Latest news with #virtualpowerplant
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Doubled $1,500 cash boost available for Aussies in weeks: 'Downward pressure on bills'
A doubled $1,500 rebate will be available to NSW households and businesses who install a solar battery and connect it to the grid. The NSW and federal governments have teamed up to boost the incentives available in a bid to shore up the grid and help lower energy bills. From July 1, households and small businesses will be eligible for payments of up to $1,500, up from the current $800, for installing a battery and connecting to a virtual power plant. These are connected groups of solar batteries that allow extra stored power to be sold to the grid. Households will also be able to access the federal government's $2.3 billion Cheaper Home Batteries Program next month. The federal rebate will reduce the cost of a battery by about 30 per cent, making it about double the current state incentive, which is coming to an end on June 30. RELATED Centrelink cash boost over 400,000 Aussies have weeks left to confirm Major RBA interest rate call set to give homeowners $250 per month win for 2025 $400 cash boost available for thousands of Aussies in new energy rebate A household that installed a 6 kWh battery would be eligible for a federal subsidy of about $2,232, and a NSW incentive to connect to a virtual power plant of about $444. On an 11.5 kWh system, the federal subsidy would be approximately $4,278, and the NSW incentive would be around $850. On a bigger 27 kWh battery, which usually costs just over $30,000, the federal incentive would be about $10,000, and the NSW rebate would be the maximum $1,500. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said attaching more batteries to soak up the sunshine and store energy would be good for bills and the grid. 'The Albanese and Minns Labor Governments are teaming up to double the benefits available to NSW households and small businesses," he said. 'We'll help more people in NSW access cheap, fast and safe solar energy in their homes and businesses night or day, when they need it." NSW Minister for Climate Change and Energy Penny Sharpe said virtual power plants were critical to future-proof the grid. 'By increasing battery uptake, we're reducing demand on the whole grid, putting downward pressure on bills for everyone,' she said. The NSW government will end its current incentive to install a home solar battery on June 30, ahead of the more generous federal incentive kicking in. The NSW battery discount was launched in November and has seen more than 11,400 battery installations in the last six months. The discount amount is related to the size of the battery and ranged from $770 to $1,150 for a 6.5 kWh battery, and $1,600 to $2,400 for a 13.5 kWh battery. According to the Climate Energy Council, four million households in Australia now have rooftop solar. However, only 4.5 per cent of them have an accompanying home battery in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data
ABC News
25-05-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Why energy giants want to control solar batteries
Sam Hawley: It was a decision driven by spite for Sydney man Peter Anderson. He was determined to buy a solar battery for his home so he could take money away from the big power companies while never receiving a hefty power bill again. But his plan came unstuck after agreeing to participate in a so-called virtual power plant. Today, energy reporter Dan Mercer on Peter's dilemma, how giving back to the grid really works and whether it's worth it. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Dan, we're going to explain what a virtual power plant is, and it sounds pretty high tech. Dan Mercer: It does, Sam, but it's actually not. A virtual power plant is a real power plant in many ways. It's just made up of hundreds or thousands of individual households. I mean, if your house has solar panels, it's a power plant. And if you add in batteries, a household has the ability to sell power even when the sun goes down. Virtual power plants are really about coordinating all of this diffused capacity. The theory is that if you can coordinate or aggregate, as it's known, enough of them, then the combined capacity can be very significant indeed. Critically, though, they involve householders signing up to become part of a VPP and giving up some control over their batteries and their solar panels in the process. And they can use that to prop up the market when it's under stress. And the market is under stress more and more as we get deeper into this transition. The quid pro quo is that the householder is supposed to be better off overall. As we're going to hear, there's a sticking point, though, because you might want all of your stored power at the same time as the grid needs it. Sam Hawley: OK. So you've been speaking with Sydney resident Peter Anderson. Now he signed up his house to be part of a virtual power plant. And that is a completely optional decision, right? He didn't have to. He agreed to. Dan Mercer: Yeah, Peter was like millions of Australians in that he already had solar panels on his roof, but he was keen on getting a battery so he could store some of the excess power those panels were generating. And it was the lure of a deal that got him to buy one in the end. In his case, it was from one of the biggest energy retailers in Australia, AGL. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: It was a very gentle kind of, hey, this is what it is. We promise we won't do these things. We promise we will do these things. We knock a thousand bucks off the battery. We put you on a five year deal to stay on the program for five years. And if you don't, we pro-rate that thousand dollars and ask for that back, which all seemed very reasonable. Dan Mercer: In exchange, Mr. Anderson says he agreed to participate in a VPP that was being run by AGL. Funnily enough, he says he didn't really need a battery. He just wanted to stop paying power bills. