title: DERVOS 2025: Deploying and Orchestrating GWs of Distributed Capacity
author: DER Task Force
contenttype: podcast
publication: DER Task Force
published: 2026-01-15T14:00:00
sourceurl: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/184143591/2b3760f99837d35d595bb0bdf0ccec2c.mp3
word_count: 7922
Welcome to another edition of Thamda Now! And I don't think I'm going to ever get sick of that intro. Super excited here to get into everyone's favorite topic of VPPs, so I'm going to let everyone do a quick introduction of themselves, along with your favorite resource in a VPP. Yeah, it's a twist on your favorite dirt because you know it has to be something you can aggregate. I'm Seth Radert Thompson. I am embarrassingly wearing the same shirt in that photo. CEO of Energy Hub, we have about two million DERs on our platform. We mostly work with utilities and we like putting all the DERs together into one meta VPP. They're all your favorite children. They're all favorite children. They all have, yes. Dana. No favorite children? No. Alright, hi everyone. I'm Dana. Thank you so much for having us. I'm co-founder and CEO at Vultus, where a VPP aggregator, DER, DERs, load flexibility. We like to just include it all. We've got roughly 8.1 gigawatts under management. Now we work with all resources from the smallest EVs and thermostats all the way on up through large data centers and my favorite resource. I really want to pick one and I was going to not pick one and now I feel like I can't do that. So I'm going to say flexible data centers because I don't think we've seen the limit of what we can do there. Okay, I'm excited to get into that. Hi, I'm Ryan Long. I work at Excel Energy. We serve three and a half million electric customers across eight different states. I currently hold two roles at Excel. I have been president of our business in Minnesota and the Dakotas called Excel Energy, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, but I've transitioned now. I'm our chief legal and compliance officer, but I'm currently holding both hats. And my favorite distributed resource, I'm sure we'll talk about this as we go, but it is a resource that we are hoping to add to our system as part of the distributed capacity procurement and battery storage on the distribution grid, which we'll talk more about. Hey, thanks for having me, Chris from Sunrun. I run our distributed power plant business, not our virtual power plant business, and we've got more than a hundred thousand residential customers with batteries enrolled in programs this year, and about 135,000. My team's here. Is that right? 135,000 batteries enrolled, and you guys make me nervous. I speak at a lot of conferences, but most conferences I can just bullshit because no one knows anything. You guys know stuff, and so I can very nervous. And I think my favorite dirt is bi-directional electric vehicles. Very excited about that. Ooh, okay, I love that. Yeah, so I don't know. I have so many things I want to talk about with you all. I guess to start, you know, we've been at this. I think earlier we said, you know, we've been saying the word 10 years, Dana and I in a conversation. She's like, I think it's been more like 20 years, and then we realize that, you know, we both kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum, we're on a related to an enter knock TVA deployment in 2007. Dana was doing the work. I was doing the the evaluation of the work. I think we all know there was a lot of improvements to be made from 2007 to where we are today. But it's kind of wild that we've kind of been the space has been evolving and sort of growing, and we've been trying to do aggregation for a very long time, and it feels like we're in a moment where we're we're already seen some today. We're going to see some more with Chris's presentation later. You know, we're doing gigawatt scale, we're doing these sort of massive aggregation and sends appointments. And so I just want to start with a little bit of, you know, a win. Like, let's hear what you guys are doing right now and like what you're most sort of proud and excited about. So Dana, I'm going to kick it over to you to start us off. I think the thing that I'm just most excited about and this is going to sound a little corny, but it's just the general energy of the industry, which there's some plan words in there about energy, but it just feels like we're all having this moment. Everybody in this industry is excited. We have momentum. We have real solutions for real problems and problems that are now not just like wonky problems that a niche group of people understand, but these are problems that something like 20% of Americans now are either struggling to or can't pay their bills. And so the fact that this is now a kitchen table topic, everybody's talking about electricity pricing. It is a problem that the companies in this room can actively solve and just the influx of energy and talents and like people out of college and new ideas and solutions are just very, very exciting. Whereas I feel like the last couple of decades, that makes me sound so old. But it has passed a little, very short decades. Like an uphill battle where we're kind of convincing people that there's a problem that we want to solve. And now it's just so stupid, obvious that there is a problem that we can solve, but that's really exciting and it feels like we're having that moment. