by Jeff Ihnen | May 21, 2024 | Energy Rant
A couple timely articles and posts have dropped since I reintroduced virtual power plants (VPPs) last week. First, I’ll share a LinkedIn post from Matt Golden, CEO of Recurve. He wrote: “VPPs being defined as dispatchable loads only, is just plain wrong....
by Jeff Ihnen | May 14, 2024 | Energy Rant
Virtual power plants (VPPs) represent a considerable slice of the clean energy race these days, and for a good reason: policy continues to favor intermittent renewable energy supply over baseload nuclear and dispatchable natural gas assets. Load needs to follow...
by Jeff Ihnen | Sep 5, 2023 | Energy Rant
In the last two Rant posts, we explored dated benefit-cost tests for energy efficiency and demand response programs and introduced flaws with dated ratemaking schemes. Both constructs are based on a century-old “cost of service” business model for monopolistic...
by Jeff Ihnen | Aug 14, 2023 | Energy Rant
The Energy Rant features content you will not find anywhere else, and this week we have blazing examples featuring two unpublished (go ahead and look) contributions to the grid crisis of Christmas weekend 2022 and winter storm Elliot. A few weeks ago, Utility Dive...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jun 14, 2023 | Energy Rant
A couple weeks ago, I quickly read this article, Cracking the Code – Aligned Incentives, on EnergyCentral.com. It concerns incentives for high-performance employees, but my read was about incentives for efficiency programs. It applies to that too. Myopic Focus...