How a Colorado utility plans to generate 30 megawatts by 2030

A decade ago, Zach Borton had a lightbulb moment when studying energy economics at Ohio State University: the grid was trending toward decentralization. That realization set him on a path that would eventually lead him to Colorado, where he now serves as DER services manager at Platte River Power Authority.

Platte River's 2024 integrated resource plan includes an ambitious goal: 30 megawatts of virtual power plant capacity by 2030. But building a VPP across multiple utility territories isn't just about technology -- it's about coordination, customer engagement, and breaking down organizational silos.

This week on With Great Power, Zach explains the technical architecture behind Platte River's VPP strategy, which relies on two interconnected systems: grid derms and edge derms. He also discusses the challenges of aligning five different organizations, the importance of seamless customer enrollment, and why he believes curiosity-driven leadership is his superpower in the energy transition.

With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.  

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.

Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.

TRANSCRIPT:

Brad Langley: Back in the early 2010s, apps skyrocketed in popularity. Apple had just launched its famous "There's an app for that" commercial, and within a few years, more than a million apps were available for download in the app store.

Commercial clips: Ever wish you could really read people's emotions? Well, now there's an app for that. Don't have a great voice or any real musical talent? Well, there's an app for that too. You want to get the potholes filled? Well, there's an app for that. There's an app for that...

Brad Langley: Zach Borton's family was right there with the rest of America, feverishly downloading apps to manage finances or track the weather or achieve personal fitness goals.

Zach Borton: Fitbits were becoming popular and my mom and dad would all compete against different steps, and we wanted to bring that kind of competitive element to the energy space.

Brad Langley: At the time, Zach was studying business and sustainability at The Ohio State University.

Zach Borton: Most of my classmates were going down the road of corporate social responsibility, sustainability reporting, but I took an energy economics course and that kind of shifted my path.

Brad Langley: As part of that course, Zach was presented with some graphics of the power system. One showed the traditional energy value chain with big centralized generation. Another showed the declining cost of rooftop solar and an upward trend for installations.

Zach Borton: I realized at that moment we're going from this horse and buggy to car event. Every few generations will have that shift, and I wanted to be a part of that shift.

Brad Langley: After graduation, Zach and two friends decided to launch their own energy-focused app, the idea was to show people the impact of their environmentally focused investments.

Zach Borton: What we were trying to build is a visualization tool to track environmental metrics such as carbon saved or trees planted, and also kind of that competitive nature of seeing what your friends were investing, what types of projects they were investing in, and then competing with your friends or tracking that with your friends to drive that competitiveness.

Brad Langley: Unfortunately, for Zach and his friends, their app didn't make millions, but it did motivate Zach to keep working on some of the big complex problems unfolding in the power sector. So he took a job at American Municipal Power in Columbus, Ohio.

Zach Borton: I was a power supply engineer. There was learning kind of the nuts and bolts on how to serve a community with generation, really how to stack those assets for energy, capacity, and transmission. But really despite everything I was learning, I kept going back to those two graphics from that energy economics course.

Brad Langley: He just couldn't get one question out of his head. How would the legacy power system interact with all these new DERs? And he wasn't the only one thinking about it.

Zach Borton: There was utility of the future white paper coming out of MIT, and so we were really going through that and understanding rather than a centralized approach from these large generators, how can we hedge against energy, capacity, and transmission from within the load?

Brad Langley: Once Zach locked into this problem, he just couldn't let it go. So he headed west to Colorado where he now works at a public power utility helping build a virtual power plant.

Zach Borton: My job is to take distributed energy resources and make use of them as we transition to a non-carbon grid.

Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid, today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough, and while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer centric. This week I'm talking to Zach Borton, the DER service manager at Platte River Power Authority, a public power utility that serves the communities of Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont, and Loveland in Colorado. Platte River provides wholesale electricity generation and transmission for its member communities, each of which has its own local electric utility. So a major part of Zach's job is figuring out how to build a VPP across all of those different utilities.

Zach Borton: So each have their own technology suite, which makes integrations maybe a little bit more difficult. So we're all at different paths in this integration and technology suite, but getting there is going to require more collaboration and breaking down those silos.

Brad Langley: I wanted to dive into the mechanics of building this kind of VPP, but first I asked Zach how the initiative came about and how Platte River planned to break down those utility silos. So let's dig into your work at Platte River. Platte River's 2024 Integrated resource plan includes 32 megawatts of VPP by 2030, which is a significant amount. Tell us about that project. How did the initiative come about?