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious. We can get back to what people are excited about, but I am curious about that. Like what is different about the moment, right? We clearly feel the time is now. Like is it affordability? Is it capacity? Is it both? Like how are you guys seeing who you're even engaging with and is interested in this shift? Yeah, I mean, I think the deployment of the DERs, people buying, buying DERs for whatever reason, right? Because it makes their house more comfortable or they like the way their car drives or it's battery, which saves the money or whatever. We're kind of riding that wave. And then we're turning that wave of adoption into into VPPs or DPPs. And so like it's just it's a convergence thing. And I think the the the fact that we're at at such scale that these things are mainstream is pretty profound, right? Like I don't know Chris what the stat is in terms of like how many homes in Puerto Rico have batteries, but it's a very large number. If you look at like VPP participation in VPP programs at utilities, we have several utilities who have 10% of their population is participating in their VPP. And so the company, you know, one of the previous panels was talking about permissionless, we have permissionless and permissioned happening at scale at the same time. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, for me, I think it's a scale maturity and need have all converged at the same time. So like if we had this need five years ago, I don't think we would have been ready. We wouldn't have had the scale or the maturity. And so I think we are we are in the right place at the right time to really show our stuff. And for me, and I think probably for the whole industry, Dana has done a lot of publishing on this too. 2025 was the summer, was the year where we prove this is real. And for us at Sunrun, that's why we don't call them virtual power plants anymore because there's nothing fucking virtual about them at all. Seriously, they're distributed fucking power plants. I don't like distributed power plant because that doesn't even capture it because they do more than a power plant can. But I think that's better than virtual. And so we made a very conscious branding decision this year to pivot away from VPPs to distribute power plants. Can we swear are there any kids in the audience? I mean, yeah, I'm all for the rebranding to DPP. I think it is more accurate. I agree virtual sounds femoral and not reliable. Even though I mean, yeah, we'll get into that. So yeah, so I think it's super interesting that we're sort of at this point where this need is growing. We have this convergence. I mean, I'm curious how we see that play out in sort of the state landscape, right? Obviously, and I know everyone was kind of like, do we have to talk about it? But we're going to make you talk about it for a couple minutes. I'm obviously California like defunded DSGS. And I think, you know, what the future of that market is, Newsom vetoed a bunch of things. It could have made it better. How should we think about that? I noticed some hot takes on the stage. So should we be should we feel sad? Should we feel like it was the right thing and something better is going to come in place? Should we feel like we don't care about California? Like what what's going on? I mean, I think we made California to get it right. I think that California led led the market in adoption of a bunch of D.E.Rs, right? Like we we have a somewhat of a debt to California in terms of like having brought us down the solar curve, for example, right? Kind of the Germany of VPPs. Exactly. And so well, okay. I'm gonna leave that with you. The something, I think they're the California of renewables, right? And so like that was very, very helpful. But California has not done a great job of converting the D.E.R. adoption into VPPs. And what California has lacked is predictability, stability, all of the things that would be necessary. And so, you know, there was a load-flex summit that the CEC put on a few months ago. And we ran the numbers. And you could see that if California were Arizona, you would see like, I don't know if you're at the number two, three gigawatts of VPP participation today, right? Because California is like in some categories, it's like five X, what other states are in terms of adoption. But the conversion rates, the funnel conversion of that, and the participating in VPP is bad. The monetization is wrong. And so the good news is I think the folks who are working on this in California know this, and they are passionate about getting it right. I would like to hope that the governor's decisions were about steering this in the direction of we're going to solve this through one channel and not the fragmentation problem that California is having with that. Okay, I like that take. Chris, what are your thoughts? I mean, you, so this is a complicated question. It's a complicated question. And I can't get in too much trouble, but so Diablo Canyon is that one gigawatt, 1.2, somewhere around there, right? And whether or not to close Diablo Canyon is always in the news in California, right? And obviously we cannot compare a two or four-hour battery resource to a nuclear power plant, but I'm going to do it. This summer with Tesla, we were operating about a half a nuclear power plant in DSGS. And that's just been silent. We will not operate that in the same way next year. So it's like if we just took Diablo Canyon, and next year it might be a, it might be a full gigawatt that we're operating. It's like if we just took Diablo Canyon, like no thanks. This is working, but no thanks. It's already built, but we don't need it. Yeah. And so it's very frustrating for us. And at that point, you can't, you can't build a long-term business or strategy when we have lumpy year-over-year, even month-over-month programs. Yeah. And Ryan, I'd be curious, not so your thoughts in California, but like how Excel decided. I mean, maybe you can give the 30-second view of people that maybe don't know what you guys just announced a week or two ago, but how did you guys decide that that was the right model for you? Yeah. So what we announced was what we have branded called capacity connect. It's a distributed capacity procurement program. The idea is that it is utility deployed batteries on our distribution grid that are distributed front of the meter that are aggregated and controlled by us as the utility. And what caused us to walk into this space, caused me to walk into the space as president of the company, was honestly sort of looking back and thinking, I have not been in the utility industry that long and maybe haven't lived through the battles that this room has had