How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
摘要: Climate change and energy
How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
Utilities are lowering energy bills in exchange for
正文
Climate change and energy
How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
Utilities are lowering energy bills in exchange for more control over your electricity use. Here’s how to get involved.
Eshan Raul
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August 28, 2026
Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Adobe Stock
MIT Technology Review
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Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one.
virtual power plant
, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such as smart thermostats, electric-vehicle chargers, home batteries, and solar panels) that a utility can control. Usually that means commanding the devices to draw less electricity during peak hours. For example, the utility might adjust your thermostat or delay or slow EV charging when electricity demand is high.
In exchange, the utility offers VPP participants a discount on their energy bills and, in some cases, a signing bonus. Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO and cofounder of EnergyHub, a software company that helps utility companies run VPP programs, says a smart thermostat program may offer an initial bonus of roughly $50 to $150, plus about $25 to $50 per year, while home battery and EV devices could yield hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual savings.
The amount of power the utility might throttle in any one home is small. But it adds up, Frader-Thompson says. “When you put it together at the scale of hundreds of thousands, or millions, it has a pretty profound impact,” he says, equivalent to “firing up a power plant.”
As of 2023
, there were already more than 500 VPP programs operating in the US alone, and the number has only grown since, especially with big players like
Google starting to invest in this technology
to help power their data centers. An
estimated 4 million households
with smart thermostats wer