If you haven’t noticed, VPPs are kind of a big deal right now. It’s a moment long awaited by DER evangelists like Mathew Sachs, chief strategy officer at CPower—one of the country’s biggest VPP platforms. Last year, CPower customers delivered around 38 GWh of load relief to the grid from January-September (a 137% increase over all of 2024).
We asked Sachs, who has spent over a decade in the distributed energy space, to break down the current momentum—and offer a sneak peek of what’s next.
(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
Why do you think VPPs are only just starting to take off?
Like everything else, VPPs —and demand-response before it—have been on an innovation curve. Emergency demand-response was good proof that we could do it technically and economically. So, how do we scale it? Now is the moment, while we’re in an affordability crisis.
What are you excited for in the coming months (and years)?
For a long time, some distributed generation didn’t have a defining problem to solve. It was a nice-to-have. But now, we have a problem to solve that could be critical to how we evolve as a country.Â
With data centers, their grid problem is speed-to-power. But as costs come in and they start really competing, they will be trying to get more profit. I think that’ll motivate them to be flexible assets in their own right. PJM’s proposed Interim Resource Adequacy Service rules could unlock distributed batteries on many levels—distribution, the bulk grid, and even the home level.Â
What are the biggest challenges in bringing new customers into VPP programs, and how do you address them?
These programs are set around the grid's needs, not the consumers' needs. That's not a recipe for success. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We’ve got to find ways to meet customers where they’re at. We started segmenting customers by their flexibility needs or capabilities, instead of by zip code or industry type. Putting that puzzle together is the challenge that our industry is going to face. 🧩