with utilities or that utilities have had with folks in this room. And so I walked into a leadership position of a utility in the upper Midwest and thought, it seems like we're under utilizing a part of our grid. And I walked into that position at a time where we needed to maximize the utilization of the assets that we already had invested in and thinking that be it distributed energy, be it rooftop solar or battery storage has a lot to offer my customers in terms of value, in terms of reliability, resiliency. It's a new way to invest in environmental justice communities. And so we thought that we had something to add, frankly, as a utility that understands our grid has deep planning expertise and thought we could deploy these in a strategic way that maximizes the value of these resources across our system for our customers by targeting circuits, by targeting feeders, that we can actually solve problems by deploying batteries in those locations as opposed to having to deal with the challenges or problems caused by a sort of random showing up of resources on our distribution grid, which we've gotten better at too over time. And the one thing I want to be clear as about is that with the capacity connect program, we think that we have something to add. We think that developers have something to add behind the meter. We think that VPPs that leverage customer equipment and things like thermostats absolutely have a place on the grid. We just saw this as an opportunity for us to step into that space. Really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I've been thinking about from, you know, the changes we're seeing in California, which, you know, Chris, to your point on this sort of loss of a power plant, right? And it's not talked about in that framing, but that is what it is, which I'm sure we will find solutions for and people are working on. And I'm not saying that I don't think California's going to figure something out. But then we have, you know, utilities doing batteries. We have, you know, bidding and aggregating into the wholesale markets, which I know Vultus is doing much more than just that. But that is a lot of what you're doing. You guys are working with utilities and the customer side and kind of creating that platform. So there's a lot of different ways, right? And we talked, we said earlier, right, 66% of people said program fragmentation is our biggest issue in five to 10 years. I'm curious if you guys actually view that as an issue or if that's just, I don't know, power plants need to figure out how to work in a lot of different regulatory environments and states and markets like is this the future of this? Is there convergence at some point? Is it a problem? Well, I think the program fragmentation can, there's a lot of permutations to that. I mean, you know, if you look at like we work with Duke energy, for example, on battery programs and on thermostat programs. And they have to file those programs like in North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, they have to go around. So there's going to be some natural, like call that like fragmentation light. I don't think that's not like a, I don't view that as a huge issue. Where you have unnecessary fragmentation is where you have like, you have a single resource. Let's say it's a battery. That battery should be, should be available to the bulk system for economic value for resource adequacy, for local congestion relief. It should be available for all of those things. It doesn't make sense to say, no, you know, you have to pick one, right? You should just turn that over to whoever the operator is or potentially multiple overlapping operators, right? In California, for example, you have Kaiso and you have the, the, the IOUs. You also have the CCAs. There's probably a model in the future where you want to sort of separate from the customer experience. I'm just saying like, I would like to be part of a flex program. And then behind the scenes, everyone figures out some system for how are you going to use this optimally on a given day? Yeah, I appreciate that. Sorry. I appreciate that because I, you were talking, calling about fragmentation and then I was thinking a little bit about gosh, we're probably part of the problem. But I see this really an opportunity to experiment in different states. And so we have the DCP moving forward in Minnesota. We have a very different VP program moving forward in Colorado. And I love that from a company perspective because we're going down two very different paths. Eventually, I will see those cross-pollity. And I think good ideas will make their way from Minnesota to the Colorado, Colorado to Minnesota. But I love that we're able to go down two paths as a company and kind of explore what really works for our customers. But that obviously creates complexity for folks on the other side of the table as you're dealing with this fragmented landscape. I was going to say and actually to bring us, I'm sitting here also thinking about my thoughts on California to bring us back to that a little. I know we all still want to talk about California. But and I promise to come back to your questions because I get super, super okay with a bunch of complexity and different types of ways that resources can participate. What I am absolutely not okay with is stop start, stop start, stop start, program this, pilot that, no, we don't like that. Like the macro equivalents of my of the tragedy and frustration of California is what happens with like the US government pulling the plug on projects that were well along the way that just made a whole ton of sense. And then all of a sudden it's not there. And now that's a really, really hard thing for investors and others to get on board with. So that's like the macro example of the California DSGS thing playing out. And so complexity, complicated stuff, like I think that's what this industry thrives on is taking all that complexity and saying consumer like what you get is savings. And like we're gonna handle that complexity. But what we don't want is the death