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.  

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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?