Frontier Forum: How VPPs earn grid-scale trust [partner content]

March 10, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the middle of back-to-back winter storms that pushed Duke Energy’s system to record-breaking peaks, Stacey Phillips’ team was doing something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: calling almost all of their winter programs at once. While 18,000 line crew members from 27 states mobilized to restore power, Phillips mobilized something else entirely—tens of thousands of connected devices designed to keep outages from happening in the first place. “During those two weekends, we called almost all of our winter programs,” she says. That included load control switches, smart thermostats, batteries, and water heaters, coordinated into a distributed fleet that Duke could call on when the system was tight. For Seth Frader-Thompson, president of Energy Hub, the moment felt different. “We’ve been running events like crazy—180 megawatts of flexible capacity deployed, about 120 megawatts from a traditional thermostat program, layering in batteries.” The conversation, recorded live as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum, explored how virtual power plants are evolving from a resource you were glad existed but didn’t really want to use into something operators are now dispatching on Saturday nights without a phone call.

The trust problem and the HUELES test

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What you'll learn

1 (00:34) **Duke Energy's Winter VPP Mobilization** - Stacey Phillips describes how Duke called on nearly all its winter programs during back-to-back cold snaps, deploying 180 MW of flexible capacity from thermostats, batteries, and water heaters.
2 (03:09) **Why This Moment Feels Different for VPPs** - Aaron Powell and Seth discuss how widespread IoT adoption (thermostats, batteries, EVs) has created a new opportunity for customer participation.
3 (05:32) **The Reliability of Modern VPPs** - Seth explains that scale and statistical forecasting make VPPs highly reliable, even with individual customer opt-outs.
4 (07:05) **Repeatability and the Battery Adoption Case Study** - Stacey emphasizes that a resource must be both repeatable and desirable to customers to be integrated into the portfolio.
5 (09:49) **VPPs in the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)** - Stacey explains how Duke's 2 GW of VPP capacity is already embedded in its IRP, with planners using customer resources to "shrink the challenge" before planning central generation.
6 (13:03) **Traditional DR vs. Modern VPP** - Seth distinguishes modern VPPs by two-way data, real-time telemetry, and scale (50+ MW threshold for operator interest).
7 (16:08) **The HUELES Test: Can You Fool the Operator?** - Seth introduces the HUELES test, a framework for making VPPs indistinguishable from traditional power plants to build operator trust.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Can a grid operator tell the difference between a virtual power plant and a traditional one?

That’s the idea behind the Huels Test, a framework developed by EnergyHub to answer a simple but consequential question: when does a distributed fleet of customer devices become reliable enough to function like a power plant?

Passing the test means more than just aggregating thermostats or batteries. It means delivering predictable, repeatable performance that utility planners and operators trust enough to rely on during system peaks. And it’s no longer theoretical.

During a series of brutal winter cold snaps across the Southeast this year, Duke Energy leaned on tens of thousands of connected devices — smart thermostats, batteries, and water heaters — to help manage record-breaking winter peaks. Together, they formed a virtual power plant that the utility could dispatch when the grid was tight.

In this Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey talks with Stacy Phillips, Managing Director of Customer Load Management at Duke Energy, and Seth Frader-Thompson, president and co-founder of EnergyHub, about the spectrum of virtual power plants.

They discuss how VPPs are evolving from traditional demand-response programs into operational grid resources, and what still needs to change before utilities treat them exactly like conventional power plants.

This conversation was recorded live as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum with EnergyHub. Watch the full video here.

EnergyHub works with more than 160 utilities across North America to build and scale virtual power plants using its Edge DERMS platform. Read EnergyHub's white paper outlining the VPP maturity model and discover what VPPs can do for your grid.