by a thousand pilots and this swinging back and forth. And so the program approach that California has taken is frustrating to me and kind of tragic because I want to move to like markets and a little bit more long-term pricing signals. But also we were talking about this beforehand. A lot of times when you get a VPP panel together everyone's like we kind of like to talk about what's not working. But there's also a ton of stuff that is working. And so I'm also very confident and full of optimism that even in California because rates are just so high. But like it's like what 40 cents a kilowatt hour or something. It's higher like the man charges or I can't someone told me the other day that it's like $750,000 a megawatt year for demand charges. Like it's absolutely insane. So the solutions we'll bring with batteries and all the other technologies in this room. We're gonna find a way. But it is frustrating when they it's tragic when they and then I have to look away because I'm like I can't even anymore. Can I just agree with Dana on that and you know I think yeah I agree with you. And I also think that like you're not hearing us say that there's a software or a hardware problem because there isn't right. So it's the same batteries and Puerto Rico keeping the lights on that are providing wholesale peak reduction in California and load serving entity capacity tag reduction in New England right same same stuff. We have no problem on that side. And we also don't I'm not concerned about program fragmentation as it were but strictly speaking for residential batteries and bidirectional EVs. The rules and programs were not written for those resources. So we're still treated as demand response measured at the utility point of interconnection in many cases and the utilities want to want to only count low drop. So fragmentation programs is fine but best practices on on program components like that need to be aligned around the country. Interesting. Can you I'd like to get a little bit more into that because I think that probably also has a little bit to do with you know jigger still my thunder and talking about Dana's revoltuses filing but I that's not exactly the same thing as data access but I do think it has to do with like how do you validate what a system is doing where are you looking are you looking at the meter is it low drop is it export is it what is it what the battery said it did. So is that kind of what you're talking about and can you expand a little bit yeah so all the process would look like there yeah so we're you know we're in 17 programs around the country or so and all the programs that we are in we meet we meet directly at the battery level at the inverter level that's revenue grade metering that we have to give to the US treasury and Goldman Sachs and our finance partners so like we trust that metering and it's it's actually more accurate in many cases than utility meters so yeah metering directly at the battery level and receiving credit for any incremental energy the battery pushes out regardless of what's happening in the home because batteries are fundamentally buffering the home and then exporting to the grid and buffering a few neighbors home so that's that's one one thing that we really focused on but but here's the tragedy of what he just said the that metering that revenue grade metering that's good enough for all those entities that somehow is not good enough for some of the wholesale markets where what's only good enough is the utility meter which may or not work which by the way ratepayers paid for what we deployed all the AMI and smart metering what also don't have access to their data so that's what we're I know everybody loves talking about data access as much as they love talking about California policy right so we're back to talking about VPP problems but that is what we're trying I know it's and we can't talk about yeah we can't only talk it's bad it's bad yeah and I mean in your mind is the solve just allowing you to use the inverter meters or getting access to the word just is hard it's like not just it is so hard to just but yes if we could use the metering from entities like sun run and others like the notion that pick your favorite utility in your head because I don't want to pick on anybody but definitely not my couch mate that that utility meter is more accurate than than some of these other technologies it's just it it it's just not true and so what we're trying to do is show that there's any number of sources that could be meter solutions and also we want access to it for the consumer in particular if we've already deployed it and rapaced it because that will unlock a lot more of the smaller D.E.Rs and residential D.E.Rs also like why are we arguing about these things like aren't we short on capacity in most parts of the country like let's we've got to move like yeah we've got to move but it's hard about the data yeah the data exists use it build VPP is DPP yeah yeah Ryan do you have like how do you think about this yeah I actually I line up with Seth I feel like the time for arguing about this is is past if the metering is good let's prove to ourselves prove to the utilities proved to Myself prove to PJM that it's good you know we may go on and debate the policy and how exactly we compensate and what that all looks like let's quit arguing about the data if the data is good and I I think that my hope is that in this new era we'll start to see movement there because the technology has come such a long ways I don't disagree with anything you guys said about meter accuracy relative to the utilities and so I think that there's some real progress that we could make especially in this era of low growth yeah I think one thing that I'm interested in maybe getting into for a minute is you know Ryan you mentioned like one of the the value part of the value of you guys kind of deciding a little bit of where to put batteries is that you have that full picture right of where would be the best places for this and I know this is something that a lot of utilities have talked