How Home Standby Generators Can Stabilize the Grid
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Electric utilities would be wise to embrace standby generators because they can help stabilize the grid during periods of peak demand. Specifically, virtual power plants (VPPs), in which homeowners can voluntarily enroll, can greatly help. Let’s take a look at how this concept was used in Texas to improve reliability during the dog days of summer.
Home Standby Generators Come to the Rescue in Texas
It didn’t take long for a Texas VPP deployed in July 2022 to be utilized to promote grid stability. With temperatures exceeding 100 degrees F, demand spiked and strained the state’s grid. To help alleviate the strain and prevent rolling brownouts or full-fledged outages, ERCOT reached out to the VPP’s operator, Generac Grid Services, to request that the company harness its network of more than 100 standby generators to help feed the demand.
Within a half hour of the ERCOT request, GGS utilized its distributed energy control platform to reallocate capacity from the VPP’s generators to the Texas grid. For the next 3-plus hours, GGS remotely controlled participants’ standby generators to stabilize the grid while at the same time ensuring that the participants would retain enough power to keep their homes running. Overall, the effort successfully kept more than 600kW of power online.
This effort clearly demonstrates that residential demand-side energy management programs can help enhance grid stability. The ability to reallocate electricity from a network of standby generators to the grid is something that can help utilities maintain reliability during extreme situations. Simply put, wherever possible this idea should be incorporated into the overall energy mix.
I view this idea as yet another way to enhance emergency preparedness – the more options we have to improve reliability, the better we’ll be able to withstand extreme events. There’s no doubt about it, in this day and age, utilities should consider all available options, and the utilization of VPPs and home standby generators to augment capacity during times of need can only help.