Zach Borton: Yeah, so it can all kind of go back to the 2018 resource diversification policy. In that policy, there's a few things that line out how we can get to a non-carbon future, but it really suggests better integration and coordination across the systems from the generation transmission system down to the distribution. So senior managers, utility directors, and a few different public engagement sessions really sparked this vision and guiding principles for a DER strategy. Next came kind of a gap analysis, so we tried to understand what systems we have today and what we need, and so this really showed us where we need to go with how to make this technology work. Finally, we got to that potential study, which you saw in the 2024 IRP. This showed us kind of the market size and the potential and really gives us a goal to hit. It tells us what types of programs we should run and where we should head into that 2030 mark that you said, 30 megawatts.

Brad Langley: And what is your role as DER services manager on the project? What are you specifically tasked with?

Zach Borton: It's really trying to coordinate and develop these programs with our owner communities. We can think about our strategy in two different approaches. It's really that best thinking available today, which you can see in the SEPA article Decoding DERMS. It's going to require two different systems, and that's the grid DERMS and the edge DERMS. But really I want to circle back to VPP isn't just a piece of software, it's a utility strategy. It's a system level approach that brings together people, technology and data to orchestrate this cleaner and more flexible grid.

Brad Langley: So we've established there's two main components to this. There's the grid DERMS and there's the edge DERMS. Talk me through specifically what the grid DERMS is doing as well as what the edge DERMS is doing.

Zach Borton: Absolutely, yeah. So we can think about the grid DERMS as the brain of the future utility operation. It's going to hold our network model. It's going to monitor the state of the distribution in real time, say watching for those stress points and identifying where flexibility could be made available. Some of this technology is in place today, but a lot of this needs to be developed over the next several years, whereas the edge DERMS manages the customer side. It's going to help us enroll devices into the programs, optimize them, and then deliver those optimized energy shapes, load shapes or blocks into the grid DERMS as kind of like, here's a block at this hour. Here's the shape that you can use here for this stress point, and together these two systems kind of coordinate those individual devices into actionable blocks.

Brad Langley: Can you go into more detail in terms of what those components are? I assume it's a mix of hardware and software, but any specific technologies you're able to call out.

Zach Borton: When we think about our owner communities, they're kind of laying the foundation for the grid DERMS for that distribution system awareness, whether that's smart metering, switching, things like that. We need to build out that process with our owner communities to bring in those data points and make that distribution grid a little bit more intelligent. We can think about the future of advanced distribution management. When we think about the edge DERMS, there's a lot of processes and people involvement: enrolling customers and engaging with those customers. Obviously there's a lot of software optimization on the backend, but that's where we lean on our partners.

Brad Langley: So two distinct yet connected systems for owner communities. What kind of challenges are you either experiencing or do you foresee in making this program a reality?

Zach Borton: There's quite a bit of challenges. I'd say one of our biggest challenges is aligning across the five organizations. It's sometimes hard enough to break down the department silos, but then breaking down the five organization department silos is really complicated. So everyone might agree on this goal of a functional customer friendly VPP, but getting there in sync is the hard part, which kind of brings us to the next challenge, which is a unified vision and consistency. Like I said, we have incredibly talented people working on this from all sides, but aligning on a common path with consistency is critical. We may ask, why is that so important? Well, we risk confusing the customer if we're changing things as we go or sending mixed messages. So we need to really build that trust and participation with our customers and our own communities. That brings us kind of to the third point, which is the customer patience and experience.

We're building something new and with that comes unavoidable, really growing pains. So making the enrollment and engagement process as smooth as possible in that first year is going to be so important for us to scale to that 2030, 30-megawatt goal. And that's the last piece is that OEM maturity and industry coordination. Like OEMs are learning how to build and design for flexibility, but it's a learning curve and everyone's taken their unique approach. Whereas the utilities, I can call up a utility that has a similar goal to us and they'll share the lessons learned where I feel like some of the OEMs aren't sharing those lessons learned with each other.

Brad Langley: It's an interesting point. We're big believers in partnerships in this space. I think partnerships are super important. Are you encouraging the OEMs to talk to each other? Because it's tricky, they might be competitive, but they're implementing similar programs, so lessons shared can be important. How do you navigate that? Are you finding openness for OEMs to be more collaborative or is it kind of a walled garden so to speak?

