Exactly two years ago, an extreme rainfall event struck Valencia, Spain. It was described as Spain’s ‘flood of the century’. Up to 500mm of rain fell in eight hours (close to an average year’s worth of rainfall in the region), killing over 200 people and causing over €29 billion of damage.

Almost exactly two years later, the Valencia region has been hit again. Pego, Alicante province, ​just 90km away, recorded 632 mm (25 inches) of rainfall in 36 hours. Some 2,000 people were evacuated, with authorities carrying out nearly 100 rescues across Valencia and Alicante.

Lightning does, in fact, strike twice. We are now living in the era of extreme weather, where terms such as ‘once in 100 years’ or ‘flood of the century’ are effectively rendered meaningless. The cause is climate change. But more specifically, the one stat we all should all know — and repeat ad nuseum: for every 1℃ rise in global temperature, the atmosphere holds seven per cent more moisture. This has added extra fuel to intense and heavy rainfall.

Extreme weather is an increasing topic amongst The New Climate’s writers around the world. Global warming has sped up to roughly 0.20°C to 0.48°C per decade, driven primarily by human-made greenhouse gas emissions. That’s much more water held in the atmosphere, ready to fall back down on us.

In What Connects All the Recent Extreme Weather Events?, Sophia Dwiratna tells us that on September 8, 2026, Nagoya, Japan, recorded 104.5mm (4 inches) of rain in a single hour, breaking the previous local hourly rainfall record. As Sophia writes, “At this point, the climate problem becomes an engineering problem.”

George Dillard notes too in Summer’s Over… and Getting Longer how during the 1990s, the number of 90-degree days per year in his hometown ranged between 5 and 35, with three years in the single digits. Six of the years in the 1990s had fewer than 17 days above 90 degrees: “There hasn’t been another year with fewer than seventeen 90-degree days since 2015.” Tracey Chaykin reports much the same from her own Napa Valley garden.

We also have fascinating — and deeply worrying — reports of the effect this is having on animals, both wildlife and livestock. Bertrand Brent writes in When Even Sheep Start Struggling of his experience as a trainee vet, on placement in Scotland:

Scotland is not a place most people associate with the climate crisis. It rains reliably, the land is green, and the 6.4 million sheep that graze its hills have done so for centuries. But the stability of that picture is beginning to fray.

Dangerous parasites affecting sheep are moving ever further north as the climate heats. Research from the Moredun Research Institute in Edinburgh has documented the northward spread of deadly H. contortus in UK sheep populations, linked directly to warmer winters and longer summers.

One animal that seems to be particularly liking the heat, writes Narrita Mahapatra, is jellyfish. See: The Stinging Tide: Why Oceans Are Filling Up with Jellyfish.

At the less numerous end of the animal spectrum, Quentin Septer asks us to Consider The Pupfish — one of the world’s, and America’s, rarest species, exisitng in just one isolated rock pool. For years it was effectively protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA), but as Trump now rips up those protections, we face the very real prospect of wanton species extinctions. And if you want a deeper dive into the environmental vandalism of this Administration, see Giulio Rocca’s “The Greatest Con Job Ever Perpetrated”: The Five Big Ideas Behind Trump’s Climate Politics.

We can’t even escape the reaches of fascism in space. Precious Awonge writes in Elon Musk’s Orbital Data Centers Won’t Save Us From the Ones He’s Building on the Ground that in the higher-end growth scenarios for the rocket launches necessary to launch orbital date centres at scale could:

…meaningfully undermine the ozone recovery the world spent decades achieving under the Montreal Protocol. One research tracking this put it about as starkly as a scientist ever does in public, “the space industry is now slowing down the healing of the ozone hole”

Perhaps just as importantly, while making his orbital-data-center pitch, Musk “quietly purchased a gas turbine company” instead. Some good news from Precious Awonge: “Nigeria’s domestic solar panel production capacity has jumped from 120 megawatts to 300 megawatts in just two years. We are now exporting locally made panels from Lagos to Accra, Ghana.” Nigeria is on track to install around 1.7 gigawatts of solar in 2026 alone.

Keeping to the space theme, satellite imagery can be a very useful tool for environmental monitoring — in particular picking up signals of both degradation and recovery. But in his fascinating piece What Satellite Vegetation Maps Miss About Climate Stress, Mandar Chaudhari shows us that some satellite systems effectively tell us whether a map is greening or not, yet greenness alone ≠ ecosystem health.

