Laura Klivans [00:01:24] Yeah, it’s in this neighborhood with a bunch of one-story homes. Actually, when you drive there, you drive by a big field with solar panels on it, which is cool. So I met a couple, Ivan Israel Amezcua, and Ramon Heredia, and they live in this neighborhood. Ramon and Ivan’s home is also very similar to the other homes that you see. One story, it’s a three bedroom home. It’s got maybe two bathrooms.
Ramon Heredia [00:02:03] This is one of our guest rooms. I love that the closet has light.
Laura Klivans [00:02:07] First of all, there’s these like lovely plants, hanging plants on their front porch. Then you walk into their home and they have incense burning, they have these two cute little kitties running around and then they have like all this cool stuff on the wall. They have, they’re really into moving quotes, inspirational quotes, like I think the kitchen one is, you know, the most important ingredient is love.
Ramon Heredia [00:02:28] I got the best cook at home. He’s a master chef for cooking and everything.
Laura Klivans [00:02:36] And they have moved into this house, maybe like six months ago, they purchased and moved into the home.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:44] What do they tell you about what they loved about the home or what about it sort of spoke to them as they were looking for a home to buy?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:52] Ramon was emphatic that he just walked through the home and he was like “this will be my home.”
Ramon Heredia [00:02:57] So I put my offer on Sunday and they got them on Monday. They took it on Monday and they took it out of the market on Monday.
Laura Klivans [00:03:05] But what he really liked about it was like the air conditioning, because here in the Bay Area, a lot of homes do not have air conditioning. And as we experience the heating of the climate, we see that that is more and more important.
Ramon Heredia [00:03:18] I didn’t know that we had solar panels. I didn’ know this was a carbon-free home. All I know it was air-conditioned house and then I was gonna sleep so comfortable because that’s what I love.
Laura Klivans [00:03:31] And what he did was he like toward the home and he saw this unit on the outside and he was like, okay, it’s an air conditioner, great. What that unit he saw is actually called a heat pump, which is like an electric version of a furnace that doubles as an air conditioners. So it’s like this appliance that’s really helpful because it can both cool and heat a home and do it very efficiently.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:54] What about this home is unique? Because as you say, it looks like every other home in the neighborhood, but it is different, right?
Laura Klivans [00:04:03] So on the outside, it looks a lot like other homes. I mean, it’s like very nice. Like it’s been repainted recently. It’s been sort of redone.
Ramon Heredia [00:04:09] The roof is covered in solar panels. And you know, the solar panels are in the right up. It is like pretty much like 32 solar panels, there’s like a lot, yeah. They’re huge.
Laura Klivans [00:04:20] They feed into this big box, which is a backup battery. But on the inside, you won’t notice too much that’s different until you start looking at the appliances.
Ramon Heredia [00:04:32] The water heater is electric. That was one of the things that we had to get used to, to everything electric. Nothing in this house is gas.
Laura Klivans [00:04:42] This stove is not a gas stove, and it’s not even an electric stove, it’s an induction stove. So it uses the magic of magnets to heat up your food. It’s also super fast. Other things in people’s homes that use gas are like our clothes dryer, which people don’t really know or think about, but so there’s this electric. And then they also have other cool gadgets like a smart thermostat. And so like, When they adjust stuff in their home, it’s just all through their iPhone. What’s unique about this home is that all these special electric appliances are connected and they’re connected to a virtual power plant.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:27] And it is a very unique technology that all of this stuff is connected to, right? This idea of a virtual power plant in their home. I mean, can you break that down for me a little bit, Laura? Like, what is a virtual power plant?
Laura Klivans [00:05:46] So let’s think of a normal power plant that we think of, like smokestacks, or maybe we’re thinking more green and we’re like a huge display of solar panels out somewhere, connected to the grid. So it’s like this one place feeding power to homes, businesses, whatever. What changes with the virtual power plant is that it’s like… Basically imagine like a little device stuck on all of these smart appliances in everybody’s homes, the backup batteries, the water heaters, whatever. And they are all talking to a central source that’s like directing them. Let’s compare it to an orchestra. Let’s say this orchestra has 100 instruments. And importantly, there’s a conductor who’s telling people when to go and play and whatever. Same thing with a virtual power plant. So for these 100 homes, this conductor, the virtual power-plant technology, is telling these homes when to change in real time. And what’s cool and new about this is it can respond based on a weather report for tomorrow. You know, see that there’s gonna be a big heat wave, people are gonna probably be blasting their AC, there’s going to be strain on the grid. What it can do is it can tell your water heater, hey, heat up the water in the middle of the day, as opposed to later in the day when people will be using their ACs a lot. And hopefully the person who lives in that home is not gonna notice anything and their shower’s just still gonna be warm at night.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:23] Who exactly is running these virtual power plants and is this a Bay Area thing?