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: Our solar installer, when I first spoke to her, she's like, oh, you don't need a battery. I said, it's not about needing a battery, Lily. It's about spite, taking money away from the power companies. Sam Hawley: Don't we all want to stop paying power bills? All right. Dan Mercer: It's the dream. Sam Hawley: It is. It is. So for a while for Mr. Anderson, it was fantastic. He got this thousand dollars off a battery and he didn't notice anything for ages. Dan Mercer: Yeah, that's right, Sam. Peter told me that in the first year after joining the scheme and getting the battery, he barely noticed a thing. Given that he thought it was a great deal, money for pretty much nothing. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: You know, we'd been on that for a few quarters and the best they got out of us was like 22 cents. So we were pretty smart. Sam Hawley: Yeah, and that sounds good, too. But things then started to go not quite as he had hoped for. And he accused AGL of pretty much draining his battery until it was almost empty. Dan Mercer: Yeah. So after about a year, Mr. Anderson reckons he started noticing some fairly dramatic shifts. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: It was just little bits and bobs and they weren't pulling huge chunks of it. And then one sort of wet Thursday night, they just drained the battery. But completely drained it down to 5 percent. And we thought, oh, OK, that's new. Dan Mercer: Was that a one off or? Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: No, because they did it again the next day. So they charged it and then drained it. Dan Mercer: Worse, he says the depletion of his battery forced him to buy power from the grid at just the wrong time. The evening peak when prices are highest. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: They changed the way they use the battery from these little bites every now and again to just dragging everything out of it. And you could map when they were doing that to when the price skyrocketed. Dan Mercer: And he says it meant he couldn't run his house of his own battery just when he needed it. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: This is an obvious misuse of the virtual power plant solution where they're draining the battery to service other clients and you're left in the lurch. Dan Mercer: There's a side note to this, too, Sam. Peter reckons AGL placed him without proper warning on a type of complicated, dynamic charge called a demand tariff. Under a demand tariff, consumers are charged according to their single greatest half hourly period of electricity use from the grid across an entire month. They're supposed to discourage people from using lots of power in the peak. But a lot of people hate them. AGL insists it gave Peter adequate notification and it says the two matters are completely separate. Peter says the changes amounted to a double whammy because he was not only having to pay peak prices, he was getting hit by the demand tariff as well. Peter Anderson, Sydney resident: They were basically forcing us to power our house from the grid and trapping us into using the demand tariff. Dan Mercer: Peter told me it was such an unsatisfactory experience that he actually left the VPP scheme shortly after all of this went down. He says he'll manage his own energy needs from now on. Sam Hawley: OK, so what has AGL had to say about all of this? Dan Mercer: Well, first of all, AGL disputes any suggestion it drained Peter's battery. A spokeswoman told me the company's policy was to leave at least a fifth of the charge remaining. And as mentioned, on a demand tariff, AGL has very much disputed Mr. Anderson's version of events. But on top of this, AGL says it's the poles and wires companies and not the retailers like AGL that instigate these tariffs in the first place. I should say, Sam, I don't think AGL is applying demand tariffs any longer. There's been such a backlash that I think they've actually walked away from them. Network poles and wires companies, for their part, they say it's completely up to the retailer to decide how to charge households. And it always has been that way. Sam Hawley: But tell me, Dan, would Peter have been better off if he just didn't sign up to this in the first place? How would it have worked if he didn't do it? Dan Mercer: It's hard to know, to be honest. He got a thousand dollars off the upfront cost of his battery, which isn't nothing. He pulled out of the VPP scheme before the costs of AGL's alleged actions were able to add up to much. But I think it raises very interesting questions about how much value there is in household storage and who should capture it. Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Dan, governments and energy companies are really working on storing renewable energy at a very large scale. So just tell me how significant could homeowners like Peter be to that? Dan Mercer: Right now, it's not a lot, but I don't think there are many people out there, in the energy industry at least, who doubt that it'll be big. Just take a look at the number of households with solar. About one in three has an installation. Now, fewer than one in 10 of those has a battery. But that will change because the cost of batteries is going to come down. Governments will throw more money at them in the form of subsidies. And the technology will mature. The Australian energy market operator expects VPPs to become a big part of the energy mix over the coming decade. Gabriel Kuiper is an expert in this space. She reckons the number of households that are part of VPPs could eventually number in the millions. Gabrielle Kuiper, renewable energy consultant: Once we have a lot of batteries and also a lot of electric vehicles with the capacity to feed back into people's homes or the grid, we will see this become a really significant part of the electricity system. Sam Hawley: And I guess the regulators, they really don't want virtual power plants to get a bad rap. They need them, right? They need people to trust that it's great and they want to opt in. Dan Mercer: Absolutely. That's fundamentally a part of this. And I think it's totally fair to say that there's this nagging concern about the risks of VPPs being rejected by the public, particularly if there are more stories like Peter's. If VPPs are going to work, Gabriel Kuiper says consumers have to be able to trust them. She reckons there's too little information that can help the average householder navigate and make sense of the market. And she's worried consumers could end up missing out on many of the benefits of their own investments, which can be substantial. Gabrielle Kuiper, renewable energy consultant: The risk is that the aggregators earn a very high proportion of the profits from household and businesses' energy technologies, particularly batteries, and households and businesses don't end up with good value from participating in those VPPs. Dan Mercer: It goes to a fundamental point, I think, which is that householders are going to want to be properly rewarded if their gear is going to be used to help the grid. Sam Hawley: All right, well, Dan, of course, Labor had a resounding win at the federal election and they're promising to give big subsidies to people to buy home batteries. So I gather that is going to see a lot more of these installed and probably pretty quickly. Dan Mercer: That's certainly the expectation. And judging by the news that's out there, since Labor made the announcement, the installers have fully booked. Sam, we've already got a lot of solar in Australia, as mentioned, but AEMO is forecasting the number of installations to double again by 2050. It expects the increase in battery numbers to be far more dramatic. It thinks the number of battery systems in Australia's two biggest grids will soar from about 270,000 battery systems now to 5.6 million by 2050. So quite an extraordinary growth. In the election campaign, Anthony Albanese pledged $2.3 billion for home battery subsidies. It'll apply to people with existing solar as well as those wanting to invest in new solar battery combinations. It won't be means tested and it'll give about 30 percent off the cost of getting one of these things. Some of the most popular batteries currently on sale in Australia from the likes of BYD, a Chinese company, and Tesla, the big American firm, they cost roughly $12,000 to $14,000 installed. That's before subsidies. Sam Hawley: Yeah, so they're still pretty expensive, but there will be a lot more homes with solar and batteries. So if virtual power plants are really important to keeping the grid stable, I guess the question is, will it stay opt in or will regulators and the government be quite tempted to force people with batteries to send their power back to the grid when it's needed? Dan Mercer: It's a great question, Sam. And to be honest, I'm not sure that it's one which has a clear answer yet. Interestingly, one of the caveats that Labor has put on its battery subsidy scheme, and which other states have also done, is that in order for the battery to be eligible, it has to be what they call VPP ready. It means the battery can technically be integrated with a VPP scheme. In reality, there are some battery manufacturers that don't particularly like or want their products being ultimately controlled by any party other than themselves, by extension, I suppose, the householder that bought them. Tesla is the prime example here. What's pretty clear though, is that there's a pressing need to better orchestrate all of the household clean tech that's out there. Lots and lots of small scale systems can add up to very big challenges for an energy system. Equally, they are huge opportunities as well. Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Dan, you must hear from customers all the time with concerns. So what's your advice to people considering installing a battery and then potentially signing up to a virtual power plant? Dan Mercer: Like in any deal you might enter, always read the fine print.I think the more engaged energy consumers, they're going to be fine. The big challenge will be ensuring VPPs can serve the mainstream where most of us are. There's no doubt that rooftop solar combined with batteries and other clean tech can provide immense value to the grid. It can smooth out the troughs when there's too much supply and not enough demand and vice versa with the peaks. But of course, energy companies know this. And let's be honest, many of them want to capture that value themselves. So what I'm going to be most interested in is whether governments and regulators and the industry itself can get ahead of it to make sure punters get their fair share of the value. And VPPs provide the broadest possible benefit. So if this doesn't happen, VPPs, I think, will struggle to work. Most people will do their own thing and we'll all end up paying more than we should. Sam Hawley: Dan Mercer is the ABC's energy reporter. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Adair Sheppard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Can Our Waterways Provide A New Source Of Baseload Power?
