Utilities across the United States are recognizing the value of aggregating distributed energy resources for additional renewable energy capacity and grid services without investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure. At the same time, the cost of solar and storage continues to fall but the systems are still unaffordable for many home and business owners. This session will explore how virtual power plants (VPPs), aggregators can stack grid services by overlapping utility and retail value streams onto asset classes, enabling a lower cost of capital and creating a virtuous cycle of deployment. As distributed energy resources are given better cost of capital and fund structure benefits, customers receive lower fixed energy costs and utilities will have more resources to leverage for meeting renewable energy targets and the services needed on the grid.