about and I've really struggled with how you kind of share that to third party developers we all know hosting capacity maps are predict they're better than guessing and I know a lot of utilities have put a lot of effort into it so I'm not trying not trying to do it but it's really complicated right because there's a lot of things happening blah blah we don't need to get into hosting capacity maps and how we do it but I am curious like do we feel like we need to know where things are in order to be valuable that they're valuable anywhere there's obviously higher value in certain areas like Ryan how do you see potentially being able to work with third parties and in a hypothetical program yeah I mean I mean we're we're having this debate in Minnesota in Colorado around our hosting capacity maps and the clarity of them and the fact that we blur certain things are aren't granular all the time and you know I acknowledge the DCP part of the strategy of the DCP is that we do understand our grid very well right not only that we understand where our grid is going right we understand our communities we understand where growth is and we understand what that growth might do to our system and so we can think a little bit around the corners of our distribution grid and make those investments I think that we've gotten better at the information we're able to make public there are always going to be limits you all know this from utilities when we think about security and cybersecurity and and I know that that is frustrating to a lot of people but it comes from a place of responsibility and and conservativeness around issues that we think are really important and that we have slowly been pulled along to be totally frank and I think that's a good thing we should have been pulled along and I think we probably still have some room to go to find where the right line is where we're actually making choices around security but also transparency and making our grid accessible to third parties in ways that will better our customers and bring value to our customers and so I think that that's a journey that we probably need to make quicker progress on but I also think that it's not just us looking at more granular hosting maps that makes the DCP value it's leveraging our scale and our our understanding around integrated system planning and our communities and where they're headed as well yeah and I guess Chris I'd be curious like how much do you guys think about you know obviously there's the customer acquisition side so you need to go what the customers are that want you to go but then there's also the grid value side so how are you guys kind of handling yeah it's a great that trade off yeah great question calling that I think it's different on the resi side because we we have in the past run programs actually here in New York with Orange Rockland where we tried to target hyper low this was six years ago I think target hyper localized geo use cases and what we found is if we went into a random neighborhood that you know maybe you already lean towards wanting solar and batteries but the utility at a high need they needed to upgrade a substation if we offered an essentially free Tesla Powerwall backed by the utility customers didn't want it homeowners didn't want it they're like it out of here right and so on the resi side I think it's a little bit a little bit different so fast forward now six years later we're running a program with PG&E this summer it's called the AC DC program a little bit of branding on their part yeah but one was very excited about that AC DC yeah it's pretty cool actually so so we have a high saturation of batteries in the PG&E territory already then we overlaid that on where they had a need on the distribution system and we're operating those batteries differently not for bulk system peak reduction but for local congestion relief basically that's been like massively successful this summer and so it's two different approaches well you know two different approaches going to to the market and I think for us like deploying as many resources as we possibly can and then operating those first for bulk system peak reduction is there's so much low-hing through there and so much value and if we did that in every territory in the country we would be like really far down the road of distributed power plants then we can start doing location yeah the I mean the frustrating thing about this is that this was obvious to all of us then right like it was the equivalent of like you've got a piece of bread and you're gonna like take peanut butter and just lay it out like on lines right that doesn't make any sense you smear the peanut butter over the whole piece of bread to get started and then so I mean we we this was pretty obvious that you needed to build up a critical mass there needed to be sort of like a market-wide signal saying like you should get a battery and you should lend it to the utility occasionally and then over time you'd have enough critical mass that you could turn into something but sometimes you just have to wait for everyone to figure it out yeah can I just shout out really quick absolutely two different things here so first of all I mean to to you know not to focus too much on the two decades but like the unlock that we all know Dana and I was 10 when she started in the business yeah yeah I've been in that long too so I'm feeling the the the unlock that we are all still benefiting from from companies like interknock is the establishment of of of value of dr and system wide capacity right like we are that is still the primary thing that we're all leveraging and then to the sort of the present day there are only a very small number of utilities including excel who are now attempting to say here's the locational value there have been people for the last I don't know five ten years trying to do that in very very complicated ways and I hate those complicated ways because they're never going to go anywhere the implementation is too much of a pain so the fact that excel is just like here's an extra