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Policy Principles

The Flex Coalition provides real-world input to educate policymakers on strategies to enable and advance deployment of Virtual Power Plants (“VPPs”) that deliver demand flexibility, including energy efficiency, demand response, load-shifting, and energy storage. Demand flexibility is critical to enabling the decarbonization transition and increased reliance on renewable energy, while maintaining grid reliability and resilience, and supporting energy affordability and equity.

1. We support inclusion of demand flexibility as a resource in competitive energy and capacity procurement models that fully value the unique attributes of these resources, including value to the electricity system, the environment, and society.

2. We support market-based solutions, market-based price signals, and customer choice, and believe risk should be managed by markets.

3. We support pairing demand response and energy efficiency to ensure the maximum benefit to consumers and the grid.

4. We support secure, reliable, and simple access to customer utility data, and portability for customer-approved third-party energy service providers, to enable data-driven and performance-measured demand flexibility solutions.

5. We support access to privacy-protected non-participant data to enable comparison groups for measurement, determination of eligibility, and customer segmentation.

6. We support standardized open-source measurement & verification (“M&V”) methods that provide market certainty and transparency, and enable markets to pay for the time and locational value of demand flexibility resources.

7. We believe governments, regulators, and load serving entities should prioritize demand flexibility as a “preferred resource” ahead of other supply-side resources, as these resources enable a carbon-neutral economy, support the grid, and help customers mitigate the cost of energy.