From Spreadsheets to Software: Insights from Building a Software-First VPP Solution

Leap's mission is to provide a platform that enhances the value of our partners’ products and services by enabling their flexible energy resources to unlock a cleaner and more resilient electric grid. To deliver on that mission, we embraced a software-first approach from the start, eliminating the need for any extra hardware or new software onsite to use our solution. And as we built out our platform, we focused on enabling automation across every part of the virtual power plant (VPP) operational value chain to remove the need for manual actions wherever possible. Today, we’ll delve into how our software-centric strategy differentiates us as a VPP provider.

An API-First Strategy

Our API-first strategy is key to the Leap platform’s designing principle. We’ve built a suite of universal APIs that work across markets and programs to automate throughout the different stages of VPP operations. The results of this approach speak for themselves: across all of Leap’s industries and verticals, our API-integrated partners grow revenue and meters 3x faster, perform in energy markets 2x better and earn 35% more dollars-per-kW. 

We know our partners are busy growing their core businesses, so we put tremendous thought and energy into making integration with Leap as simple as possible. We strive for the best user experience for API integration, providing extensive documentation and step-by-step onboarding guidance. Our top-notch developer documentation enables our partners’ technical teams to quickly and painlessly complete platform integration work. And, everything we build in our Partner Portal UI is also exposed as an API function, creating a consistent experience for partners across our platform. 

A Market-Agnostic, Extensible Core

Think of our software platform as an onion, with layers of functionality and specialization for connecting, transacting and monetizing energy devices that can be peeled back or added as needed. 

In software, “extensibility” measures how easily and quickly a software system can incorporate new features and capabilities without compromising functionality. The more extensible we can make our software, the more value we can provide for partners across a wide range of technologies and geographies. The Leap platform was designed for extensibility: at its core is the market-agnostic Leap Model that stores all assets and program rules in a uniform way. This core allows us to easily build market-specific services on top, like integrations with various wholesale markets and utilities. And, it allows us to expand value for partners much faster than other software architectures would. By mapping different market-specific extensions into one inclusive model, we enable partners to integrate once with Leap and gain universal access to all the markets and programs we offer.  

Traditionally, demand response operations relied heavily on spreadsheets and other manual processes. Our goal has been to transition all operations into software, enabling us to scale in ways that spreadsheets simply can’t handle. For instance, last year a partner added a large portfolio of over 80,000 energy devices to the Leap platform in just one week, demonstrating our ability to automate and manage complexities across different markets efficiently.

One of the key motivators for founding Leap was the recognition that millions of distributed energy resources (DERs) in homes and businesses were coming online, yet their owners and operators couldn’t access demand response programs to monetize their devices’ flexible capacity as paid grid resources. We designed the Leap platform to seamlessly integrate and aggregate energy devices of all types and sizes, supported by a functional architecture that caters to both residential and commercial markets. 

In order to scale efficiently - especially when it comes to integrating thousands of small residential devices with small margins - full automation is essential. 

An Effective Team Structure and DevOps Culture

Leap operates in a very context-heavy industry, where our engineers need to have strong domain knowledge in order to build effective solutions. We’ve organized our engineering team into verticals that align with the different stages of VPP operations facilitated through our platform. Our operations team has also adopted this vertical alignment to ensure smooth collaboration with engineering.

We embrace a DevOps culture where the platform team provides the necessary infrastructure and access. We adhere to the "you build it, you run it" philosophy, ensuring that our engineers are responsible for the functionality of what they build. This approach is supported by continuous integration and deployment pipelines, allowing us to deploy new features and updates multiple times per day.

Leap's software-first approach to innovation is not just about building a platform; it's about creating a resilient, scalable, and highly automated system. This strategy has set us apart as a virtual power plant provider, enabling us to offer unparalleled value to our partners and the broader energy market.