Yes. VPPs was the more common academic term used for many years. Recently, FERC came out with Order 2222 that essentially paved the way for Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to participate in the wholesale electricity markets (think organizations like CAISO that determine the optimal schedules for thousands of power plants on an hourly and 5-minute basis via a market) via a DER Aggregator.
So if you take all these infinitesimally small sources and add them up, a single entity can be a market player for them as a kind of tiny virtual power plant. Naturally, this is extremely complicated and took years to get through the legal processes and for the various grid operators to get it figured out. It's still a work in progress.
So if you take all these infinitesimally small sources and add them up, a single entity can be a market player for them as a kind of tiny virtual power plant. Naturally, this is extremely complicated and took years to get through the legal processes and for the various grid operators to get it figured out. It's still a work in progress.