Dive Brief:
California’s nation-leading virtual power plant program faces an uncertain fate after this year. The biennial budget revision released by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month zeroes out funding for the Demand Side Grid Support program in 2027.
Newsom has proposed shifting customers enrolled as of this summer in the DSGS program to the Emergency Load Reduction Program, or ELRP, a separate state program designed to mitigate periods of acute stress on the grid. The move came after the state legislature zeroed out funding for DSGS last summer amid projections of a severe budget shortfall.
Clean energy nonprofits, distributed energy providers and demand response aggregators have been pushing Newsom to rethink the plan. More than a dozen signed on to a March 25 letter that called the proposal “detrimental to the state’s energy reliability” and said “attempting to re-create the same type of program at another agency” would expend public resources and cause delays with no guarantee of success.
Dive Insight:
