The Biden administration is loaning a company a massive sum to develop “virtual power plants” (VPPs), according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
The DOE’s Loan Program Office is providing $3 billion to Sunnova Energy to develop green energy technologies, including software that will be ready to adapt to VPPs, the agency announced Thursday in a press release authored by Loan Program Director Jigar Shah. VPPs are networks of smaller energy storage or production devices, like solar panels and batteries, that are combined together to support an energy grid, whether being accessed to meet high demand or saved for later use during periods of lower demand, according to Reuters.
“The project will make distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar, battery storage, and virtual power plant-ready, consumer-facing software, available to more American homeowners and create more than 3,400 good-paying, high-quality American jobs,” the agency said in a Thursday press release. The loan’s announcement follows a recent DOE report which called for the expansion and standardization of VPPs to facilitate the green energy transition. (RELATED: Biden Admin To Spend $1,200,000,000 On Carbon Removal Tech That Might Not Work)
Biden administration is fighting very hard to make their Green New Utopia a reality. https://t.co/8ryBKrfM8p
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 30, 2023
Sunnova’s revenues for fiscal year 2022 amounted to $557.7 million, according to the company’s website.
“This is an important step in structured solar investments that will accelerate solar adoption and bring our best-in-class service to more underrepresented customers,” Sunnova Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Robert Lane said of the loan.
The DOE has touted VPPs as a way to reduce electricity costs from the green energy grid of the future, saying in its recent report on VPPs that “VPPs can increase the grid’s capacity to serve growing electricity consumption by shifting or shedding demand to shrink peaks and reduce the need for peaking generation assets” like coal plants. The DOE’s VPP plan calls for incentives for consumers to subscribe to the program, with the underlying idea that the incentives compensate for modifying their use of the grid to accommodate its limitations.
Sunnova, the DOE and the White House all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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