Some good news from Precious Awonge: “Nigeria’s domestic solar panel production capacity has jumped from 120 megawatts to 300 megawatts in just two years. We are now exporting locally made panels from Lagos to Accra, Ghana.” Nigeria is on track to install around 1.7 gigawatts of solar in 2026 alone.

Also in Nigeria, new writer Aminat reports that Lagos’s summer extended well into October this year: “The heat has become something we complain about every year, but this time, it feels different. It is more intense, more persistent, and harder to ignore.”

While Stephen Kamugasa gave us the latest instalment in his ‘The Invisible Deficit’ series, on The Link Between Domestic Violence and Ecological Destruction. It’s a challenging and vitally important article, and I urge you to read it. Here’s an excerpt:

Domestic abuse and ecological collapse are not separate crises of culture and science; they are twin manifestations of one systemic logic of extraction. Both rest on a paradigm that treats living systems — whether ecosystems or human bodies — as invisible shock absorbers, demanded to endure endlessly while denied accountability, protection, or repair. As advocate Sally Stevenson observes, “Climate change is a threat multiplier. It doesn’t cause violence, but it makes existing risks worse. If we want to keep women safe, we need to think about climate resilience not only in terms of infrastructure but also in terms of relationships, trauma, and recovery.”

As regular readers know, I like to end each New(s)letter with one of our more hopeful pieces from the past month. And there have been several.

Stephen gave us a fascinating report from Taiwan’s Shuangxigou Ancient Trail, and in particular the nature-based approach to trail engineering that has transformed the climate resilience of these ancient routes, in The Stewardship Scale: How Taipei’s Trail Engineers Protect Taiwan’s Fragile Slopes.

Here’s Bruce Kania on how you can turn a fishing trip with the kids or grandkids into a transformational freshwater conservation and carbon sequestration project (yes, really): How Fishing Can Be The Top Link of a Methane-Control System.

And renowned academic Dr Natasha Chassagne reminds us in Climate Hope as Practice: Six Pathways to Transformation that:

…while the word ‘hope’ can get a bad rap, we need it in practice and we need to not taint what climate hope really means and stands for… we need hope driven by people power — the grassroots movements, activists, and civil societies organising to enforce accountability and drive transformation.

She gives us not one, but six (count ‘em!) pathways to do just that, and build community at the same time.

And if I could request one action of you now, please click on a story in this newsletter, and clap and Repost it if you feel moved to. We are, afterall, building a community here in The New Climate too.

Yours in hope and action,

Tim Smedley, the Editor, The New Climate.

The New Climate. New(s)letter #29 was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Satellite systems such as NDVI tells us whether a map is green, but greenness alone ≠ ecosystem health

In the summer of 2018, a hot drought spread across central Europe. By late summer, forests were shedding leaves early. Researchers later mapped this early wilting across roughly 21,500 square kilometres, particularly in Germany and the Czech Republic, and found that affected patches were still less green the following spring. The case is a useful warning from a landscape that satellites could see well, but not reduce to a simple verdict.

A vegetation map can tell us where green leaf cover is changing. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether an ecosystem is healthy enough to absorb the next shock. The forest study joined satellite time series to ground interpretation, climate anomalies, terrain, and soils. From orbit, a field, hillside, or forest can still look lush while plants are running hot, drawing down stored water, or changing their seasonal timing. The image is not wrong. The question is narrower than the one we often want it to answer.

What a green pixel actually measures

Satellite vegetation indices changed environmental monitoring because they convert reflected light into a signal that can be compared across seasons and continents. The best known is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI. Leaves absorb much of the red light used in photosynthesis and reflect a large share of near-infrared light. NDVI turns the contrast between those bands into a measure related to the density and condition of green vegetation. NASA’s NDVI primer explains why the method has become so useful for tracking broad patterns in plant cover, drought impacts, crop development, and recovery after disturbance.

That reach is extraordinary. Repeated observations let scientists ask whether a landscape is greener or browner than its own seasonal norm, rather than relying on a single photograph. But NDVI is a measurement of reflected light, not a blood test for an ecosystem. It sees canopy structure, chlorophyll, and leaf area more directly than it sees water stress, root-zone moisture, carbon uptake, or the ability to recover after heat.

Green is visually persuasive. But greenness is not ecosystem health, and ecosystem health is not climate resilience. A landscape can look green because leaves are still present, even while the processes that keep those leaves functioning are under strain.

