which is critical as we get more
and more renewables on our power grids.
So VPPs can do it all.
Is that right, Pega?
Do you want to take it on?
Did I miss anything?
That was a great description of VVPP and my understanding of VPPs or virtual power plants
is working around DERs which are these flexible assets that either produce electricity energy
or they can store electricity so they are flexible and that you can because the prices of electricity
they're volatile, you can take advantage of those and buying cheap and selling high
at a higher price. And a VPP's job is to orchestrate these flexible assets and get a revenue and
then distribute it to the DER asset owners and everyone wins just an extra source of
income for something that it's made like its main job isn't to produce revenue in that way
but it's a nice extra cash that you can get. I think that's a really key component is
you know what's going to incentivize people to join a VPP is the cash you get out of it.
One of the things that I saw from this recent cold snap is you know too many
utilities asking people nicely,
hey, can you please curtail demand?
A VPP is a way to just encode that
and here is the business relationship we're going to have.
If you curtail demand, here's what you get.
And so that's a big part of what we're going to
figure out today is based on the hardware
that's gonna be the backbone of our VPP
and the amount of load we can shift and when.
How much how much can we offer to our consumers?
To incentivize participation. I wanted to like zoom out a bit
Get my game face on here
so what we're trying to do is
Identify what type of virtual power plant we want to build and when we ask people who know about this stuff
They said there's several kind of key questions
which will narrow down like the type of thing you could do and so one key question is residential or
or what's called commercial and industrial.
That's generally how electricity customers are bucketed
in the electricity world, for better or worse.
Geographic location is another kind of key question
to answer for us.
What types of devices, be it a toaster or something else,
might you want to manage and bundle
into our virtual power plant?
And then once you have all those questions answered,
Another kind of key question is, as I understand it, there's two broad types of programs and markets you can participate in.
There's a utility program and a wholesale market program.
And so what we're trying to do is think about what type of virtual power plant we want to build and kind of go through those questions and arrive at some answer so that we can actually roll up our sleeves and really see a couple options and start to put some meat on the bones.
So, let's jump into some kind of really, really high-level splits, like where do we want to
work?
Do we want to be in Resi, which is, you know, there's a few different players in this space.
Do we want to look at CNI?
What do you guys think?
Where is an opportunity that potentially hasn't been explored enough?
Resi.
Resi it is.
I know you're all shocked. I want Resi.
Because it involves toasters, right? I mean, how many C&I toasters are there?
Very few. They're only in the commercial buildings.
More importantly, I think in 2008, the federal, I think it was 2008,
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released a report on untapped demand response potential,
and the majority of it, or not the majority,
I don't remember if it was the majority or not,
but compared to commercial and industrial,
there was significantly more untapped demand response
potential in residential.
Perfect.
Yeah, I just wanna ask a question though on the solar,
or on the, sorry, are we jumping into devices now, or?
No, go ahead.
Yeah, so what I've been told is resi is easier,
and so I do think we're trying to get reasonably far
in the process.
And so in general, we're probably gonna make things
that are easier to our decision.
And we got some like input on that.
My question on toasters, is that even reasonable
to like make a toaster virtual power plant?
Like, I guess we can get into this,
but there's like, it's not a huge load, right?
And so I don't even know if it's like big enough to matter.
I have two.
But I, sorry, go ahead, go for it.
Yeah, I want to, I think for residentials,
you know, the number of residentials is much higher.
So that might, it's more complicated
to work with a large number of DRs
that are small in scale.
It might become a more complicated one.
But most VPPs nowadays, from what I know, are focused on C&I, so that might make sense
because the residentials are kind of left out.
My second comment is, what about small businesses?
Because from talking to them, it sounds like the extra cash that they can get, it really
makes a difference to their business.
And so are they even an option that we can think about?
Somewhere in between the two.
So I just want to jump in here.
There's technical and commercial issues.
And I wouldn't worry too much about the size.
It all contributes.
I actually once heard of a company
that was offering to install an app on cell phones.
And because if they could get this into hundreds of thousands
and cell phones that formed,
and they could turn off the charging simultaneously
and that on a large enough scale
with enough phones signed up
could meaningfully impact the grid.
You can think about everybody-
I believe Apple has that baked in at the OS level.
They do have on an operating to optimize their charging,
but that is more around battery life preservation
than it is about I can turn on and off a load
through an app in order to manage the grid.
So that was, I don't know if that company ever went anywhere, I just heard that and it was quite a while ago now, so they clearly didn't break through.
So toasters are not necessarily, I mean, they may not be the optimal unit of electricity, but they make for a fun one.