Virginia is the first state to formally press for the creation of a virtual power plant. Glenn Youngkin, the state's Republican governor, signed the Community Energy Act on May 2, which mandates Dominion Energy to launch a 450-megawatt virtual power plant (VPP) pilot program. Virginia isn't alone in this endeavor, but it is certainly the most out front. There are many incipient VPPs clustered around utilities across the country. A virtual power plant is the ultimate realization of something that has been going on for a long time as utilities have been hooking up various power sources, managed conservation and underused generation, known as distributed energy resources (DER). These, according to even small utilities, can contribute up to and possibly over 10 percent electricity to a utility system. Organized and formalized and with enough coverage, DER becomes a VPP. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. A virtual power plant not only depends on managed conservation and underused generation but also on some imaginative use of resources, like hooking up transportation fleets to discharge their batteries onto the grid when they aren't in use. Electric school buses are frequently cited as playing a role in future VPPs. Conservation and solar roofs with related batteries are the backbone of DER and VPPs. Eventually, they are expected to be common to most utilities or consortia of utilities. In Owings Mills, Maryland, an engineer and inventor with a slew of patents to his name, Key Han, dreams of a different kind of VPP, one which could, if widely deployed, provide a new source of baseload power. Han, CEO and chief scientist at DDMotion, has pioneered speed-converter technology which, if widely deployed, would produce inexpensive, reliable energy in sufficient quantity to be described as baseload. Indeed, he said in an interview, 'It would be a huge new source of baseload.' Han's technology converts variable energy inputs into constant speed outputs. For example, the flow of water in a stream is variable but with his speed-converter technology, the energy in the flow can be captured and converted to a constant speed output. With his technology, grid-quality frequency can flow from many sources without extensive civil engineering or major construction, he told me. In particular, Han cited non-power dams, like the ones in New England which were built in the 19th century to drive the textile mills. 'A simple harnessing module with a generator behind the spillway coupled with my technology can produce frequency that is constant and ready to go on the grid. If you have enough of these simple, low-cost generators installed, you have created a new baseload source, a virtual power plant of a different and exceptionally reliable kind,' Han said. Another use of the same DDMotion technology would remedy what is becoming a growing problem for wind and solar generators: the lack rotating inertia. Inertia is essential for utility operators to fix sudden changes in frequency caused by changes in generation or consumption (50 cycles in Europe and 60 cycles in the United States). Lack of inertia has been blamed for the widespread blackout on the Iberian Peninsula and is becoming an issue for utilities with a lot of solar and wind generation, so called inverter power. This refers to the grooming with an inverter to power to grid-quality alternating current from its original direct current. Here, again, his technology can inexpensively resolve the inertia problem for wind and solar generation, Han said. Either using a mechanical system or an electronic one, wind and solar systems could provide rotating inertial. Increasingly, utilities are looking for untapped sources of power which can be bundled together into VPPs. Renew Home, a Google-financed company, claims 3 gigawatts of electricity savings, which it says makes it the leader in VPPs. It relies on managing end-use load primarily in homes with load shedding of high energy-consuming devices during peaks. This is accomplished by using special thermostats and smart meters. Industry experts believe artificial intelligence will be a key to extracting the most energy out of unconventional sources as well as fine tuning usage. VPPs are here and many more are coming.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Partnership Reduces Grid Stress And Pays EV Owners
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA - AUGUST 30: The sun shines over towers carrying electical lines in South ... More San Francisco, California. (Photo by) A new partnership aims to reduce the strain on the power grid while boosting electric vehicle adoption by putting money back in the pockets of EV owners. The partnership between Leap and ChargeScape will create the nation's largest EV virtual power plant, the companies announced Wednesday. A virtual power plant, or VPP, combines the capacity of what's known as distributed energy resources such as solar farms, EVs and EV chargers, batteries, household appliances, heating and ventilation equipment and others that can be flexibly charged or accessed to provide power back to the grid. When effectively managed, a VPP can provide some of the same services as a traditional power plant. Graphic shows how the concept of virtual power plants, or VPPs, works. Leap specializes in creating and managing VPPs, providing financial reward for its partners. 