Good News For Solar & Virtual Power Plants In Canada

Recently, we covered Bill McKibben’s new book entitled Here Comes The Sun, in which he enthuses about how solar energy is becoming the primary choice for both commercial and residential customers. “Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind — and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay,” McKibben’s website says.

“From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy — California — nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves—it’s available to all.”

For those of you old enough to remember the New Age movement, one of its more memorable mantras was: “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Today we could say the same about solar power. Sunlight is free and it’s everywhere, so why not use it? That seems to make much more sense than extracting fossil fuels, sending them halfway around the world to be processed, then distributing them to customers who burn them to make heat or electricity while leaving a pall of pollution in their wake, doesn’t it?

Pakistan has been adding enormous amounts of solar energy — enough to suggest its conventional electrical grid may no longer be needed by some of its people. Much the same can be said for Africa. A decade ago, it leapfrogged over old fashioned telephone networks and went directly to digital communications. The rise of solar suggests something similar could happen to conventional utility models as well.

A Small Step For Solar & VPPs In Canada

A story from the CBC in Canada shows that is happening in one Canadian community — Blatchford, a residential community north of Edmonton in Alberta where 20 homes with solar panels on their roofs and storage batteries are now networked together to become a virtual power plant or VPP. Eventually, the network will include 100 new high-efficiency homes that combined will be able to store 2 megawatt-hours of electricity.

CleanTechnica readers will be quick to notice that Edmonton is not exactly known as an ideal place for solar — it’s too far north, it’s too cold, it gets too much snow — and yet it works. There may be a lesson there.

Proponents of virtual power plants told CBC that VPPs make it possible to add more wind and solar to the grid by filling the gaps when it’s not windy or sunny. They also help stabilize the grid by matching electricity supply with demand and reduce or defer the need to spend money on building physical power plants and other electricity infrastructure. That means lower costs for utility companies and ratepayers.

The residential batteries for the VPP in Blatchford are supplied by Germany’s Sonnen, which also makes the software for the project. The battery is controlled by local utilities EPCOR and Solartility, who are also partners in the project.

Geoff Ferrell, senior vice president of virtual power plants at Sonnen, said either utility can draw from the batteries of the VPP if they need to stabilize the local grid or when the price of electricity is high. Homeowners can monitor what is happening but cannot control it. In some VPPs, such as those that use Tesla batteries, participants can decide how much of the electricity stored in their batteries can be shared with the network or even decline to participate at any time.

Brent Harris, vice chair of Decentralised Energy Canada, an industry group dedicated to the development of distributed energy technology, told CBC, “People are adopting electric vehicles. People are switching from gas to electricity and heat pumps at the same time as you’re seeing all these data centers coming on.” Reports from the International Energy Agency and the Canadian Climate Institute claim Canada will need to double or triple its electrical grid capacity by 2050 to reach its net-zero emissions goal. Doing so will require costly upgrades to the entire grid, from transformers and substations to distribution lines.

The beauty of virtual power plants is that they can reduce the need to build all those expensive new infrastructure pieces. New power plants are expensive, new substations are expensive, and new transmission lines are really expensive.

Sonnen’s Ferrell said his company’s first Canadian project is just a demonstration, but he hopes it will pave the way for bigger ones. In the United States, one of Sonnen’s partners, Rocky Mountain Power, now has a virtual power plant that links together 8,000 batteries that can store up to 114 MWh and can supply 39 MW to the grid.

Huge VPP Goes Live In California

That is still tiny. On July 29, 2025, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E tapped 100,000 residential storage batteries installed by Tesla and Sunrun to form an enormous VPP that supplied about 535 megawatts of electricity to the grid — enough to supply the electrical needs of hundreds of thousands of homes during peak demand.

In a blog post, PG&E said, “This wasn’t a blackout. It wasn’t an emergency. It was a test. But it was the largest test of its kind ever done in California — and maybe the world.” Maybe or maybe not. Australia has some pretty big VPP installations of its own, but that is beside the point. What is important is the test gave the lie to the “solar power is not reliable” psychobabble so popular with ultra-right-wing fossil fuel supporters.

So far in Canada, a hurdle to larger VPP projects is varying regulations among provinces, which are designed to allow large generators to sell to the grid — not promote small, distributed energy sources. Alberta has started to allow “micro” generators — which could mean just individual homes with solar panels — to sell power to the grid through aggregators like Solartility. CBC reports there is also interest in this technology in British Columbia, Ontario and, Nova Scotia.

In Blatchford, Rebecca Calder told CBC she is really happy with her system and would “definitely recommend” something similar to other families. “The big thing for me is we produce power, we use our own power, we save our power and we give back power. That is fantastic.” In the days and years to come, more and more people will find out just how fantastic it is to generate, store, and share their own power.