The stress that arrives before brown

Consider a crop field during a heatwave. Irrigation, deep roots, or a temporary drawdown of stored water can maintain a green canopy long enough for an optical image to look reassuring. Yet leaf temperature may be rising, stomata may be closing to conserve water, and yield potential may be slipping. The same mismatch can occur in forests and grasslands, where deep roots and stored carbohydrates can postpone visible damage.

Research increasingly supports this caution. A 2025 study in Geophysical Research Letters notes that greenness-based vegetation indices can respond later to drought than physiological changes such as reduced photosynthesis, because canopy structure changes more slowly than the processes inside leaves. The early-warning study makes a practical point: a stable green signal should not be treated as proof that water stress is absent.

There can also be a long lag between stress and visible decline. A 2024 global analysis found that vegetation responses to climate can be delayed by as much as six months in humid, warm, tree-rich ecosystems. That time-lag research is a reminder that the date of a satellite image is not necessarily the date on which the climate pressure began.

Why timing changes the meaning of a map

Seasonality makes the problem more subtle. Compare an early-season image with a late-season image and a normal seasonal transition can look like environmental decline. Compare the same calendar date across years and an unusually early green-up can look like improvement, even if it shifts water demand into a hotter, drier part of the summer or leaves plants exposed to a late frost.

This is why anomalies are more useful than isolated values. A defensible comparison asks what is typical for this location, land cover, and point in the seasonal cycle. It also asks whether the two observations come from comparable conditions. In the 2018 central European case, the researchers did not simply inspect one late-summer image. They followed 10-metre Sentinel-2 observations across the growing season, then compared their time-series signals with high-resolution visual interpretations of where tree crowns had actually wilted early. They also tested whether the mapped pattern lined up with temperature and precipitation anomalies, tree size, slope, and shallow soils. That combination helped separate a true drought response from ordinary seasonal variation, cloud-contaminated observations, or a single misleading image. Their method is as important as the map it produced because it turned a visible change in canopy colour into evidence about the conditions driving it.

What satellites can and cannot see

Optical imagery does not observe a landscape in a vacuum. Clouds, smoke, aerosols, view angle, illumination, exposed soil, and sensor differences all affect the signal that reaches the instrument. In dense vegetation, NDVI can saturate, becoming less responsive to further changes in leaf area. In sparse vegetation, soil background can exert an outsized influence. NASA’s current Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 guidance is clear that different indices have different strengths: NDVI and EVI describe greenness, while NDMI and NDWI add information about moisture, and burn indices are designed for disturbance. The HLS guide is a useful antidote to the idea that one number can answer every question.

Preprocessing is therefore part of the science, not administrative clean-up. Atmospheric correction, cloud and shadow masks, comparable sensors, and consistent seasonal windows determine whether a change map reflects land conditions or merely differences in how and when the satellite observed them. A beautiful layer is not automatically a reliable comparison.

A fuller picture of climate stress

The answer is not to abandon NDVI. Its simplicity, long archive, and global coverage are genuine strengths. The answer is to combine it with signals that answer different questions. Land-surface temperature can reveal thermal stress. Soil-moisture observations add information about the water constraint. Radar can contribute structure and moisture-sensitive information, including when clouds block optical imagery. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence can be closer to photosynthetic activity than a greenness measure alone.

Those tools do not make uncertainty disappear. They make it visible. The European drought literature offers a revealing example: satellite fluorescence was able to capture some forest drought impacts faster or more clearly than NDVI when the reference period was short. The OCO-2 analysis did not declare a winner among sensors. It showed why the answer depends on the ecosystem, the timing, and the question being asked.

Multi-sensor monitoring also gives field teams and decision-makers a better starting point. Instead of asking whether a map is green, they can ask whether greenness is consistent with moisture, temperature, phenology, recent weather, land cover, and on-the-ground observations. USGS drought monitoring follows this logic by interpreting vegetation response alongside climate, soils, irrigation, evapotranspiration, and other biophysical context. The USGS approach is less tidy than a single index, but it is closer to how landscapes actually function.

Health is a question of function

Calling a landscape healthy implies more than leaf colour. It points to functioning: whether plants are taking up carbon, using water within tolerable limits, maintaining habitat, replenishing biomass, and recovering after disturbance. Each component has a different observation problem. A heat-stressed crop may still look green while its productivity changes. A forest may retain its canopy while deep soil moisture falls. A grassland may green rapidly after rain while its species composition shifts over years.

That is one reason field observation remains indispensable. Satellite records reveal patterns across places too large for a person to walk, but field measurements tell us what a pixel means in a particular ecosystem. The strongest studies use both. In the 2018 forest study, researchers paired satellite signals with visual interpretation and then tested the role of temperature, rainfall, tree size, slope, and soil depth. That combination turned a map of colour change into an explanation of vulnerability.