layer of of value that you can tap into when you're local that is huge for the industry and the benefit of the industry is that the next utility who tries this will look at that work put their own spin on it do their experiment and so on and so forth and in five more years that will be a nationwide thing with a bunch of different permutations and that will have unlocked like a whole new level of potential here yeah I love that thinking and that actually you maybe think of something else that has kind of been on my mind which is how you know to to one extent I'm always like okay how do we you know brought in and have a lot of third parties involved and if the other extent you get some added right you get some added complexity where if you're like oh this is you know this congested spot me this goes back to your point of like you just need to spread peanut butter were and then figure out figure it out where you're like go and build here and here's extra incentive to build in this congested area if everyone runs over there and also you're like oh now that's too hot too many batteries too many batteries there and like how do you guys think about how we should be I don't know like adjusting and still be able to like create the right investment structures for people because I do think that's like a complicated question right of we were talked about earlier with the EVs right where if you don't if you create a rate class where it's really cheap if you have an EV to charge between midnight and 7 a.m. suddenly you're peeking at midnight because everyone starts their charge at the same time you have to think about okay how do we get them to all sort of start charging within five minutes of each other and then it's fine I don't know there's kind of a half question in there but I'm gonna roll with it I just a observation like you're this is there's a there's a corollary it's a like congestion pricing in in like Uber and Lyft right where if you're driving Uber and you use you're like you know well not here but if you were in you know out by JFK not on governor's island Uber if you're out on JFK and you see that there's a congestion fee available in Manhattan you're not gonna get there in time right you can't steer the ship like that yeah it's it's an emergent behavior that kind of like by the time people notice it has taken care of itself and so I do think we have to remember that like that's how these sort of economic signals work is they they they emerge in complex ways whereas we're all still living in like salad bar land in some places where it's like the cucumber costs as much per pound as the caviar like what world does that makes sense right so this is the more that we can get towards those price signals we know how to do it we have the technology to do it I love I love your point what salad bars are you going to like any New York's out you what you put all the food on them you go and you weigh it and that's what you oh no totally as the caviar specifically the caviar oh I don't know I just eat salad bar food I just like like think of something but I'm totally with you and I see people like rice and something that's okay I don't know I was really into the food the peanut butter analogy yeah I just want to know what the jelly was we come back to that later yeah I also think I don't want to step on the salad bar caviar and I also think there's like it's funny that we haven't been talking about time of use rates at all because this for me brings up the difference between rates and grid service programs right rates by definition have a very long regulatory lag and are sort of backward looking so the net billing tariff in California is probably the best example of this where super complex locked in way ahead of time into the future customers can't understand it in fact customer bills in the near term we'll go up to bank credits for the long term so it doesn't make any sense so what we're finding out or what our modeling is showing after operating the net billing tariff for a couple years now is we're just going to put the batteries in self-consumption mode never export for the rate only export for grid services programs right because that's dynamic and I'll give you examples is Brenna here Brenna can you stand up put your hand up go ahead so I've got my whole team here for an offsite and we were going to Broadway show on Wednesday and Brenna got a dispatch notice from Luma in Puerto Rico for 15 minutes in the past like I don't know if they messed up a time stamp 15 minutes in the past they said full power now because they were facing a rolling blackout like you cannot do that with rates and so I think you know we also need to really separate out how are we incentivizing this behavior totally yeah no no okay well I do want to so in our in our last few minutes I did want to get into we haven't yet talked about the heels test I know it's a five minutes is an ambitious amount of time but we're gonna do it anyway so let's you know what does success look like and I'm gonna set set that for for his theory yeah okay so the theory definitely not my theory credit goes to to Mr. Hewals Matthias Hewals from my team so the thought experiment is basically it starts with the idea of the touring test which is that a computer passes the touring test if when you're talking to a computer versus a person you can't tell the difference how do you tell whether a VPP can really substitute for you know you mentioned like does it actually replace a nuclear plant right down the line at some point VPPs or DPPs will pass the Hewals test but they don't today so the question is how do you define the sort of stages of progress and so so we're gonna publish or maybe we already have published today the the a framework for levels going from sort of where we started with which was the man response to level two where you're doing active load shaping you can do a little bit of limited kind of locational dispatch to level three where you can do basically everything you pass the Hewals test at level three where your grid integrated up to a point