(Credit: Captive)As extreme weather events become more common across the United States, regulators and grid operators are turning to customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs) to help relieve strain on aging grid infrastructure and keep the power on during times of high energy demand. While historically the times of highest demand have occurred during warmer months, markets across the U.S. are also seeing an increase in winter demand in relation to growing electrification for heating.
CPower, a company that aggregates customer-sited DER, said its customers provided more than 50GWh of load relief during Winter Storm Elliott, in late December 2022, an amount of energy equivalent to the daily energy use of more than 1.7 million homes.
CPower dispatched customer DERs 197 times across three programs in the PJM and ISO-NE markets: PJM Emergency Capacity and Synch Reserves, and ISO-NE Active-Demand Capacity Reserves (ADCR).
Winter Storm Elliott was the first time PJM’s Emergency Capacity program called winter events since the 2014 Polar Vortex and the first capacity event in ISO-NE since the 2018 unplanned outage of the Mystic Generating Station that happened over Labor Day.
The growth of customer DERs is expected to continue as more customers install home energy storage systems and other resources that allow them to manage their own electricity supply and demand. This trend will make customer DERs an increasingly valuable resource for utilities to use during extreme weather events year-round.
“The events of Winter Storm Elliott demonstrate the unpredictability and fragility of our country’s energy infrastructure. But there is a solution today: customer-powered DERs proved their ability to alleviate grid strain during extreme winter weather events. During this storm, our customers helped entire regions to avoid grid failures and allowed people within those regions to celebrate the holidays with peace of mind.” said John Horton, President and CEO, CPower.