But at a large enough scale, aggregated more broadly, in the same way as one home doesn't really make a big impact on the grid at large.
But when you have thousands, and particularly like we're talking about concentration, right, so you can have thousands of homes across the country and that's not going to make an impact.
Whereas if you have 1000 homes in Sacramento, right, like in a subdivision that's going to really impact that, that local grid and you're working with SMUD or maybe PG&E if you're further out.
So, geographic density matters.
And I think in some ways you can then tip that over
to look at CNI, where one CNI provider
can be a much larger demand consumer,
especially if you're looking at bigger.
And I also wanna be clear.
It was bigger, you made a good point.
There are different sectors within CNI.
And this is really interesting.
I did work on a fairly substantial portfolio
deploying and financing.
behind the meter batteries to be used as micro grids.
So we orchestrated the whole portfolio
and every different customer had a different load profile
and some were pretty predictable.
Something like a cinema,
like you know when they're gonna turn on their projectors
and you know when showtimes are gonna be.
Maybe slightly more predictable
versus like a hair salon or whatever,
or like a grocery store may not be as predictable,
but it's much more flexible.
So for example, with grocery stores,
they have freezer aisles,
which are the big demand consumers, the big demand loads.
So those freezers can be really deep cooled
and then you can reduce the energy demand
by moving that load around.
So they're much more shiftable.
And I think what's, well, so from a commercial side
where that's really important,
is just to this point, one more from a commercial side where that gets really important is you,
you then have to sort of shape your, your hardware to fit that and to manage that.
And, you know, they are sort of bigger loads. Generally, commercial will be more micro grid
or tech heavy, like hardware heavy, because it's all about the physical, like the site,
You're trying to manage their energy, whereas residential tech is important,
but it's going to form a smaller component.
It's much more about the software pay.
It's about the orchestration.
So if we want to go down commercially, you're thinking much more about how do
we make all the hardware on site pay nicely together so that we can meet the
demand or the load curve of the onsite resource.
Residential is going to be much more about how can we use loads that already exist?
Right?
Like there are retrofits, but it's, they're smaller, they're harder.
it's less about what hard work can I get into there, like obviously there are people who are
doing home energy efficiency retrofits like electric water heaters, but it'll be much more
about how can we use people who have already made the decision. I think based on what we've
said so far there's a lot of opportunity in Resi and especially you know there's a ton of different
options for devices and now if we think about the kind of devices as well I think we should put a
on that. And as much as we love toasters, toasters themselves do not necessarily
have the ability to shift. When you want toast, you move the plunger down
and it draws power from the grid and then it's done. Unless we're
going to go about retrofitting thousands of homes with smart toasters and
battery backup. So this is one of the filters that maybe we think about.
okay, within a home, what's an opportunity for a device
that has a load that is theoretically shiftable
without ruining the customer's experience
and is something that people already have.
So let's take the approach that we wanna build
a lean VPP company.
We don't wanna have to deal with hardware.
We're just gonna use what you already have.
How does that sound?
Does that make sense to me, Pam?
Yeah, I would just add with the geography component too, that's especially important
when combined with the technology, because your load needs to be, your load and the way
that you shift it needs to make sense for the location and any reliability issues they
might be experiencing.
So that's why, for example, your direct load control programs in California are mostly
always being dispatched during the summer with air conditioning.
You could run a direct load control program, which just turns off the technology that it's
targeting for toasters in California instead of the air conditioning unit, but that doesn't
really make sense because that's not where most of the load is coming from and really
it's not probably being run in significant amounts during peak electricity usage hours.
You know, people aren't running their toasters in some way for three hours at a time at seven
or 8 or 9 p.m., which is when those programs tend to get dispatched.
So for example, you could run a direct load control program up in the ISO New England
area, for example, in the middle of the winter for air conditioning units, but that would
be very silly.
Okay.
Pam, I think that's a good grounding input.
We're trying to balance what actually makes sense and is feasible, what is cool and fun,
and kind of based off of that.
And so I don't know how we want to take this.
So we could just say, like, batteries
are the most common thing, and let's just do residential
and pick a geography.
And that's just very, like, I don't know.
There's not a lot of whimsy and fun to that approach,
but maybe it's the most broadly applicable to the audience.
Or we could try and say, like, could we
take some of those inputs, right?
The load flexibility needs to make sense,
and we want to use load that's already there to come up
with something really cool.
I'm not saying this is the answer,
but one idea that popped in my head was I'm a big fan of local restaurants and grocery
stores and businesses and things like that. I know that's light commercial, not quite residential,
but I think it'd be really cool if you could come up with some VPP way to enable your favorite
local coffee houses or your favorite restaurants or something to create a virtual power plant and
come up with some side cash to help them stay more economically viable. That's something I
literally made up and I don't know how feasible it is, but that's where my brain is going.
