Utility Dive
Summary
As electricity demand soars — driven by AI-powered data centers, the rise of electric vehicles and beyond — the U.S. grid is feeling the strain. Experts estimate that AI alone could drive a 67 GW increase in energy demand over the next five years, a challenge the U.S. grid is not currently equipped to handle. And while new generation is in the works, building supply fast enough to keep up is a near impossibility.
Fortunately, there is a massive but largely untapped resource at utilities’ disposal that doesn’t require years of lead time to start producing: customers and their growing number of distributed energy resources (DERs), including everything from residential solar to home and commercial batteries to combined heat and power systems, are at the ready. Utilities currently tap these DERs to deliver load flexibility through a variety of demand response programs, but there is significant room to expand the impact of these assets through the creation of virtual power plants (VPPs).
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