A version of this story was published in the Latitude Weekly newsletter on October 16, 2026. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus a round-up of our reporting — in your inbox every Friday.
At Latitude Media’s inaugural Flex Summit, the Dallas Cowboys came up more than you might suspect. The analogy was first made by David Visneau, NRG’s head of demand response and VPPs, referencing the importance of making sure distributed capacity delivery matches the forecast.
“I’m a long-suffering Dallas Cowboys fan,” he told the audience gathered in Austin. “We go into every season with really high forecasted hopes, and then our delivery underperforms, I feel like every season.”
Others put their own spin on the original, using it not just to describe a single delivery, but the state of the market more broadly. One such: If the Super Bowl is the use of distributed energy as a true grid resource, the industry is finally on its way, and just needs to avoid fumbling the ball. My favorite: VPPs are more like the New York Knicks, underdogs for decades before the moment is finally right.
Those hopeful spins, of course, are because of load growth. To meet the demand of hyperscalers and other large loads, the need for flexible resources that can be deployed quickly has never been higher. There’s also a real affordability pitch: The original reason behind VPPs was to defer capital investments for the grid, and in a moment where rate increases are angering an increasingly revved up public, saving ratepayers money is still a key part of their appeal.
As Latitude Media executive editor Stephen Lacey put it, “DERs and other advanced grid technologies are being evaluated as power plant-grade resources” — by utilities, policymakers, and by the hyperscalers themselves. And from Tim Hade, an SVP at Voltus and long-time VPP evangelist: “For the first time, people are actually buying what we are selling.”
But that maturation isn’t happening everywhere. On the path to the proverbial VPP championship, barriers remain:
- Most significantly, there’s a scale problem. There’s a gap between how much capacity distributed resources can currently deliver, and how much capacity large loads are looking for: As aggregators celebrate deployments in the hundreds of megawatts, data centers are looking for multiple gigawatts of capacity — and it’s not clear whether the industry has the labor or business models to get up to that scale quickly.
- There’s also an investment mismatch. The total spending to build out VPP programs in the U.S., while far greater than was being invested even a few years ago, is still just a rounding error in the trillion-dollar spending spree on the grid.
- There’s also a gap between how much utilities are comfortable with relying on DERs for firm capacity, and what VPP providers say they can deliver. And that caution extends to regulators, who are moving “frustratingly slowly” as they consider whether behind-the-meter capacity can be counted as firm, according to Sunrun president and chief revenue officer Paul Dickson.
- The industry still doesn’t have accessible data on how much of the grid we actually utilize, though just this week that’s beginning to change; yesterday, Dominion Energy filed one of the country’s first grid utilization metrics proposals, as required by Virginia’s new law.
- The market is hugely fragmented, so while there are some major proof points at scale — including a record 745-MW flex event last week in California by Tesla and Sunrun — the fact that each region and even each locality treats them so differently means that many utilities still don’t see DERs as a planning-grade resource.
Ultimately, though, my biggest takeaway is that people are really, truly optimistic. No one wants to be disappointed by yet another year missing the Super Bowl, but the sentiment in the room was that market momentum from load growth is more powerful than all the inertia that held things up in the past.
And the industry is ready to work. In conversations onstage across the two-day event, speakers went deep into the weeds of how distributed capacity is actually being deployed, from the live debate over how much flexibility data centers are willing to embrace, to the quirks of operating in a regulated versus unregulated market.
We have a lot more coverage coming down the pike next week, including the drop of our live Open Circuit episode on Tuesday. It features Jen Downing, who authored the Department of Energy’s 2023 “liftoff report” on VPPs, and Todd Conner, senior VP of distribution at Xcel Energy. It’s a good one; reporter Maeve Allsup previewed some of the discussion on the site this morning.
On a slightly different note: It’s our birthday!
Three years ago today, Latitude Media went live for the first time, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. We were focused back then on the frontier technologies that could close the emissions gap that remained even as utility-scale solar, wind, and batteries surged globally. But what we couldn’t have anticipated was that the rise of artificial intelligence, in combination with electrification and onshoring, would prompt electricity demand to soar so much that it would change everything about the market we cover.
In the wake of Flex Summit, I revisited an opinion piece that Jigar Shah, then-director of DOE’s Loan Programs Office, now co-host of Open Circuit, published that first week. “It’s time for electricity providers to choose virtual power plants,” he wrote, referencing the publication of the office’s VPP lift-off report. (It has since been taken down, but you can find a 2025 update to the report archived here.)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The market has evolved so thoroughly since then but so many of the same barriers remain. Shah highlighted the need for changes in how utilities plan, manage, and measure grid performance in that original piece, which are all things that we were still talking about this week in Austin, even though the market has new momentum that we couldn’t have imagined back then.
To all of our readers, those who have been along for the ride since October 16, 2023, and those who are reading The Latitude Weekly for the first time today: thank you. We have grown so much since we launched, and it would be impossible without your reading, listening, and coming to our events, both virtual and in-person. There’s much more to come.
