This report communicates key findings from the Richmond Advanced Energy Community Project, led by the Zero Net Energy Alliance with MCE, a community choice aggregation that serves four counties in Northern California, as part of the California Energy Commission’s Advanced Energy Community grant. The California Energy Commission has identified adoption of advanced energy solutions as a promising pathway for enhancing grid reliability and resilience while lowering overall carbon intensity; however, barriers to adoption persist. This project addresses these barriers by creating a scalable, community-focused virtual power plant, operated by MCE, functioning as a demand response provider, along with a robust distributed energy resource deployment program focusing on rehabilitated affordable housing in the disadvantaged community of Richmond, California. The project demonstrated that: 1) community choice aggregations can function as demand response providers to generate value and realize cost savings through active load shaping and market integration; 2) community choice aggregations can optimize the value of virtual power plants using purpose-built, enterprise-level distributed energy resource management systems to which they retain perpetual licenses; and 3) a diverse range of customers would participate in programs to install distributed energy resources and grant community choice aggregations the ability to orchestrate those assets through a virtual power plant in return for turnkey project installation and a value-sharing tariff. Learnings from this project included effective use of pay-forperformance compensation models, the benefits of open-source code stacks, and the need for turnkey distributed energy resource program management frameworks that integrate distributed energy resource selection optimization, customer relationship management, financing, and virtual power plant integration. These learnings will inform MCE’s follow-on California Energy Commission grant, Virtual Power Plant Approaches for Demand Flexibility, which will scale the Richmond Virtual Power Plant to cover MCE’s entire service territory, thereby reinforcing and expanding the positive results demonstrated in this project.
