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The business of demand response cutting energy use to reduce peak grid demands has evolved with the growing capability of technologies to enable it over the decades, from the manual emergency load-shedding of the past to the modern incarnation of virtual power plants, which coordinate digitally connected devices to shift loads across thousands of sites in close to real time. But the structures for valuing the “negawatts” that demand response delivers have largely remained the same. One is utility programs that pay customers ahead of time to reduce load under preset conditions and with preset payments, with little flexibility outside the program rules. ....
Swell Energy has lined up $450 million in financing to give homeowners and business owners batteries and solar systems at no upfront cost, and then earn the money back by turning them into virtual power plants serving utilities’ grid needs. Ares Management Corp. and Aligned Climate Capital will provide up to $450 million to back projects Swell is developing with four undisclosed utilities in three states, according to Thursday’s announcement. The projects will deliver a combined 200 megawatt-hours of dispatchable energy capacity spread across about 14,000 solar-storage systems, to be completed by 2023. It’s a massive potential investment in a form of distributed energy resource aggregation that’s growing by leaps and bounds across the country. Multiple companies are bundling solar-battery systems to earn revenue from their flexibility as wholesale energy market capacity or utility grid services. ....