Laura Klivans [00:07:28] It’s Bay Area and it’s beyond. We’re seeing these all around California. The group that’s running Ivan and Ramon’s virtual power plant is called MCE. They’re one of several of these smaller power nonprofits. They serve four different counties in the Bay Area.
Alexandra McGee [00:07:49] Of course it matters what you consume. We’re trying to increase more clean energy, but it’s also important when you consume…
Laura Klivans [00:07:57] Alexandra McGee is a vice president at MCE. They’re a nonprofit energy provider. Alexandra McGhee says that virtual power plants have the opportunity to give us cheaper and greener energy.
Alexandra McGee [00:08:08] So if collectively we’re shifting everyone out of the more expensive times and our contracts get cheaper and we can pass along those bill savings so that for the customers as well.
Laura Klivans [00:08:18] Rates for energy change throughout the day based on when there’s an abundance of energy on the grid versus not as much. If we pull energy from the grid in the middle of the day, it’s most likely gonna be closer to zero emission than if you are using all your appliances at night.
Alexandra McGee [00:08:36] If we can be more smart about how we use power and when we use the power, we can displace the need for otherwise building a large centralized location that is much more industrial, heavier, has a much larger environmental impact.
Laura Klivans [00:08:52] The other huge benefit that people who love virtual power plants talk about is that as our demand for energy expands, we have data centers, we have a push towards electric vehicles and electrification of all sorts of things in California, we’re going to see a demand increase on electricity. Virtual power plants give us the opportunity to avoid building a new polluting power plant.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:23] Coming up, what it’s gonna take to get more homes connected to virtual power plants. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:36] I mean, Laura, in theory, this sounds all really nice. You get a cheaper monthly bill. You’re opting in for a more sustainable and environmentally conscious lifestyle. But how commonplace are these virtual power plants right now?
Laura Klivans [00:09:52] Some of the numbers that I have looked at lead me to believe, after talking to experts, that we have the capacity to power a million homes in California during peak energy demand time using what is available from virtual power plants right now. A lot of scientists and academics are predicting growth of virtual power plans. And then we also have skeptics.
Duncan Calloway [00:10:15] I have yet to be convinced that this is a new idea.
Laura Klivans [00:10:21] So Duncan Calloway is a researcher at UC Berkeley, and he studied this stuff for a long time, and he thinks these technologies are good and have potential. And this kind of moving around when you can, like when people are demanding power, is a thing that’s been around for a longtime. He cautions people that, you know, there’ve been some roadblocks before with this kind adoption. I think the one that prevailed is behavioral. Human challenges.
Duncan Calloway [00:10:53] The problem all along with demand response has been that folks are very reluctant to have somebody else adjusting, controlling how much electricity they consume. And so that’s a very difficult problem to get around. Can the enthusiasm around the idea of a virtual power plant make it so that we can scale these solutions to have even more impact? And that’s not clear.
Laura Klivans [00:11:23] I think for Ramon and Ivan, their experience has been really positive. They haven’t felt like, oh my gosh, this is so frustrating, we don’t have control over our own stuff. Like the goal of the virtual power plant is you don’t even notice it’s happening. But in order to be part of it, you have to like, let’s say I hear this podcast, I wanna be part a virtual power plan, I call up my energy provider. There might be several hoops to jump through to join one, your energy provider might not even know what we’re talking about, or they might not have a program like this. At the moment, it can require perseverance. Very few people are gonna follow through with that if it’s not easy.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:06] But it sounds like there’s a huge potential for this technology to help with, I feel like this problem that we deal with increasingly year after year of, you know, the threat of everyone’s power going off because it’s gonna be really hot in the summer and we’re all just kind of like preparing for our blackout in the middle of the day. But I think what’s interesting about this story, Laura, is that Ivan and Ramon weren’t necessarily looking for a home with this technology, right? They kind of just stumbled upon it.