The same principle should shape practical monitoring. For a farm, the next question after an NDVI anomaly may be whether leaf temperature, root-zone moisture, irrigation records, and crop stage point in the same direction. For a forest manager, it may be whether canopy change coincides with shallow soils, pest pressure, or several dry seasons in succession. The satellite layer is not the answer sheet. It is a prompt for better questions.

What better monitoring looks like

A useful climate dashboard therefore needs time, not just imagery. It should show an anomaly against a long-term baseline, track the trajectory through the season, label cloud and data-quality gaps, and distinguish an observed signal from an inferred ecological outcome. It should also make the spatial scale explicit. A 30-metre pixel can be powerful for landscape monitoring while still blending a field edge, a hedgerow, a wet patch, and a stressed crop into one average.

Newer Earth-observation models may improve how these signals are combined, especially across long time series and multiple sensors. But a more sophisticated model does not remove the need for physical interpretation. If it predicts stress, users still need to know whether the pattern is explained by moisture, heat, phenology, management, or a sensor artefact. The valuable role for machine learning is not to replace ecological reasoning. It is to help surface relationships that can be checked against the ground.

Return to the forest stands of 2018. A satellite time series helped reveal the early wilting. But the story did not end when leaves changed colour. The following spring, the affected areas still showed reduced greenness. The drought had become a legacy, not a one-day event. The follow-up signal is why resilience cannot be inferred from a single green moment.

Satellites have given us an extraordinary ability to watch the planet change. The next challenge is learning not to confuse what is easy to measure with what we actually want to know. A green pixel can be good news. It can also be a landscape just buying time.

When Greener Doesn’t Mean Healthier was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What would happen if, on a hot summer day, everyone in your town turned on their air conditioning at the same time? The grid could be pushed past its limit, and the lights could go out. But there is a way to prevent this, and it doesn’t need a new power plant.

This is where Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) come in.

This article explains how can ordinary people gain more control over electricity production, and how Virtual Power Plants help make this possible.

1. How Does Electricity Reach Our Home?

The journey that electricity takes to our homes is more complex than you might think, but it comes down to a few simple steps.

First, electricity is generated from sources such as sunlight, wind, water, natural gas and coal. Solar panels turn sunlight into power, wind turbines use the wind, and most fossil fuel plants burn coal.

Next, electricity travels through transmission lines. These large wires, often supported by tall towers, carry electricity over long distances from power stations to towns and cities. Electricity is transmitted at high voltages to reduce energy losses along the way.

Then, transformers adjust the voltage. Near neighbourhoods, they lower it to levels that are safe and suitable for homes and appliances.

Finally, electricity flows through local distribution lines and transformers into our homes. Household wiring delivers it to everything from refrigerators to computers.

Throughout this journey, power stations, grid operators and other energy providers help ensure that electricity is available when people need it.

2. From Electricity Consumer to Energy Producer

Traditionally, electricity is generated in power stations and delivered to homes and businesses through the grid, while generators and grid operators manage production and balancing.

That is changing. Rooftop solar panels let households generate their own electricity, home batteries store some of it for later, and smart appliances can shift when they use power. A household with solar panels might use its surplus on a sunny afternoon right away, store it in a battery or export it to the grid, depending on its equipment and local rules. People can now produce electricity, and sometimes supply it to others, rather than only buying it.

There is a limitation, though. Owning solar panels or a battery doesn’t automatically give a household influence over the wider system, since individual homes have limited capacity and aren’t coordinated with one another. So how can thousands of small energy resources work together to make a bigger difference?

3. What Is a VPP?

A Virtual Power Plant is software that connects many small energy devices, such as home solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, so they act like one large power station.

Think of a single home battery as one musician: it can play a tune, but not a whole concert. The VPP is the orchestra. Using the internet, it links thousands of devices together, so grid operators can call on them as one instead of relying on a single large fossil-fuel plant.

How the VPPs work is as follows:

First, households join a VPP. Owners of solar panels, batteries or other suitable devices sign up to a programme run by an energy company or VPP provider, and may receive payments, lower bills or other benefits in return.

Second, their devices are connected. Software monitors production, battery charge and demand, often through smart meters, to show how much electricity is available and when it is needed.

Third, the VPP coordinates them. On a sunny afternoon, it can have batteries store surplus solar power, then release it when demand rises.

