Tak Lockney, Vice President at Eversource, joins the Suncast podcast to challenge the “virtual power plant” framing and make the case for calling distributed energy resources what they really are: demand flexibility assets.
Key insights:
Eversource’s Connected Solutions program mobilized 200 MW of demand reduction in a single July 2024 event across 70,000 residential and 350–400 commercial customers without any ISO-level grid emergency.
Utilities now dispatch demand flexibility through cloud-to-cloud integrations with third-party aggregators like Renew Home, Ecoee, and EV OEMs rather than directly controlling customer devices.
The architecture separates a grid DERMS (managing front-of-meter and SCADA-connected assets) from an edge DERMS (managing customer-side contracts and dispatch signals).
Energy efficiency remains the single largest untapped demand flexibility opportunity, illustrated by a fast food chain unknowingly running industrial toasters during off-peak hours with no customers.
And state-level policy rather than federal mandates is the primary driver of demand flexibility investment, with Massachusetts’ 2021 climate legislation cited as the key catalyst.