Since opening its doors back in 2009, the team at Providence-based VCharge has been hard at work evolving the electric grid to support a renewable energy future.
“We view transactive load – electric load coupled to energy storage that senses and responds to grid and market conditions – as critical to realizing this vision and making the grid more resilient,” said Bob Chatham, vice president of marketing and sales. “It’s critical because it can keep the grid balanced.”
Transactive loads can be turned off when the grid is overwhelmed and there is more demand for energy than generation can meet, and turned on and used as storage when there is more generation than demand.
With renewable energy, where resources are often intermittent and unpredictable, transactive loads smooth out the fluctuations, incorporating these resources into the grid more easily. VCharge adds its hardware and software controls to thermal storage heating systems and similar loads to turn them into transactive loads.
“We turn them off when there is excess demand and turn them on when there is excess generation,” Chatham said. “Because these heating systems can store heat – a ‘heat battery’ in a sense – VCharge can provide these grid-balancing services to grid operators and provide reliable comfort to customers. By aggregating individual residential heating [and cooling] systems, VCharge creates clusters large enough to be meaningful to grid operators.”
Going beyond residential customers, the company’s ultimate goal is to attract grid operators for its balancing services.
“VCharge eases the transition to a renewables future with products that don’t require consumers to change their behavior or sacrifice comfort, on financial terms that make them easy to adopt,” Chatham said. “That is very innovative in an industry that usually focuses on changing consumer behavior to reshape demand.”
If you want to know how deep the passion runs within the team at VCharge, look no further than Jessica Millar, the company’s co-founder and chief technical officer, who sees the company’s role as part of a bigger picture.
“What happened over the last couple hundred years [with overconsumption] and will continue to happen for the next couple of hundred years represents a pivot point for our species,” Millar said. “To me, it feels kind of out of control and I don’t know if the human race will survive or not,” without thoughtful, strategic resource management, she said. I think humans have the potential for great beauty, compassion and intelligence.”
Millar said she started VCharge because she saw the potential “of a resilient, scalable, distributed, adaptive, market-based grid control architecture.”
A mouthful, she admits, but a truth she believes in wholeheartedly.
“We want a sustainable future,” Millar said. “Most practical versions of such a future involve good, clean renewable electricity driving our energy ecosystem. And that means technology like ours is a prerequisite.”
