Case study
Powering Rapid Growth for Daily-Dispatched Behind the Meter Battery VPPs
Powering Rapid Growth for Daily-Dispatched Behind the Meter Battery VPPs
Powering Rapid Growth for Daily-Dispatched Behind the Meter Battery VPPs
“The reality is, the grid needs support every single day of the year, and Leap embraces that philosophy. They’re out there advocating for better programs, piloting new offerings, and building the best possible value stack for our customers. That alignment with our mission to use batteries every day — not just during energy emergencies — has been a big part of why our partnership works so well.”
Geoff Ferrell
Senior Vice President, Global C&I and VPP Project Business - Americas
Highlights
1,000+ meters
Enrolled on the Leap platform
2023-2025 API-Driven Growth:
Highlights
About sonnen
sonnen is one of the world's leading manufacturers of smart energy storage systems and a pioneer of clean, decentralized and networked energy technologies. One of the of the fastest growing energy tech companies, sonnen has received many internationally recognized awards including for its innovative virtual power plant.
10X growth in grid program revenue
>3X increase in customer meters
95% decrease in manual work of key operations
1,000+ meters
Enrolled on the Leap platform
2023-2025 API-Driven Growth:
These integrations removed manual bottlenecks and reduced operational overhead, making it possible for sonnen to grow its VPP footprint without scaling up its internal operations team. By automating workflows across each operational stage, over two years sonnen achieved:
10X growth in grid program revenue
More than 3X increase in customer meters
95% decrease in manual work of key operations
Go deeper: Read about sonnen’s return-on-investment from integrating Leap’s API suite.
Geoff Ferrell
Senior Vice President, Global C&I and VPP Project Business - Americas
“Ten years from now, imagine you have 300 million sonnen batteries in homes and businesses across the United States. Using the battery as the epicenter of the smart home ecosystem to store and redeploy energy, the net effect is we can really orchestrate different generation sources – harmonize the use of rooftop solar and wind turbines and offline those really dirty generation sources that utilities would just as rather not use.”
A Strategic Advocacy Partner
Leap’s technology is backed by energy market and policy experts who advocate for regulatory frameworks that maximize the full potential of distributed energy resources (DERs), including championing programs that offer year-round dispatch opportunities for DERs, export compensation, shorter dispatch windows, and lower minimum participation thresholds. Leap’s proactive policy work aligns with sonnen’s goal for daily battery dispatch in grid programs.
The Solution
sonnen partnered with Leap to quickly expand its VPP offering in California and use Leap’s platform to automate operations for CAISO’s Resource Adequacy (RA) capacity program and the statewide Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) program.
API-Driven Automation
Leap’s developer-friendly, universal API suite allowed sonnen to automate many key VPP operations, including:
Customer enrollment: Embedding Leap Connect into customer sign-up channels to streamline utility account authorization required for Resource Adequacy
Interval data uploads: Automating the sharing of battery-level performance data required for DSGS
Dispatch event scheduling: Automating the response to grid event signals from the Leap platform without the need for manual scheduling
Participation monitoring: Real-time visibility into enrollment status and program eligibility
Performance reporting: Automated tracking of customer-level performance data
Timely Revenue Tracking & Customer Payments
Leap’s advanced revenue forecasting and modeling tools provide sonnen with preliminary revenue estimates — often long before final grid program settlements are complete. sonnen can view performance results soon after grid events and flag any underperforming batteries for quick troubleshooting, ensuring they stay on track to meet their revenue targets.
Through Leap’s revenue dashboard or API, sonnen can:
Access preliminary and finalized earnings summaries from all its grid events.
Export revenue reports directly to their internal financial systems.
Project and distribute customer earnings on a monthly and quarterly basis.
This enables sonnen to issue payments to customers on a consistent cadence across grid programs, improving satisfaction and trust while maintaining operational efficiency.
