US-headquartered virtual power plant (VPP) platform company Leap has formed a new partnership to enable electric trucks to provide grid services.
Announced this week (10 June), Leap’s has partnered with electric vehicle (EV) truck manufacturer and fleet services provider Xos, to onboard Xos’s charging technology to the VPP platform. The chargers will then be able to access energy markets via the automated platform.
The EV company’s Xos Hub is a mobile charger with integrated battery storage that Xos claims allows customers to upgrade to electric fleets without having to wait for costly and long lead-time grid upgrades.
Xos makes vehicles, including step vans, that delivery and logistics services companies like FedEx and UPS use.
As with many US VPP plays, the initial rollout of the Leap-Xos combination is in California, where the truck chargers can be enrolled into the state’s Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) demand response programme.
During peak or stress events on the grid, enrolled distributed energy resources (DERs) are sent signals to assist as required.
Home battery storage providers such as Sunrun and Tesla have already successfully participated in the DSGS programme by aggregating their customers’ systems into VPPs, particularly during California’s summer peaks.
In the case of the Xos Hub chargers, during DSGS events, the vehicles will switch from charging directly from the grid to charging from the chargers’ integrated batteries, helping reduce strain on the network.
By supporting the grid through emergencies, fleet owners and operators can earn revenues from the programme.
“Our VPP offering gives fleet customers advanced energy capabilities without compromising control or convenience,” Xos CEO Dakota Semler said.
In May, Leap partnered with ChargeScape, an EV-charging venture founded and co-owned by BMW, Ford and Honda in September last year, with Nissan joining shortly after as an equal partner. The Leap software-only platform would enable automotive brands including ChargeScape’s owners and others to access grid services market.
While the ChargeScape-Leap collaboration was, like the software company’s partnership with Xos, initially also based in California, this time in the wholesale energy market, Leap and ChargeScape said the two companies’ ambition was to continue expanding to create the biggest virtual power plant (VPP) in the US.
Leap’s tech that enables this VPP aggregation is a universal API suite that the company claims enables seamless onboarding of equipment without hardware upgrades and equally simple software updates to access new energy and power market opportunities as grid operators and utilities roll out programmes.