Could you go to all the local brunch places and say, or maybe not brunch, maybe it's some
other place, and say back to the toasters, I know normally you serve avocado toast,
but if there's going to be a grid event, no avocado toast on the menu, change the menu
up and then you will reduce your toaster load. Again, I made that up, but thrown it out there
for inspiration.
Amazing.
And yeah, James, I think on top of that, you know, there are gyms, there are dentist clinics,
and the prices that these businesses charge their customers can be varied based on a potential
BPP that is really giving them significant cash, and it'll be fun.
And I think the customers, most of them also care about a restaurant participating in this
program.
And then they also are taking part in this, and it would add something dynamic to it.
I think it would be fun, at least at the beginning, you know, maybe a few years from now, everybody
is doing it, and it's not fun anymore.
But for now, that's another branding message that these small businesses can have to attract
new customers even.
I say let's try that.
The idea of a VPP for coffee shops sounds super novel to me and fun.
I really like the idea of doing coffee shops and I guess that moves us squarely from resi
to commercial, because you cannot model a coffee shop in ResStock, which is NREL's modeling
tool, but you can model a coffee shop to a certain extent in ComStock, which is the commercial
building modeling tool.
Yeah, Pam, question on this, right?
So we would need to find a place where it makes sense for a coffeehouse to change their
electricity usage with, and aligned with,
a grid of reliability event, right?
Is that feasible or practical?
I'm asking.
Well, it would be multiple coffee shops.
Yeah, yeah, many.
Because, yeah, so you would find.
What I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about peak,
like around, you know, like when it's cold,
when it's kind of like peak hours,
like four to nine or whatever it is,
when coffee houses are like mostly closed.
And so like maybe they're not traditionally using
electricity during that time,
but maybe there's some other reliability event that would make it make sense.
Like we put a bunch of batteries in coffee houses and they charge it with cheap
solar and then they dispatch it later.
I don't know.
Like you tell me.
What if you targeted the belly of the duck instead of the bill?
So as opposed to shedding, shedding load during high demand, we absorb
available energy during the cheap periods.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they get,
And then they could sell it back during the build of the docking.
Okay, so okay. A quick distinction that I want to make
is I think if you were to look at the kind of proper definition of a
virtual power plant, this is where we're talking about
something that is technology-enabled, remotely
controllable, and
And kind of gives the utility some control over the functionality of the power plant.
And the reason that I bring this up is because, oh, you know, it'd be cool.
We could make a coffee shop where, you know, we do a ton of baking in the middle of the
day when, you know, when solar is at max potential and there's a ton of cheap energy on the grid.
And then as you go on into the evening when power is getting more expensive, well, we
We actually, we really kind of shut off most things
and we just sell, we're not selling hot food
in the bill of the duck, right in the evening.
But that is, that's more business design
than it is virtual PowerPoint design in my mind.
What do you guys think?
Ben, I don't know, like where my brain is like lighting up
is like cool intersections of VPP design
and like business design that already makes sense
for these things.
like, you know, could you have a bar that's normally, you know, has lights, do a disco
or do a candlelight thing, like, during grid reliability events, or is there something with
the coffee house where they charge during the day and they sell it at night, or you
turn the coffee, like, in the office, right, they did cafe disco, where, like, people dance
in the little room. Could you have, like, a coffee house that normally doesn't run at
but turns into a bar at night or maybe that's the opposite of being grid reliable, so I don't know.
This is me pointing my fingers in a very rave-like fashion, but what I think is key here
is to understand the underlying consumer behavior, right? What does this coffee shop do,
right? Is it typically running at four to six? Probably not, because that's not when people are
ordering a whole bunch of espressos and steam milk. So you think about the
underlying business case and then you create a hardware layer to best, well so
okay, you create an optimal load profile or a grid profile and then you add the
hardware to get you from the base case to the optimal load profile and it could
be a combination actually of hardware and business model or like energy use
So sometimes you can just say, hey, have a rule that people don't run the espresso machines
from four to six to help with load curve or to shed load.
And then you use hardware to make up the difference, right?
So you kind of want a predictable use case where the same thing is happening, the same
behavior is happening on a day-to-day basis, because that minimizes the cost of the hardware
that you need to get to simulating
an optimal load profile.
And so typically, you think about this
as being something you can either attach to hardware
that automatically shuts it down.
Things like HVAC are the low-hanging fruit
where a lot of VPPs got started, a lot of the VPP software
systems.