Finally, the combined resources support the grid. One battery has a small effect, but thousands together can balance supply and demand, reduce peak demand and make better use of renewable energy.

Importantly, a VPP does not necessarily produce electricity itself. Instead, it coordinates resources that are spread across different locations, allowing them to operate together as a larger, more flexible system.

I feel like this part is quite tricky, so let me explain it simply. In AEMO’s trial, the service where VPPs reliably earned money was helping keep the grid’s frequency steady. Think of frequency as the grid’s heartbeat: if supply and demand drift apart, it speeds up or slows down, and batteries can quickly add or absorb power to steady it. This service is called FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Services).

The VPP doesn’t pick individual batteries. It works out what the whole fleet can deliver, remembering that communication dropouts affected up to 30% of a fleet at any one time. Because delivering less than promised risks a penalty, VPPs keep 2–10% extra capacity in reserve as a safety margin. FCAS pays for being available, not for the energy delivered, so a battery earns simply by being ready. Earnings can be lumpy: a price spike on 12–17 March 2021 earned South Australian VPPs $685,000, 86% of that month’s total.

4. Core Benefits from VPPs

A VPP, if you haven’t realized it yet, is an amazing thing to have, especially in the clean energy industry. In this section, I want to explain all the benefits for consumers, energy Providers, and communities.

Benefits for consumers-producers:

Can earn money and save money on their electricity bills. For example, a South Australian VPP customer with ‘model usage’ could save up to $608 off their annual electricity bill in a year. Also, a Fraunhofer study shows that ‘vehicles to grid’ technology can save the EU 22 billion euros a year by 2040.

Can use electricity when it is cheaper by charging their devices at certain times. To prove this, EU reforms aim to make bills more affordable and stable, expanding clean energy with low operating costs.

Can help reduce the need for expensive upgrades to the electricity network. Energy efficiency (and VPPs’ usage, while it is naturally more efficient than running multiple physical dedicated servers) costs less than half the amount it would cost to build new generation capacity and grid infrastructure, per unit of energy, by coordinating existing distributed energy resources and reducing peak demand.

However, the savings and earnings depend on the country and its rules.

Benefits for the energy providers:

Lower electricity purchasing costs. Energy companies can use smart systems to buy and manage electricity more efficiently, potentially reducing costs.

Stronger customer loyalty through special energy plans. Energy companies can offer smart electricity plans that help customers save money, making them more likely to stay with the company.

Quick backup electricity without building expensive infrastructure. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s project (in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Colorado) shows, that it is possible to make the electric grids safer and more responsive, resilient, and affordable.

Benefits for the communities:

Cleaner air. By 2035, VPPs can avoid 12 to 28 million tons, or two to four percent of projected US power sector carbon emissions.

Fewer power cuts. Distributed Energy, connected into the VPP systems, increase power grid resilience and reliability to prevent outages.

Lower electricity costs. RMI estimates that using virtual power plants as part of the electricity system could reduce power-generation costs by 20% compared with a system that does not use them as effectively. he report also estimates annual savings of about $140 per household.

All these benefits seem really great, but to be sure and certain, we must look at some real examples of VPPs.

5. Real-World VPP Success Stories

When we talk about theories and new inventions, it is necessary to hear about real practice. I want to share two stories in which VPPs solved an issue and the whole process was a success.

South Australia’s Virtual Power Plant
After electricity supply problems in South Australia, the state government announced a Virtual Power Plant project with Tesla in 2018. The plan aimed to install solar panels and Tesla Powerwall batteries in up to 50,000 homes. Together, these systems were expected to provide up to 250 MW of power and store 650 MWh of energy. The project started with 1,100 public-housing homes, with more homes to be added in stages. Eligible households could receive the systems without paying installation costs upfront. The government also expected participating households to save around 30% on their electricity bills. However, 50,000 homes was the project’s target, not the confirmed number of homes already equipped.

When heatwaves increase electricity demand or power plants suddenly shut down, a virtual power plant (VPP) can use energy stored in household batteries to help keep the electricity grid stable. These batteries can respond quickly to changes in electricity frequency, depending on their technology and control systems. AEMO’s Australian VPP trials showed that groups of home batteries could provide fast frequency-control services, including services designed to respond within six seconds. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Energy highlights how VPPs can improve grid reliability and help manage periods of high electricity demand. Households taking part in these programs may also save money on their electricity bills, although the savings depend on the program and household.

