Scaling Ders For Reliability And Resilience | Factor This…

Utilities and grid operators face immense pressure to meet rising electricity demand, harden systems against extreme weather, upgrade and replace aging infrastructure, adapt to changing state and federal policies, and keep rates affordable. It’s a juggling act, and with all of those balls in the air, the ‘old-school’ utility method of building more supply-side solutions just doesn’t cut it anymore.

As a result, distributed energy resources (DERs), or customer-sited technologies, are moving beyond the margins of reliability planning to the center of attention. This episode of the Factor This Policycast, presented in partnership with national business association Advanced Energy United, explores how mostly behind-the-meter tools batteries, smart thermostats, backup generators, microgrids, rooftop solar, and flexible load can be aggregated and operated as dependable grid assets.

Extending a conversation that began at DTECH Reliability & Resiliency 2026 in Chicago, Illinois, moderator Paul Gerke leads a discussion alongside Emma Heins, policy principal at Advanced Energy United, about what it takes to scale virtual power plants and other DER programs. The conversation, featuring Bart Jackson of Sunrun, ENERGYHUB’s Maxwell Burke-Scoll, and Kari Gehrke at Alliant Energy, highlights practical lessons from states and utilities moving past pilots to full-scale implementation, focusing on how DERs can improve reliability, reduce peak demand, support resilience during emergencies, and lower customer costs. Also on the table: utility partnerships, market design, customer enrollment, dispatch performance, interconnection, data visibility, and compensation.

Listen to the audio version of the podcast:

In This Episode

Why everybody wins

DERs provide system-wide perks, regardless of household or business-level participation in VPP programs. Participation equity matters, and pathways exist for low- and moderate-income customers to join, but regardless, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“While technologies battery storage and rooftop solar are ownership-gated, the system benefits in affordability, resiliency, and reliability to all ratepayers are not gated,” explained ENERGYHUB’s Max Burke-Scoll. “So just because my house doesn’t have a battery doesn’t mean I wouldn’t benefit from a system perspective of a scaled battery virtual power plant or grid flexibility program in the jurisdiction that I live in.”

As Advanced Energy United’s Emma Heins points out, resiliency has some quantifiable savings, too.

“It costs money to replace medication that needs to be refrigerated,” she posited. “If there’s a power outage, that’s a pretty direct financial benefit if your freezer isn’t cold anymore and you don’t have to throw away all the Costco chicken breasts that you had stored in there. That’s a savings for you. It might not come in the same form as a gift card from your utility or a bill credit, but that’s pretty easy for a lot of ratepayers to quantify.”

The measured ratepayer impact of distributed energy programs is generally positive, and some provide can’t-miss savings for customers.

“There’s the Connected Solutions program on the East Coast and in Connecticut,” Sunrun’s Bart Jackson pointed out. “I think the payment for performance is around $300 per kWh, and the ratepayer impact score for that is nearly or almost two, meaning that the return on the cost pencils quite nicely.”

What makes up a good VPP program?

Bringing the customer along is key to the success of any VPP program and the broader adoption of DERs. Basically, providers need to make the process as streamlined and simple as possible to maximize available capacity.

“We want it to have the least impact on the customer’s daily life while participating,” d Alliant Energy’s Kari Gehrke. “You’re looking at event duration, the number of times you call it per year. What are the triggers? How do you stack the different devices so you can extend the event without calling on one customer device?”

Making it easy to join is essential, says Gehrke, who detailed an Alliant Energy example on the Factor This Policycast.

“What’s the least number of clicks that we can deliver a message to a customer that gets them enrolled? We tested out a campaign this year where we had an opt-in to a behavioral program with a one-click enrollment, so a personalized email that was authenticated. So they literally just have one click inside the email, and they’re enrolled in a program.”

Easy in, easy out, however. One bad experience is often all it takes to lose a participant, Burke-Scoll warned. A single morning without the EV at the necessary state of charge could mark the end of that customer’s time in the program.

“The program doesn’t (just) lose that event capacity. The program loses that capacity of that customer forever,” he said. “So we build our active managed charging programs around the hard constraint that a vehicle hits its target state of charge before the departure, and the driver can override at any time. There’s no penalty. There’s no friction, and those are concessions to customer experience that are made for the grid objective, but they are also an investment in maintaining the scale and building the scale of the capacity for the resource. Because if you make the customer experience poor, you won’t have the program.”

Scaling up

Virtual power plants are past the pilot stage, argues Heins. It’s time for utilities to really lean into the benefits aggregated DERs can provide.

“I think the biggest misconception is that this is a brand new program and brand new technologies, as if we don’t understand how they act, and so we can’t count on them as firm load,” said Heins.

That isn’t the case. Look no further than this month’s record-breaking DER dispatch of more than 580 megawatts to the California grid. At the request of the California Energy Commission (CEC) and state utilities, Sunrun and Tesla discharged their customers’ home batteries to the grid for three hours to increase the grid’s operating margin and put downward pressure on real-time energy prices. The event was coordinated through two statewide grid service programs: the California Energy Commission’s Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) program and the California Public Utilities Commission’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP). The California Independent System Operator (CAISO)’s day-ahead locational marginal price exceeded $200 per megawatt-hour, triggering the DSGS dispatch event. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) called the ELRP dispatch to coincide with the heat wave for batteries located within its territory.

“It’s the first time actually that the $200 price trigger has been hit, which is super cool to see,” recollected Sunrun’s Jackson. “The program was designed to respond to that price, and it did.”

“I would argue we don’t need pilots anymore,” he added, concurring with a sentiment expressed by Heins and others on the podcast.

Technology was already headed this direction, Gehrke ventured, further spurred by electric load growth and the need for more flexible load to balance the generation stack.

“All demand response is good demand response,” she concluded. “It’s cost-effective. It’s worthwhile. We need to be doing it.”

Learn more on Factor This

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