US residential solar and energy storage installer Sunrun, energy management platform Renew Home, and Tesla have announced an agreement to deliver more than 16GW of flexible energy capacity to US hyperscalers and utilities.

The New Orleans, Louisiana, US City Council voted unanimously to approve a US$28 million virtual power plant (VPP) programme, reportedly, the first distributed energy resource (DER) programme in the city.

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are networks of small-scale, distributed energy resources, such as solar panels or batteries (and in some instances vehicles) which can together function as a single power plant, providing stability to the electric grid.

Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) is set to launch a demonstration of how solar panels, energy storage and customer-sited demand side response (DSR) can be used to drive down costs of the IESO’s network.