Platte River Power Authority has decided on an approach to building its 32-megawatt virtual power plant by 2030. The Colorado utility is implementing two distinct yet interconnected distributed energy resource management systems. For Zach Borton, Platte River’s DER services manager, this dual-system strategy represents the “best thinking available today” for orchestrating distributed resources across multiple utility territories.
The approach, outlined in the Smart Electric Power Alliance’s article, “Decoding DERMS” divides functionality between a grid DERMS and an edge DERMS — each serving critical but different roles in the virtual power plant ecosystem.
Two systems, one vision
The new system will serve as the central nervous system for Platte River’s distribution network, holding the network model and monitoring grid conditions in real time.
“We can think about the grid DERMS as the brain of the future utility operation,” Borton explained during a recent interview on the With Great Power podcast. “It’s going to monitor the state of the distribution in real time…watching for those stress points and identifying where flexibility could be made available.”
While some components of this technology exist today, much of the grid DERMS infrastructure will need to be developed over the coming years. Platte River’s owner communities — Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont, and Loveland, in Colorado — are already laying foundational elements through smart metering and switching technologies that will feed critical data into the system.
The edge DERMS, meanwhile, operates on the customer side of the equation, handling device enrollment, optimization, and program management. Unlike the grid DERMS’s focus on system-wide operations, this platform balances technical performance with customer satisfaction, ensuring that, for example, demand response events don’t negatively impact participant comfort or convenience.
The edge DERMS’ primary function is to aggregate individual customer devices and deliver “optimized energy shapes, load shapes or blocks into the grid DERMS.” Essentially, it combines distributed resources — water heaters, EV chargers, and home batteries — into what Borton describes as “actionable blocks” of capacity.” When grid stress occurs, the grid DERMS can dispatch these coordinated blocks of resources to address specific distribution system needs.
“Obviously there’s a lot of software optimization on the backend, but that’s where we lean on our partners,” Borton noted, acknowledging the complex technical requirements while emphasizing the collaborative approach needed for implementation.
Rolling out the VPP
Building two interconnected systems across multiple utility territories presents unique challenges that extend far beyond technical integration. Platte River serves as a wholesale provider to four distinct distribution utilities, each with its own technology infrastructure and operational procedures.
“Each has their own technology suite, which makes integrations maybe a little bit more difficult,” Borton said. “So we’re all at different paths in this integration and technology suite, but getting there is going to require more collaboration and breaking down those silos.”
The coordination challenges multiply across organizational boundaries. “It’s sometimes hard enough to break down the department silos, but then breaking down the five organization department silos is really complicated,” Borton explained. While all participants agree on the goal of a functional, customer-friendly VPP, maintaining alignment and consistency across organizations remains complex.
Platte River plans to roll out its dual DERMS strategy over three distinct phases. The first year focuses on customer enrollment and program awareness, targeting approximately one MW of initial capacity across EVs, batteries, and thermostats. This phase emphasizes building seamless onboarding processes and testing dispatch capabilities with a limited number of devices.
Year two will concentrate on analytics and insights, using dispatch data to improve forecasting and demand response modeling. “We’re going to lay out the infrastructure needed to capture dispatch data and analyze that across the systems, whether it’s on the distribution or the generation transmission system,” Borton said.
Finally, the third year targets scalability and full integration between the two DERMS platforms. “I think this is where the edge DERMS becomes integrated with the grid DERMS,” Borton explained. “So as the grid DERMS is getting intelligent and connecting to all of those devices in the field, we’ll build out that integration to kind of build this full VPP.”
For Borton, the dual DERMS approach represents more than technological implementation.
“VPP isn’t just a piece of software, it’s a utility strategy,” he emphasized. “It’s a system level approach that brings together people, technology and data to orchestrate this cleaner and more flexible grid.”
This strategic view reflects Platte River’s broader commitment to reaching 85% non-carbon generation by 2030 while maintaining grid reliability and customer satisfaction. The utility’s approach of building two complementary systems — rather than attempting to manage all distributed resources through a single platform — acknowledges the complexity of modern grid operations and the need for specialized tools at different levels of the system.
As Platte River prepares to begin customer enrollment next year, its dual DERMS strategy may serve as a model for other utilities grappling with similar integration challenges across multiple service territories and diverse technology platforms.
For the full conversation with Zach Borton, listen to his interview on With Great Power.
This is partner content, brought to you by GridX. It borrows from an interview that appeared on With Great Power, a Latitude Studios partner podcast.
With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.
