Fair competition benefits consumers by fostering innovation, efficiency, lower prices, and better services. This is evident across various markets. However, due to historical reasons and their immense political influence, monopoly utilities have been able to evade fair competition. Our energy system and consumers are suffering as a result, and with electricity bills rising nationwide, we simply cannot continue with the status quo. Without competition, the promise of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) could face the same fate.

Just as they have done in areas like EV charging, energy efficiency, community solar, and rooftop solar, utilities are now attempting to exclude fair competition from the emerging VPP market. Allowing monopoly utilities to own VPPs and their component parts would mean missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a more affordable and resilient energy system.

VPP projects that utilize customer-owned resources have proven that competition is delivering significant results. In Puerto Rico, a third-party-owned VPP project—the Customer Battery Energy Sharing Program—helped keep the island's power service running during times of grid stress. This project exemplifies how VPPs can reduce costs and enhance reliability through competition.

The island's program has scaled rapidly—from under 40 megawatts in 2024 to over 500 megawatts in 2025. More than 80,000 households are now participating. Our organization found that this customer-owned battery program avoided or mitigated at least 10 outage events between June and December of last year.

In California, the Demand Side Grid Support program had over 1,100 megawatts of capacity by the end of last year. The state uses a range of programs to alleviate grid stress caused by heat waves and wildfires. Participants earn credits by providing backup generation during extreme events from May to October, helping to balance energy demand and support the state's grid. This reduces the risk of rotating outages.

The potential of VPPs is enormous. According toresearch by the Brattle Group, deploying VPPs nationwide could save ratepayers up to $35 billion.

Speed is crucial, and so is capacity. As utilities across the country race to meet data center demand and repair aging distribution and transmission infrastructure, VPPs demonstrate that when customers are allowed to bring their own devices in an open-access environment, we can quickly acquire resources without requiring utility capital expenditures and rate-of-return.

Unsurprisingly, from Minnesota and Colorado to Maryland and Virginia, utilities are telling legislators and regulators that they should be allowed to own all the resources that make up VPP projects. However, there is no compelling evidence to support such an expansion of power.

When utilities design customer aggregation programs, they limit customers' choices and independence in managing their own energy production. After all, VPPs consist of distributed energy resources that are typically owned by households and small businesses. If utilities are allowed to own the behind-the-meter resources that form the foundation of VPPs, they will slow the adoption of clean energy. Utilities will prioritize assets they own and control over rapidly expanding rooftop solar and other decentralized energy sources. At a time when we need to bring as much clean energy onto the grid as quickly as possible, we should promote private sector participation, not erect barriers.

That is why Maryland's utility regulatorsrecently rejecteda proposal for utilities to own behind-the-meter storage, instead choosing to foster a robust competitive market of third-party manufacturers and installers. Similarly, in Colorado, Public Service Commission staff and other stakeholders opposedthe proposal for utilities to act as aggregators of distributed energy resources, and due to the opposition, the utility has chosen to make third-party suppliers the sole aggregators in its program.

Unfortunately, regulators in Minnesota have taken adifferent approach. They approved a plan by Xcel that allows it to deploy its own battery systems over the next two years. This decision rejected proposals from stakeholders within the process to allow third-party participation and competition. Regulators also rejected a proposal to establish a VPP program that includes behind-the-meter customer-owned resources. We will wait and see how much clean energy Xcel can actually deploy compared to what customers could achieve on their own with appropriate incentive structures.

Policymakers should wisely reject proposals for utilities to own and aggregate behind-the-meter storage. Effective VPP programs in the United States rely on free market competition, leveraging third-party businesses to aggregate electricity between customers and the utility system.

Utilities exist to serve customers, not the other way around. While it is not in consumers' interest for utilities to own the solar and battery resources that make up VPPs, they do play an important role in coordination. They can help determine where and when storage resources are deployed within their service areas to incentivize siting distributed energy resources where they are most needed. Meanwhile, the private market and utility customers provide the actual resources.

Utilities alone cannot build the future we need. But millions of energy-producing Americans can—if policymakers allow them to.