What is a Virtual Power Plant?

A Virtual Power Plant sounds abstract, but the idea is simple: instead of building one big new power station, we link together thousands of small devices that are already in people's homes and operate them as though they were one. The grid gets flexibility. Households get paid for it.

What's in a VPP

• Home batteries that can charge and discharge on command.
• Heat pumps that can pre-heat the house by a degree or two when electricity is cheap and coast through peak.
• EVs that can shift charging sessions to the cheapest, cleanest hours of the night.
• Smart hot water systems that run the immersion in the overnight trough.
• (Later) solar + battery homes with excess generation to place.

Individually these devices are small. Collectively, 10,000 Irish homes with batteries and heat pumps represent roughly 100 MW of dispatchable flexibility — about the size of a mid-range gas peaker, and a whole lot cheaper and cleaner to run.

How a household actually gets paid

Three overlapping streams, stacked:

• Load shifting. Moving your own consumption from peak to off-peak captures the price spread directly on your bill. Bigger when the spread is bigger (i.e. in Ireland).
• Export rewards. When your battery or solar exports to the grid, you earn the Clean Export Guarantee rate, plus whatever wholesale premium the VPP captures at that moment.
• Grid services. System operators (EirGrid here) pay for very fast response — frequency and reserve services — that VPPs are genuinely good at delivering, because we can dispatch thousands of devices in under a second.

Why now

Three things lined up:

• The devices are finally in the houses. Battery adoption has tripled in Ireland since 2022. EV sales are accelerating. Heat pumps are mainstream new-build and rising fast on retrofit.
• The APIs are open. Tesla, Huawei, SolarEdge, Daikin, Mitsubishi — you can now control them via software without touching a screwdriver.
• The market signals are sharpening. Dynamic pricing turns hourly price swings into cash flows; ETS2 raises the cost of doing nothing.

Driving Green is building this for Ireland specifically — starting with smart charging, expanding across batteries, heat pumps and smart hot water. See the enrolment page or take the Energy Score to see what you'd save.