Transparent, Flexible & Competitive Market Access
Leap provides a transparent pricing structure and low-risk revenue share model and has helped sonnen capture competitive value stacks, increasing opportunities to monetize their batteries every day in grid services. Through a single interface, sonnen can manage all of its Leap-powered VPP offerings and quickly expand its portfolio to new programs.
In California, Leap’s advocacy and guidance directly helped shape the Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) initiative, a statewide grid services program launched in 2023 designed to maximize DER capabilities. DSGS provides compensation for exports, leverages data directly from the battery to simplify enrollment, and offers a performance calculation methodology that is favorable for batteries; these program characteristics make battery participation easier and more lucrative for sonnen.
What’s Next
With Leap as a strategic partner, Sonnen plans to scale its platform across the Western Hemisphere, providing VPP offerings to new markets and to other OEM batteries.
Revenue Data Latency
As part of its value proposition, sonnen provides regular, transparent VPP revenue reporting to its customers, delivering quarterly statements and annual bonus payments based on performance. But many grid programs take months to process performance data, leading to lengthy delays in providing payments to customers. Additionally, some programs only offer aggregated results not broken down at the individual customer level, requiring sonnen to perform additional analysis to calculate customer payments.
Program Advocacy & Innovation
As sonnen uses its batteries for daily grid services, it prioritizes programs that allow for frequent dispatching to maximize the hardware technologies ability to monetize. But, many traditional demand response programs aren’t set up to enable and compensate for daily battery participation. To grow, sonnen sought a partner that could not only navigate the existing landscape but also advocate for and help shape new grid programs that fully monetize battery capabilities.
Timely Revenue Tracking & Customer Payments
Leap’s advanced revenue forecasting and modeling tools provide sonnen with preliminary revenue estimates — often long before final grid program settlements are complete. sonnen can view performance results soon after grid events and flag any underperforming batteries for quick troubleshooting, ensuring they stay on track to meet their revenue targets.
Through Leap’s revenue dashboard or API, sonnen can:
Access preliminary and finalized earnings summaries from all its grid events.
Export revenue reports directly to their internal financial systems.
Project and distribute customer earnings on a monthly and quarterly basis.
This enables sonnen to issue payments to customers on a consistent cadence across grid programs, improving satisfaction and trust while maintaining operational efficiency.
Transparent, Flexible & Competitive Market Access
Leap provides a transparent pricing structure and low-risk revenue share model and has helped sonnen capture competitive value stacks, increasing opportunities to monetize their batteries every day in grid services. Through a single interface, sonnen can manage all of its Leap-powered VPP offerings and quickly expand its portfolio to new programs.
In California, Leap’s advocacy and guidance directly helped shape the Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) initiative, a statewide grid services program launched in 2023 designed to maximize DER capabilities. DSGS provides compensation for exports, leverages data directly from the battery to simplify enrollment, and offers a performance calculation methodology that is favorable for batteries; these program characteristics make battery participation easier and more lucrative for sonnen.
What’s Next
With Leap as a strategic partner, Sonnen plans to scale its platform across the Western Hemisphere, providing VPP offerings to new markets and to other OEM batteries.
Background
sonnen is a global leader in residential energy storage and virtual power plant (VPP) innovation. Unlike many storage providers who position their batteries primarily for backup power, sonnen’s systems are designed for grid services participation. Its batteries are designed with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, making them especially well-suited for VPPs due to their safety, longevity, and ability to be frequently dispatched.
sonnen’s business model is deeply aligned with grid services: the company uses revenue from grid participation to significantly reduce the cost of battery ownership for customers, increasing adoption of new home storage systems.
Challenges
Despite being a technological leader in energy storage VPPs, sonnen faced new hurdles at it looked to expanding its VPP model:
Operational and Regulatory Fragmentation
Each U.S. energy market operates under its own complex regulatory framework. Expanding efficiently into new geographies was resource-intensive. sonnen needed a partner that could provide local expertise, operational scalability, and automated infrastructure — especially since the company would need incremental headcount to manage new programs independently.