You think about EVs, especially if you
have some sort of leak component, which probably
not in the case of coffee shops.
Or you have energy source.
So I'll try and keep my points tight.
Take the low profile.
Adjust it to what your optimal profile would be.
And then identify what you can do
to match the existing low profile to the optimal profile.
That will be hardware.
And then you will add a software layer on top of the hardware
so that you can affect those low profile changes.
Okay, so if I'm thinking of our cafe, right,
we have, a cafe is highly, they're busy in the mornings.
There's also a peak in demand in the mornings,
not as high as in the evenings,
but it is there in the morning.
So if we think about, okay, a cafe has espresso machines,
it has refrigerators, it has ovens.
Um, I'm drawn to refrigerators because they are, I'll be it inefficient.
They are a thermal battery.
And let's say that in across our, you know, our cafe VPP, uh, we have, you
know, a thousand commercial refrigerators potentially under management.
And we could say, all right, we are going to lower your set point in the
hours preceding your morning open.
And as grid demand rises in the morning, as people are getting up, going, you know, getting
ready, but nobody has really made it to out the door and going to the cafe yet.
In that hour, two-hour window, that's when we're going to raise the set point of these
refrigerators, let them just kind of idle, let the temperature slowly rise while still
being food-safe.
James, what do you think?
So, I just have a quick question, I just want to sanity check the coffee house idea.
I like, I love coffee houses, I'm drinking a nice latte as we do this.
Are coffee houses viable even though most of their operations happen during the day and
when most of the grid reliability issues happen later in the day, like, are they still viable?
I'm just asking, like, maybe Charles and Pam are more familiar with this.
It could be a coffee house in the morning and a bar in the afternoon.
But it doesn't even need to be it doesn't even need to be open at night
It just needs if anything a coffee house is really great because they're using all their power
In the beginning in the middle of the day, which is what we want and then at night they're just sitting there dormant
So if they can discharge anything from their solar plush storage system back into the grid
Then they're perfect
This comes to geography though because it depends on what the policies and regulations are around discharge. So are we talking about a
a building that can go both directions, like absorb and export power, or are we just talking
about a load control facility? Because that will depend on the utility and what utility
programs you can bid into.
Yeah, but my comment is related to this. My question was, are we considering a distinction
between a demand response program and a VPP? Because what I'm hearing from your guys'
those opinions and ideas mostly reminds me
of a demand response, you know, shifting low
rather than having actual DR assets
like storage or a PV system.
And also, are the utilities charging
their invoice structure?
Is it considering the time of use?
because when I look at my bill from PG&E, sometimes it gives me some additional cash or
some sort of a reduction in my bill because I usually start, I usually use my dishwashing machine
or you know most of my electronic devices during the day and I think that's how I get those
rewards. And because most of residential, they have smart meters and every 15 minutes my
power consumption is, the data is going to the utility. So if I own a cafe, I am already
incentivized to turn on my ovens and bake all the muffins at noon and how does a
VPP help have a like an additional offer me an additional value or additional
cash on top of what utility is giving me? I think I think that again is a
geography question because you said you're PG&E in California right? PG&E I
I think around, it was either 2020 or 2021,
they started moving and then eventually moved
their whole residential stock at least over,
or sorry, all of their residential customer base
onto a time of use rate.
But that's not the majority of the case
for most of the country.
They're just a very specific situation of that happening.
So that's why you're seeing those reductions,
especially relative to the past.
So if our coffee shops are all in San Francisco,
then yeah, they're already seeing that incentive.
But if our VPP is in, you know, Ann Arbor,
then they might not be on a time of use rate
and they might need some company to step,
they might need some other entity to step in or some way.
How about the demand response question?
Are we now designing a demand response program
or are we still focused on VPP, or is it not even a difference between the two?
That's a question we've come back to many, many times.
And I want to avoid getting into the minutiae of the differences between demand response and VPP,
if we can. But I think for the sake of this episode, let's just say any controllable
And I will add one thing about that and then I'll hand it over to James, but I will just
say, I would say we should operate under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's definition
of a distributed energy resource aggregation, which does include demand response.
And also I'm biased because I studied demand response.
So I want to talk about demand response, specifically residential demand response, because it may
makes me happy.
So good to have you here, Pam.
You do such a good, eloquent, and official way
of describing all the stuff that we're trying to say.
Yeah, and so what I just wanted to try and do
to stitch all this together, and I
do think we probably need to decide and then cut
into actually trying to spec out what we're going to build here.
But I do think it's an important discussion.