'What we're enabling our partners to do is monetize what we call their flexibility, their ability to control load behind the meter, control these stationary batteries, or mobile batteries and EVs, and monetize them as capacity and energy for grid operators,' explained Leap CEO Jason Michaels, in an interview. Graphic explains payment arrangement using virtual power plants. ChargeScape's charging platform connects power grids with automotive brands that include BMW, Ford, Honda, Nissan and Tesla, also providing financial rewards to EV owners for their flexibility in charging their vehicles. Owners sign up through the automaker's app such as Ford Pass or My BMW, which they already use to manage charging their EVs, then enroll their electric meter with Leap. 'So we deliver all of these electric vehicles from all these automotive brands and all the flexibility that comes with their residential charging, and we plug that into Leap, and we sort of become part of their overall portfolio that they then bid into these energy markets to deliver flexibility,' said ChargeScape CEO Joseph Vellone, in an interview. 'Leap will then tell us we need to either reduce demand during these hours on this day or actually the power grid needs more power. How much can we export through vehicle-to-grid charges? Leaps makes sure that we get paid in the end.' EV owners are then paid directly by ChargeScape through Venmo or PayPal. The results are managing the strain on the power grid, especially during peak load periods such as the heat of summer when air conditioners are in high use and making it financially attractive to own and EV, say both Vellone and Michaels. 'At the end of the day, we are saving Americans money on their EV charging,' said Vellone. 'By making EV charging more affordable, we are making EV ownership or leasing more affordable, reducing the total cost of ownership.' The two systems are connected through Leap's API and it's that connectivity and complementary capabilities that has Michaels especially enthusiastic about partnering with ChargeScape. 'ChargeScape is a really exciting partner for us because of both their technical ability to be able to control the charging of all these different customer devices and their EVs, and also their reach and association with their OEM partners,' Michaels said. 'That's where I think this gets to be really exciting for everybody, because we can do this, not just for one utility program, but really unlock scale.' The partnership is rolling out initially in California where automakers on the ChargeScape platform can earn additional revenue through the Emergency Load Reduction Program, a five-year pilot program designed to pay electricity consumers for reducing energy consumption or increasing electricity supply during periods of electrical grid emergencies. Revenue is also available through California's Demand Side Grid Support program which offers incentives to electric customers that provide load reduction and backup generation to support the state's electrical grid during extreme events from May to October to reduce the risk of rotating power outages. Beyond California, the partners plan to expand to states such as Texas and New York, which Vellone says, have similar power structures to California's along with a high number of electric vehicles.
ABC News
08-05-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Trust 'on the line' amid claims AGL drained householder's battery at peak times
Peter Anderson likes to joke that he has an aversion to paying power bills. It's what drove him to install solar panels at his home in Sydney in 2019. And it's what convinced him to go one step further and get a battery in 2022. "The funny thing about it was that our solar installer, when I first spoke to her, she's like, 'Oh, you don't need a battery,'" Mr Anderson recalls with a laugh. Like a growing number of consumers, Mr Anderson was enticed into buying a battery by the lure of a deal. In his case, it was from one of the key energy retailers in Australia, AGL, which was offering about $1,000 off the up-front costs of installing a system. In exchange, Mr Anderson says he agreed to participate in a so-called virtual power plant, or VPP. As part of a VPP, companies which are co-ordinating — or aggregating — households' batteries and other clean tech can use those devices according to the needs of the grid. Mr Anderson says that in the first year after joining the scheme and getting the battery, he barely noticed a thing. "It was all very gentle and easy going," he says. "It was, 'Hey, this is what it is, we promise we won't do these things, we promise we will do these things, we knock a thousand bucks off the battery, we put you on a five-year deal to stay on the program for five years.' "The idea of it was to help stabilise the grid in times of drama. "So it all seemed very reasonable. "And for the first year, I don't even think they touched the battery." That all changed after a year or so when Mr Anderson says he started noticing some dramatic shifts. For starters, he claims AGL placed him without proper warning on a complicated type of dynamic charge known as a demand tariff. Under a demand