Hardware Podcasts

Frontier Forum: How VPPs earn grid-scale trust [partner content]

Catalyst · 10 Mar 2026 · 35m

What this episode covers

Stacy Phillips, Managing Director of Customer Load Management at Duke Energy, and Seth Frader-Thompson, President and Co-founder of EnergyHub, discuss how virtual power plants (VPPs) have evolved from traditional demand response into trusted grid-scale resources. They detail Duke Energy's deployment of tens of thousands of connected devices—including smart thermostats, batteries, and water heaters—to manage record-breaking winter peaks, highlighting the importance of repeatability and statistical forecasting. The conversation centers on EnergyHub's 'Huels Test' framework and VPP maturity model, which aims to prove that distributed fleets can perform with the reliability and predictability of traditional power plants, thereby earning the trust of utility operators and planners.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Duke Energy, EnergyHub
Also
Huels Test, VPP Maturity Model

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