So to repeat back what I think I've heard,
So, a coffee house normally is not using electricity during a peak time, but if we were to add
solar and storage to it, that's one way where we could basically have them suck in a bunch
of electricity when it's cheap and bid it out during peak hours and they don't need
that electricity. So it's like basically completely free to use
as Charles analogy. Or two, if the coffeehouse is in a place
where time of use rates are not pervasive across coffeehouses,
you could have coffeehouses switch to a time of use, and
they'd probably save a lot of money, like both of those ways
would help coffeehouses save monies. Yes or no, I guess to
the to the team, it feels appropriate to answer.
I second.
Yep.
That feels, that feels good.
Okay.
So then, given that, I think we can decide, right, like going back to our key questions,
which of those do we want to pursue?
Like the solar plus storage is like a cool, like, you know, you know, juice up your coffee
house or however you want to say that.
Like there's a lot of good stuff to do there.
And that's like a very like mainstream relevant example
to lots of people who probably want to include
solar and storage in their virtual power plants.
And so given that,
what like, do we like the solar plus storage?
It's like, that's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna like help coffee houses install
solar plus storage and then make money
from this flexibility.
Yes or no.
And then if we do that, where geographically does that make sense, basically?
Well, I think that I think you guys have laid out some fantastic reasons why solar storage make a ton of sense for a coffee shop, especially because they can self, they can consume their own generation throughout the middle of the day.
And then feedback to the grid, any excess they have stored up, or any kind of shoulder amounts that they're still producing, as you know, they're winding down, you know, three, four o'clock.
And that's as demand is starting to rise, but you know, the sun probably isn't setting until 7pm, so it innately works.
And, James, for location, I'm going to suggest your corner of the world, you know, the birthplace
of Starbucks, Seattle.
I would love that.
I also know that we have, so when we polled some people before, they said, yeah, Ben,
your voice sounds spectacular with your potential strep throat today, so I just want to applaud
you for that.
Thank you so much.
Applauded.
So people said do Pacific Gas and Electric and the utility program, because that's the
easiest to implement in two hours, I guess.
Do we want to, like, do that, or do we want to try something else, like, Seattle, right,
and see, like, if there's a program out there that makes sense.
I know with Seattle City Light, we maybe don't have, like, the most, like, that many, like,
complicated tariffs, but maybe that's better in C9, we could unpack it.
I'm open.
Well, a quick Google says that San Francisco is America's most awake city, with the highest
ratio of coffee shops to people, with 528 dedicated coffee outlets serving a population
of 866,000.
I disagree.
Find a college town.
If you want many people consuming aggressive amounts of coffee, you want a college town.
Okay, so let's try and come up with some criteria here, then.
I have one argument against doing California, when I think of California utilities and California
programs and also CAISO on top of it, the California independent system operator, if
we look at wholesale, we can look at wholesale, they are, they're not necessarily representative,
they're just a little bit further ahead in some ways, like the, everyone in the residential,
all the residential class for being defaulted
into time abuse rates, for example.
So if we wanna look at maybe what the future is
for everywhere, then maybe California,
and then they clearly have very extreme reliability issues,
so maybe that's a reason to go there too.
And they have the duck curve, they're very distinct.
But if we wanna look at more what the status quo is
for the rest of the country,
then maybe Seattle might be a better case
or somewhere that's just not California.
I also think that if you want to consider solar for coffee shops,
it doesn't make sense in San Francisco.
It's always cloudy here.
And also, there are tall buildings, so.
Density.
Density is definitely very relevant.
OK.
The density point is very fair.
I just want to, on the cloudiness,
there's something, feel free to correct me,
Charles or whoever's pretty familiar with solar, but there's um
Something called like sun hours. I forget the term but like even in seattle solar is just viable and it's certainly much more cloudy than
uh
san francisco
um
So I just wanted to kind of like say that out loud, I think
Yeah, likewise with with victoria. It is so much cloudier than um, you know much of uh,
Much of north america, but it's solar still viable. It's just like a slightly longer payback period
Okay, and so I think we're trying to tease apart like criteria here to select one
So density Pega, I think that was a really good input. Like if we're in Manhattan, that's not really a viable like coffee
Coffee house approach, you know
And so we need a place that
The coffee probably has like a roof, you know, or it's at least like in most cases. It's gonna have a roof
Maybe where solar plus storage makes sense question mark and
Yeah, I don't know, wherever else we think is fun, I think that's like my three criteria
right now.
And on that note, we're going to take a break here.
Join us next time on Intermediate to hear us dive deep into the details of building
the Coffee Shop VPP.
I'm your co-host Ben Hillborn, and I can't wait for you to hear part two.
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