Zach Borton: It seems like a walled garden, but I would like for all of us utilities to try to break that down and share like, Hey, we're trying to get to this non-carbon future and open up all of these opportunities for flexibility. And so I think if a lot of us will say that to the OEMs, maybe they'll start listening. So I think if we can band together and really get the OEMs to listen, we can get to this non-carbon flexibility future.

Brad Langley: You mentioned you'll start enrolling customers early next year. Does that mean the project is complete? What are some of those stages or milestones that kind of happen before or after that? Maybe give us the one to two year look into the various stages of the program following customer enrollment?

Zach Borton: Yeah, so I mentioned the two types of DERMS and there's kind of different working paths for each of those, but I'll kind of talk about the edge DERMS really enrolling customers there early next year. So I think we're breaking this strategy out into three different years. First year we really want to boost up the enrollment and awareness of these programs. So enrolling customers, boosting up satisfaction and increasing that program awareness. It's going to take many actions to get there, like streamlining that DER onboarding process and establishing incentive structures and engagement methods with our customer base. That's going to be critical for scaling the VPP all testing in that first year dispatches with a small number of megawatts and devices. In that next year, we're really going to be looking for analytics and post-event insight, so leveraging event data to better understand how we're forecasting and modeling DR.

So we're going to lay out the infrastructure needed to capture dispatch data and analyze that across the systems, whether it's on the distribution or the generation transmission system. And then that third year is going to be building out scale. To get to that 2030 goal in the third year, we're really going to be trying to grow those legs and pick up our speed, and it's all going to be about scalability of the dispatch and optimization. I think this is where the edge DERMS becomes integrated with the grid DERMS. So as the grid DERMS is getting intelligent and connecting to all of those devices in the field, we'll build out that integration to kind of build this full VPP fully integrated using those historical insights. And really in that year, we start to see the real time grid data and the integrations.

Brad Langley: How did the customers react to the VPP announcement? Are they excited about the prospect of integrating this type of technology? What was their overall sentiment towards the program when it was announced?

Zach Borton: Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of excitement around this. When we think about our customer base, they love technology. We have a lot of EVs in our service territory. We have a lot of solar. We're starting to see that solar being paired with storage. So I think there's a lot of interest in helping us get to that non-carbon goal. And it's really the foundation we've built over the past 50 years, our community ownership, our collaborative mindset, and a long-term vision. We're not just building it alone, we're building it with our members, our partners, and every customer who chooses to be part of the solution. And it's really great to see a lot of those customers show up to the stakeholder meetings and suggest really great ideas to get to this VPP.

Brad Langley: How many customers are you initially targeting and what's the scale of that look like over time?

Zach Borton: Yeah, so the first few years, our big focus is on seamless integration, enrollment and engagement with those customers. We're going to most likely start within three different program groups, so EVs, batteries and thermostats and expand offerings from there. We hope to have roughly one megawatt in that first year, but again, I want to focus mostly on building out the seamless enrollment process and engagement. We can't build that 30 megawatts by 2030 without the customers and the devices, so having that poor engagement or poor enrollment process isn't going to help us scale. So we really need to build out the processes we have and kind of scale up to that 30 megawatt number by 2030.

Brad Langley: Well, hey, we call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote. With great power comes great responsibility. So Zach, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?

Zach Borton: That's a really great question. I would say that curiosity-driven leadership. I'm highly adaptable and I have this ability to connect with all types of people, meet them where they're at, and build that real trust through kind of empathy, curiosity. I find common ground and help bring out the best in others, whether it's a technical person, strategic customer focus, I know how to relate and inspire those folks and share a sense of purpose. The ability to connect with folks is key when bringing together a diverse team with the single vision that we have.

Brad Langley: And I'd add a great sense of fashion. I know our listeners can't see it, but I love the VPP hat you're rocking. It's right on point. So nicely done with that. Well, Zach, thank you so much for coming on the show and we wish you the best of luck with the program.

Zach Borton: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you having me, Brad.

Brad Langley: Zach Borton is the DER service manager at Platte River Power Authority. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid. 

Our production team includes Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O'Connor. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Steven Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley.

If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us on Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, we thank you for listening. I'm Brad Langley.