Central Coast Community Energy (3CE), a public agency that supplies renewable energy to 1.2 million people across the Central Coast, is partnering with Lunar Energy to launch a “Virtual Power Plant” program.
The program will create a coordinated network of participating homes and businesses to optimize energy usage and reduce reliance on the grid. Lunar Energy, a clean-technology company that develops home battery and solar management systems, will provide its Lunar Gridshare platform, a distributed energy resource management system to coordinate these assets.
Using this platform, 3CE will be able to optimize energy use by charging batteries in participating households during off-peak hours, when energy is cheaper, and use that energy during peak hours when prices are high and when there is more demand on the grid. The goal is to reduce demand during high-cost time periods in the evening, which is when there are less renewable energy sources available.
The three- to four-year agreement aims to translate customer participation into cost savings while reducing strain on the grid and harmful emissions.
“Virtual power plants are one of the fastest, most cost-effective ways to strengthen the grid using infrastructure that already exists,” said Kunal Girotra, Founder and CEO of Lunar Energy, in a press release. “Through Gridshare, 3CE can unlock new value for households while adding flexibility to the broader energy system. 3CE joins a growing number of Community Choice Aggregators across California.”
California’s electric grid is under growing pressure from climate change, electrification, and the rapid construction of new data centers. The program will allow 3CE to remotely coordinate devices across a network of participating customers to dispatch stored energy precisely when and where it is needed.
The first phase of the program will utilize home batteries, with other devices including heat-pump water heaters, EV chargers, and smart thermostats rolling out in later phases.
3CE is targeting a 5 megawatt capacity of flexible, on-demand power by the end of 2026, scaling to 30 MW by 2030.
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