your your automated response to market conditions and bolts bulk signals and then level four is where you actually surpass what a traditional power plant can do because it's distributed and because you're able to leverage existing distribution infrastructure so we're very excited about this because I just think we need a road map of like to tell are we making progress along this thing or not can we unlock those future values and what I love is we talked about this at the leadership summit yesterday and immediately got into into very nerdy debates about like does this count as level two or three or four and I think that was the hope is that it would help drive a more sophisticated conversation about this where on average do you think we are stuff on that is it the Hewals test yeah I think we're depending on the utility we're but we're summer at two summer at three yeah I once I'm just sitting here listening to it for the first time I think once you get to three or four you're gonna have utility engineers and planners who are very happy to have those tools and pull those levers when they're available that's right yeah and I think that we there a big topic these days is the conversation about does part of the utility think this is only at level one and other parts think that it's at level three and that becomes a really interesting like like change management problem yeah utility leadership is Seth is it the case I haven't heard the paper yet but I love the heuristic is it the case that getting from one to two to three takes one to two decades but getting to four might take many decades that's an interesting question I think that probably not many decades I think that one of the the conversations has started yesterday was you like you might say that your system somebody did say to me yesterday that their system was at level four and I said you can't be at level four on your own right you can only be at level four when you're fully integrated into the system so like if you're in Ryan's shoes the question is how do you take a system that is capable of receiving a bunch of signals from the utility to do layers of different grid services and integrated into the actual systems that the utility uses and I think that is the hard work and the problems that are there I think are largely not the problems that people think are going to be the problems there are there are big issues associated with just like like for us within energy hub we think of this problem as being dominated by there's a state machine problem of you have to track what's the sort of as operated state of the grid and have that mirrored I need to be able to configure your batteries to mirror the way Ryan's distribution grid is operating at any given moment and I need pieces of the utility system to tell me that they're congested or that they're forecasting a congestion in the future and managing all of that across a very vibrant ecosystem of hundreds of DER manufacturers is a big interesting systems engineering problem all right yeah I was like I feel like yeah that was amazing I know I have I have so many more questions on that we don't really have the time to get into them but I would say read the paper debate it I will ask just one last question which is what what do you think you energy hub is or is it very by state what what level are we yeah yeah two three somewhere yeah yeah like actively working toward level three and facing a lot of like very practical unsexy problems associated with that all right any quick last things that people feel like this group needs to know before we part what they should be working on the biggest thing they should be tackling the biggest thing they should be excited about your last question was how we're all thinking about success yeah and down this one wonderful I just feel like I learned so much from you where my brain was going was one can we not get a D minus on the state of our electricity grid as country here also worldwide but just sitting in the US I think that's like a measurable achievable thing to can we please allow people to be able to afford their electricity I think we can bring down the build significantly 20 30% and and hold it that way and three I don't want us to be limited on the amount of load growth we see so we talk about it's like quality of life climate the AI race or whatever we want to call it I race yeah I don't want to limit us because we can't do things because we don't have enough supply so I was where I love is where my brain went like limitless growth while keeping it affordable and reliable so amazing no D minuses you know I was just really excited to be here honestly I don't know how many utility people are here or how many utility execs you've had on the stage but I think yes but I think I think we need to talk to each other more and I think that there's a whole lot of collaboration and success that we can have together so I've been trying to come to these spaces and have more conversations if I would love to do like a job swap with one of you for you know just to kind of live in your shoes and have to deal with the utility I've sort of done that a little bit through the DCP dealing with my own engineers and my own planners and I've walked away from a lot of those meetings frustrated but I think more of that empathy building is is really valuable for our collective industries yeah I completely agree with that and I would say like if you're if there's so much many young people here make me feel really really old and if you're either a young person looking for your first only old people say young person yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're if you're if you're like yourself on this hello fellow youths if you're looking for like your first step into this career or or even like a mid-career change don't try to work at Sunrun or Voltus or Energy Hub go work at a utility or a public utilities commission as a staffer because like that's really where we need to to have change and have fresh thinking and and good minds awesome thank you all so much thank you