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It's a horrible naming choice and it shows the industry preconception that a power plant is a large, transmission-interconnected facility. It also, IMHO holds
by ghouse 3y ago
It's a horrible naming choice and it shows the industry preconception that a power plant is a large, transmission-interconnected facility.
It also, IMHO holds on to an outdated concept that all generation must be centrally dispatched. There are plenty of concepts that allow distributed dispatch including voltage (which in turn can be controlled based on local conditions).
Finally (and perhaps most importantly), it implies that only devices that export generation are part of the solution. The supply and demand must be balanced in real-time. And the demand side of the equation is often much less expensive than the supply side.
- idiotsecant 3y agoWhat? It's the opposite of literally all these things.
- sunk1st 3y agoYeah I think that’s why GP is saying it’s a poor choice of name.
- SamBam 3y agoBut if the industry is the one naming it, why are they going against their own "preconceptions?" I feel like GGP is the one with the preconception about the name "power plant," while the industry (as shown here) is starting to use it to be this broader term encompassing distributed generation and price-influenced demand, etc etc.
- ghouse 3y agoAs an industry, the term "power plant" is something that generates power (electric energy). However, much of the DER opportunity is not generation, but load. Which is why the term "Virtual Power Plant" is a misnomer and predisposes people to only be thinking about the generation side of the supply/demand equation.
- SamBam 3y agoRight, but it's precisely that shift that the term is supposed to induce. From a fungible energy perspective, there really isn't that much difference between increasing the supply by an additional MW and decreasing the demand by an additional MW. Moreover, that additional MW that's now in the grid is the greenest possible energy, provided without producing a single atom of CO2. When people thinking about generation they think about something different than reducing demand, but it's critical to start seeing that those can be the same thing, in certain circumstances.
- sanderjd 3y agoBut "PP"s, that is, normal power plants that aren't compromised of DERs, are not going to partake in this shift of the term from meaning "generation" to meaning "generation or load shedding". So you end up with "power plants" that everyone understands are suppliers of power and "virtual power plants" that are, confusingly, a mix of demand reduction and maybe some supply. So I agree that the VPP terminology leaves a lot to be desired. I prefer the more generic "DER" terminology, because it is more descriptive; either a generator or a load is an "energy resource", and "distributed" is a good description of what is unique about these particular energy resources.
- garba_dlm 3y agoit's an attempt to bridge the language because you're right, the people that own this stuff (and work on these companies) are used to thinking in terms of large transmission-interconnected facilities. so my take this move has most to do with how to bill people, and how to collect payments and pay taxes on said payments and so on. I expect that the actual electrical engineering is treated as an implementation detail
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoVirtual Power Plants, both in general (see first sentence on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant), and specifically in the definition given in the comment you replied to, include "demand flexibility" so your comment is confusing.