California’s Emergency Load Reduction Program
California faces intense strain on its grid during summer “heat domes,” when millions of people crank up their air conditioning. Programs are led by utilities in partnership with companies like Google Nest, OhmConnect, and EV automakers. During peak stress hours, the VPP automatically sends signals to thousands of participating homes.

With customer consent, smart thermostats nudge temperatures up by just 1–2 degrees, and smart EV chargers briefly pause charging. By making micro-adjustments across hundreds of thousands of connected devices simultaneously, the VPP drops the grid load by 28.8 megawatts, the equivalent of multiple fossil-fuel “peaker” plants, preventing rolling blackouts without customers having to manually turn anything off. For comparison, the Henrietta Peaker Plant has a capacity of 95 MW, so this demand reduction was equivalent to about 30% of its capacity.

These two stories and projects show, that VPPs benefits can be achieved in our real-life situations and areas. But why don’t we use VPPs everywhere? What is the problem with it?

6. Challenges VPPs Have to Face

Although Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) offer many benefits, they also face several challenges. Connecting energy resources is not enough on its own — people must also be able and willing to participate. For this section, I will discuss the main problems in Australia, that are relevant to all other countries in our world.

Regulatory issues

Australia’s existing electricity rules mainly support traditional power plants. Unclear rules can make it difficult for VPPs to enter the market and attract investors. Also, different rules across Australian states can make it harder for VPP companies to operate in multiple regions.

Market competition

VPPs must compete with large, established power plants. Smaller VPPs may find it difficult to compete because of high costs and limited support.

Technology and infrastructure

VPPs need advanced software, batteries, and reliable electricity networks. Expanding these systems can be expensive. Traditional power plants already have established systems, giving them an advantage over VPPs.

Consumer awareness

Many people do not know what VPPs are or how they work. More public awareness is needed to encourage people to join VPP programmes. Some people may hesitate to join VPPs because they are worried about costs, privacy, or giving companies control over their devices.

How Can We Make VPPs More Usable?

In the previous section, I mentioned some challenges and problems, that make VPP usage not as effective as it could be nowadays. But after all, as a representative of the next generation, I must talk about how we can solve the problems and have VPP a possible choice for everyone. So, I will be regarding every challenge with a solution:

Consumer awareness → Education: we must help people get to know it — create opportunities, for example more courses, online videos, articles like this one make VPPs a known option. Also, we have to make it popular and familiar not only to common people, but also to the big energy companies, especially the fossil-fuel ones, so we can save our environment.

Regulatory Issues→ Regulatory Sandboxes: think of it as test zones or a video game trial version. Regulators can set up small test areas where new rules are allowed. Once everyone sees it works safely, the government can officially change the law for everyone.

Technology and Infrastructure → Investment in Technology and Network Upgrades: Governments and energy companies can invest in better technology, batteries, and electricity networks.

Market Competition → Financial partnerships: VPPs can work together with energy companies to share resources and reduce costs. Also, governments can provide financial support not only in technology and infrastructure, but also in incentives to help smaller VPPs compete with traditional power plants.

8. Who Should Control the Future of Energy?

I want to end this article by coming back to our main question: How Can We Give People More Control Over Electricity Production? The answer is to give simple people and their homes the opportunity to become not only electricity consumers, but also producers and active participants in the energy system.

On a hot summer day in my country, Lithuania, this is no longer a thought experiment. The country is adding solar and wind faster than its grid can always absorb, and that has become a new challenge here.

The European Commission’s 2026 country report identifies continuing grid constraints, insufficient system flexibility and exposure to electricity price volatility. It also reports that prosumers (consumers+producers) reached around 170,000 in 2025, up 37% from 2024.

Lithuania still needs to improve its ability to balance electricity supply and demand. It needs better ways to encourage people to use electricity at different times, store extra electricity and manage changes in renewable energy production. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has highlighted the importance of demand response, combining energy resources and making it easier for them to participate in electricity markets.

So, in this situation, VPPs could come in as the solution in my country? Litgrid, Lithuania’s electricity transmission system operator, in 2026²⁰ launched a flexibility services calculator. With this calculator, VPPs could shift demand and charge the batteries, make predicting, buying and selling energy, and deciding how to use it all work together, and offer qualified balancing services.

These benefits have already been noticed — in 2026 Inion Software (energy technology company) launched virtual power plant platform, that currently connects 30 assets with a combined capacity of 160 MW.

The future of energy should not belong to power companies alone: VPPs let ordinary people have a greater say in how their electricity is produced and used. The effects of climate change are already visible, we should start integrating them now rather than wait.

How Can We Give People More Control Over Electricity Production? was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.