Rapidly-globalising energy storage company Sonnen has teamed up with utility Rocky Mountain Power to take its virtual power plant concept to the US state of Utah.

Real estate company Wasatch Group, Sonnen and Rocky Mountain Power announced today that Soleil Lofts, an apartment complex of 600 homes in Herriman, Utah, will be equipped with 5MW of solar PV and a total of 12.6MWh of battery energy storage, aggregated together from individual units in each apartment.

It has been billed as the US’ largest virtual power plant project so far, although Green Charge (now known as ENGIE Storage since its takeover by the European utility group ENGIE) has been working on a project in Brooklyn-Queens, New York, to mitigate peak demand on the grid using distributed storage that was originally touted to reach 13MWh when completed.

When it is completed by the end of December 2020, with residents set to start moving in this September, Sonnen’s Utah project is claimed to be the “largest fully installed and operational residential battery demand response solution in the United States”. Either way, both projects are certainly among the biggest that arguably can be termed VPPs announced so far, but if the concept proves successful, it’s possible much larger VPPs will be seen in the US too - Tesla’s South Australia VPP is mooted to aggregate together as many as 50,000 individual residential units over the four years that project is expected to last.

The Utah homes will be fitted with Sonnen’s Ecolinx energy storage units, which are available in 10kWh to 20kWh usable capacity sizes, in 2kWh incremental steps, with 8,000W (AC) continuous output.