The Down Low with Joe Podcast: Buildings as the New Power Players

Buildings are no longer just energy consumers; they’re becoming more active grid players. Edo co-founder,Courtney Blodgett, recently joined Voltus sales director Thomas Armstrong, and Sparkfund VP Growth Brendan Reed, on the Down Low with Joe Podcast. They discussed how commercial buildings are becoming grid assets, with opportunities for building owners to unlock revenue, resilience, and overall value.

Joe Aamidor led the conversation, which touched on:
• Why DERs + VPPS are scaling faster than new generation
• How buildings can earn revenue instead of just paying bills
• Why data, automation, and policy are the real bottlenecks
• The parts of demand response everyone gets wrong
• The future of grid reliability as AI + electrification ramp up
• What keeps facility teams from participating today
• The opportunity for buildings to replace peaker plants over time

Read an excerpt from the podcast below, and watch the full episode to better understand where distributed energy resources (DERs) and virtual power plants (VPPs) are headed.

Driving Revenue from the Grid

Joe Aamidor: We typically think of a building as paying money to the grid for power. But if we flip that around, how can a building make money from the grid?

Courtney Blodgett: Utilities are starting to recognize that DERs are big energy resources and buildings can really play a role in the grid. So instead of just consuming energy, they can help to store or reduce energy use. Edo is using a VPP model to preheat or pre-cool buildings in order to reduce load during peak periods. Utilities are willing to pay for those reductions in load because they reduce the stress on the overall system.

For example, we participated recently in a pilot with a utility that was doing planned maintenance on a substation. They were going to bring in a diesel genset. Instead, they just called on the assets that were on those substations. Over the course of two weeks, they called on the assets regularly, almost every day, to reduce load and do that planned maintenance.

So it’s just starting to look differently at the land, at the building, and at the assets that are based in that building to really enable them to participate in the grid.

New Opportunites

Aamidor: How do you move beyond traditional demand response to multiple opportunites to a multitude of ways to participate in the grid?

Blodgett: Edo’s whole reason for existence is being able to work with buildings in a way that has really low impact on occupants and is light-touch for facility managers. Getting access to data from commercial buildings has traditionally been really challenging. Now, we’ve been able to unlock that data, which allows us to shift set points in advance of an event without requiring calling in the controls contract or rewriting any control sequences.

We’ll work with facility managers to establish what the comfortable set points are for tenants and then expand them a couple of degrees to do pre-cooling without tenants knowing an event is happening. Facility managers have the ability to cancel an event but don’t have to do anything otherwise. That’s a big shift from having to turn off part of your building, as was historically required.

We’re also able to shift load on a more regular basis. Typically, buildings would participate a couple of times and decide it was too much work with too great of an impact on occupants. Now, in one case, we shifted load at a fitness center eight times in 13 days and nobody noticed.

Aamidor: What do you say about industry challenges around analyzing data creating more work for the building operator and not necessarily leading to a better outcome?

Blodgett: We really try to support building managers. We identify anomalies in the system, say, chillers running off the schedule that’s most efficient for the building. We are feeding them actions that they can take, and that are pretty low lift. Our building engineers are there to support facility managers because we know how busy they are with other things.

Replacing Gas Peakers

Aamidor: What actually makes a virtual power plant?

Blodgett: A virtual power plant is an aggregation of different resources. People often think of solar and storage, but it’s also thermal storage, EVs, buildings and homes that can shift loads when they need to. Again, load shifting was primarily for emergencies but now we’re recognizing that they can be adjusted much more often. When aggregated, all of these resources show up on the grid the same as a power plant, even though they’re actually reducing load.

Now you have these really flexible assets that can reduce load quite quickly, especially if these buildings are compensated because they’re more willing to flex on a regular basis.

Aamidor: Do you see the market adopting virtual power plants and replacing peakers over the next five to ten years?

Blodgett: I think so. The DOE has done the calculations that VPPs could serve 10-20% of peak load) by2030. California has 800 megawatts of VPP capacity, which is equal to multiple natural gas peaker plants. I think as more technologies continue to improve, the cost of storage decreases, and payment for this flexibility increases, we’ll see a major shift away from gas peaker plants.

For more information about turning commercial buildings into grid assets, reach out to our team at Edo.