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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

What? It's the opposite of literally all these things.

Yeah I think that’s why GP is saying it’s a poor choice of name.

But if the industry is the one naming it, why are they going against their own "preconceptions?"

I feel like GGP is the one with the preconception about the name "power plant," while the industry (as shown here) is starting to use it to be this broader term encompassing distributed generation and price-influenced demand, etc etc.

As an industry, the term "power plant" is something that generates power (electric energy). However, much of the DER opportunity is not generation, but load. Which is why the term "Virtual Power Plant" is a misnomer and predisposes people to only be thinking about the generation side of the supply/demand equation.

Right, but it's precisely that shift that the term is supposed to induce. From a fungible energy perspective, there really isn't that much difference between increasing the supply by an additional MW and decreasing the demand by an additional MW. Moreover, that additional MW that's now in the grid is the greenest possible energy, provided without producing a single atom of CO2.

When people thinking about generation they think about something different than reducing demand, but it's critical to start seeing that those can be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

But "PP"s, that is, normal power plants that aren't compromised of DERs, are not going to partake in this shift of the term from meaning "generation" to meaning "generation or load shedding". So you end up with "power plants" that everyone understands are suppliers of power and "virtual power plants" that are, confusingly, a mix of demand reduction and maybe some supply.

So I agree that the VPP terminology leaves a lot to be desired. I prefer the more generic "DER" terminology, because it is more descriptive; either a generator or a load is an "energy resource", and "distributed" is a good description of what is unique about these particular energy resources.

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