Sunrun creates New York’s largest residential virtual power plant

A stock photo of a family with an installed Tesla Powerwall, offered by Sunrun. Courtesy: Sunrun

They say that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

Sunrun is testing whether virtual power plants apply to that old axiom.

In conjunction with Orange and Rockland Utilities (O&R), a wholly owned subsidiary of Consolidated Edison (ConEd), Sunrun has successfully activated the largest residential power plant in New York State, comprised of more than 300 solar + storage systems. According to Sunrun, the aggregated home batteries supplied stored energy to help stabilize the electric grid during dozens of peak electricity demand events this summer, although it did not indicate how much energy was exported.

“This is an important step toward the future of fortifying New York’s energy grid, utilizing innovation to build a more affordable and reliable way to deliver power. We are excited to see residents of New York benefit from the sharing of stored solar power and know this partnership with Orange and Rockland will show the path forward for the rest of the state,” said CEO of Sunrun, Mary Powell.

The Sunrun-managed virtual power plant was initiated by O&R and approved as a demonstration project by the New York State Public Service Commission. In the program, Sunrun synchronizes the discharging of participating batteries, which also provide backup power to customers’ homes, to reduce stress on the grid during times of high energy usage. It will run year-round, as opposed to Sunrun’s largest-in-California CalReady VPP, which operates from May through October.

“The creation of this virtual power plant unlocks incredible benefits to the electric grid that will provide our customers with the clean and reliable energy that they expect and deserve,” said Andre Wellington, O&R director of distributed resource integration. “Home solar-plus-storage is an innovative, flexible resource that can be called upon during times of stress on our electric system and O&R is happy to be part of this opportunity to advance New York State’s clean energy goals.”

What’s in it for me?

Sunrun receives an upfront payment from O&R based on the amount of battery capacity installed, which allows it to offer sweetheart deals to customers like a free or heavily discounted home battery in exchange for participating in the 10-year program.

Participants get all the benefits of using their own stored solar power in addition to utility bill credits for the excess energy they supply to the electric grid. Even when O&R dispatches the batteries for load relief, customers’ batteries will still retain 20% or more of the stored solar power to provide their homes with backup power in the event of a local power outage.

“We quickly signed up once we learned that a Sunrun solar and battery system could protect our home from outages while also bolstering the grid for our community,” said Joseph Ortiz, a Sunrun and O&R customer in Rockland County. “It’s gratifying to know that—without us even lifting a finger—our home is supplying clean solar energy back to the grid to benefit everyone.”

Off and Sunrunning

Boasting more than 1 million customers and 116,000 installed storage systems, Sunrun is the nation’s largest developer of residential clean energy systems. The company is responsible for nearly half of all new home battery installations in the United States.

Sunrun operates more than a dozen virtual power plants, including the nation’s largest single-owner VPP, the aforementioned CalReady, consisting of more than 16,000 home solar and battery energy storage systems. The VPP supplied California’s Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) with up to 32 MW during peak times last summer and averaged 48 MW during a heatwave this July, topping out over 50 MW. The distributed energy aggregator is applying its CalReady findings to a pair of new-ish programs in Texas- one with Tesla Electric and another in partnership with Vistra/TXU Energy.

“Customers don’t care about virtual power plants,” Sunrun’s head of grid services and virtual power plants Chris Rauscher told Renewable Energy World during an interview for a recent feature about the challenges and opportunities of VPPs. “There’s an old saying that they spend six minutes total each year worrying about their electricity. Customers just want hot showers and cold beer,” he laughed.

A New York state of mind

The NYISO forecasts distributed generation in New York State to roughly double over the next three decades. According to a report on New York’s distributed solar and storage markets put together by NYSEIA’s Noah Ginsburg, the state has a robust policy framework to support the deployment of distributed resources, including net metering for onsite solar, a Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) tariff for exporting solar + storage projects, a standardized interconnection process, community solar and remote crediting framework, and NYSERDA’s NY-Sun program, which incentivizes diverse project types. New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) codified a distributed solar goal of 6 GW by 2025 and 3 GW of energy storage by 2030; Those targets have since been raised by Governor Kathy Hochul to 10 GW and 6 GW, respectively.


NYSEIA’s Noah Ginsburg is moderating a panel about predicting interconnection upgrade costs in New England at the upcoming GridTECH Connect Forum in Newport, Rhode Island October 28-30. Register now and join us at the interconnection event everyone will be talking about!


A graph depicting annual energy storage deployment totals in New York. Courtesy: NYSEIA

Ginsburg indicates distributed storage deployment is “still in its early days in New York,” but notes there’s a growing pipeline of standalone energy storage in the NYISO interconnection queue, especially in ConEd territory. 2023 was the state’s best year in terms of deployment, though NYSEIA indicates there are several key threats to sustained growth in the market including rising installation costs (inflation and interest rates), declining incentives via NY-Sun, rising interconnection costs, and permitting barriers. Ginsburg believes New York can overcome these barriers with the right policy interventions.

In April, another leading VPP provider CPower Energy became the first registered aggregator to integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) into wholesale markets via NYISO’s DER and Aggregation Participation Model program. The program allows DERs to be aggregated as VPPs to provide both wholesale services to the grid operator and retail services to utilities and load servers simultaneously, unlocking the full benefits of VPPs for the resiliency and reliability of the grid and creating new revenue opportunities for commercial and industrial energy users and DER owners and developers. The NYISO’s new market rules allow aggregations of DER resources over 10 kilowatts.

Earlier this month, CPower and EnergyHub, a grid-edge flexibility and VPP provider to utilities and markets, launched a new residential VPP partnership available to 1.2 million Ameren Illinois customers in more than 1,200 communities across Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the U.S. Midwestern grid operator. Ameren and other utilities in the Midwest are expanding VPP programs to help MISO manage increasing electricity demand by utilizing a growing base of distributed energy resources.

CPower Energy has more than 6.7 GW of capacity distributed across more than 27,000 sites. CPower is based in Baltimore, Maryland, and is owned by LS Power, a development, investment, and operating company.

Trump’s ‘unpredictability’ shakes investors – This Week in Cleantech

This Week in Cleantech is a weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less.
wind turbines in front of an orange sunset

Renewables permitting has been ‘paralyzed’ by Trump – This Week in Cleantech

This Week in Cleantech is a weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less.