tariff, consumers are charged according to their single greatest half-hourly period of electricity use from the grid across an entire month. The charges are designed to discourage people from using power from the grid at peak times but consumer advocates and even some regulators say they are incomprehensible, ineffective and unfair. AGL denied it did not provide adequate notification, stressing Mr Anderson was given written communication flagging the change ahead of time. On top of this, Mr Anderson asserts AGL also started "draining" his battery at times, forcing him to buy power from the grid at peak prices. To compound his frustrations, he says the changes amounted to a double whammy — by forcing him to buy power from the grid at peak times, he claims he was driving up his costs under a demand tariff. AGL has disputed this claim. "They changed the way they use the battery," he says. "It went from these little bites every now and again to just full on sucking the thing down to its 5 per cent reserve level, just dragging everything out of it. "And you could map when they were doing that to when the price on the (national electricity market) had skyrocketed." Gabrielle Kuiper is a consultant who specialises in the adoption and integration of solar panels and batteries. She says virtual power plants hold huge potential as the energy transition gathers pace and the number of households and businesses participating in them could eventually number in the millions. And she reckons policies such as the pledge by the federal Labor government to subsidise the cost of household batteries is only likely to supercharge this trend. "We've got about over a third of households across Australia now have rooftop solar, but less than 10 per cent have batteries," Ms Kuiper explains. "Once we have a lot of batteries and also a lot of electric vehicles with the capacity to feed back into people's homes or the grid, we will see this become a really significant part of the electricity system." However, Ms Kuiper says experiences such as Mr Anderson's should serve as a warning about the dangers of poorly designed or managed VPPs. For such schemes to work, she says, consumers have to be able to trust them. "We know that there's been issues for decades now around trust in electricity, full stop," Ms Kuiper says. "You know, the big energy retail companies, I think, are rated below banks even in terms of consumer trustworthiness. "So, yeah, there are real challenges there." Ms Kuiper says regulators need to ensure consumers are getting the right advice and being properly protected. To that end, she reckons there's too little information that can help the average householder navigate and make sense of the market. She worries that unless this happens, consumers could end up missing out on many of the benefits of their own investments. "This is a new and emerging issue," she says. "We really need the Australian Energy Regulator to get on top of it and to improve transparency and provide more information to consumers. "I think the risk is that the aggregators, particularly the large ones, like the four main retailers, earn a very high proportion of the profits from household and businesses' energy technologies, particularly batteries, and households and businesses don't end up with good value from participating in those VPPs." AGL, which is Australia's biggest energy retailer with more than 4 million customers, defended its actions in relation to Mr Anderson and its management of the VPP. A spokeswoman rejected claims AGL ever entirely depleted the batteries of participating households, saying it was the company's policy to always leave at least 20 per cent of a charge remaining. The spokeswoman also rebuffed suggestions Mr Anderson's tariff had been changed as part of his participation in the VPP scheme. She said the change in tariff was a separate matter. The spokeswoman acknowledged that some customers were transferred to demand tariffs in areas where they applied, including much of New South Wales. However, the spokeswoman pointed out that it was the poles-and-wires companies — and not the retailers — that instigated the tariff changes in the first place. Retailers, by contrast, merely passed on those changes to consumers and always tried to ensure they provided the correct notifications. Amid a backlash to the spread of demand tariffs, it is understood AGL is no longer applying the charge. Instead, the company has said it is "endeavouring to maintain" customers on their existing tariffs such as flat-rates and time-of-use charges when their meters are replaced. "AGL proudly has one of the largest growing virtual power plants in Australia," the spokeswoman said. "Customer participation in the VPP is entirely voluntary, and by enrolling in our VPP, customers receive payment for allowing us to use their battery in this way. "A VPP participant's battery is never fully discharged." For Mr Anderson, his own experience was bad enough to leave the VPP scheme. In future, he says he'll manage his own energy needs. "This is an obvious misuse of the virtual power plant solution," he believes. "They're draining the battery to service other clients and you're left in the lurch. "Now, I bet if you go through the fine print … there's no guarantees around that.