Revenue Data Latency
As part of its value proposition, sonnen provides regular, transparent VPP revenue reporting to its customers, delivering quarterly statements and annual bonus payments based on performance. But many grid programs take months to process performance data, leading to lengthy delays in providing payments to customers. Additionally, some programs only offer aggregated results not broken down at the individual customer level, requiring sonnen to perform additional analysis to calculate customer payments.
Program Advocacy & Innovation
As sonnen uses its batteries for daily grid services, it prioritizes programs that allow for frequent dispatching to maximize the hardware technologies ability to monetize. But, many traditional demand response programs aren’t set up to enable and compensate for daily battery participation. To grow, sonnen sought a partner that could not only navigate the existing landscape but also advocate for and help shape new grid programs that fully monetize battery capabilities.
Challenges
Despite being a technological leader in energy storage VPPs, sonnen faced new hurdles at it looked to expanding its VPP model:
Operational and Regulatory Fragmentation
Each U.S. energy market operates under its own complex regulatory framework. Expanding efficiently into new geographies was resource-intensive. sonnen needed a partner that could provide local expertise, operational scalability, and automated infrastructure — especially since the company would need incremental headcount to manage new programs independently.
Background
sonnen is a global leader in residential energy storage and virtual power plant (VPP) innovation. Unlike many storage providers who position their batteries primarily for backup power, sonnen’s systems are designed for grid services participation. Its batteries are designed with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, making them especially well-suited for VPPs due to their safety, longevity, and ability to be frequently dispatched.
sonnen’s business model is deeply aligned with grid services: the company uses revenue from grid participation to significantly reduce the cost of battery ownership for customers, increasing adoption of new home storage systems.
Challenges
Despite being a technological leader in energy storage VPPs, sonnen faced new hurdles at it looked to expanding its VPP model:
Operational and Regulatory Fragmentation
Each U.S. energy market operates under its own complex regulatory framework. Expanding efficiently into new geographies was resource-intensive. sonnen needed a partner that could provide local expertise, operational scalability, and automated infrastructure — especially since the company would need incremental headcount to manage new programs independently.
Revenue Data Latency
As part of its value proposition, sonnen provides regular, transparent VPP revenue reporting to its customers, delivering quarterly statements and annual bonus payments based on performance. But many grid programs take months to process performance data, leading to lengthy delays in providing payments to customers. Additionally, some programs only offer aggregated results not broken down at the individual customer level, requiring sonnen to perform additional analysis to calculate customer payments.
Program Advocacy & Innovation
As sonnen uses its batteries for daily grid services, it prioritizes programs that allow for frequent dispatching to maximize the hardware technologies ability to monetize. But, many traditional demand response programs aren’t set up to enable and compensate for daily battery participation. To grow, sonnen sought a partner that could not only navigate the existing landscape but also advocate for and help shape new grid programs that fully monetize battery capabilities.
The Solution
sonnen partnered with Leap to quickly expand its VPP offering in California and use Leap’s platform to automate operations for CAISO’s Resource Adequacy (RA) capacity program and the statewide Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) program.
API-Driven Automation
Leap’s developer-friendly, universal API suite allowed sonnen to automate many key VPP operations, including:
Customer enrollment: Embedding Leap Connect into customer sign-up channels to streamline utility account authorization required for Resource Adequacy
Interval data uploads: Automating the sharing of battery-level performance data required for DSGS
Dispatch event scheduling: Automating the response to grid event signals from the Leap platform without the need for manual scheduling
Participation monitoring: Real-time visibility into enrollment status and program eligibility
Performance reporting: Automated tracking of customer-level performance data
These integrations removed manual bottlenecks and reduced operational overhead, making it possible for sonnen to grow its VPP footprint without scaling up its internal operations team. By automating workflows across each operational stage, over two years sonnen achieved:
10X growth in grid program revenue
More than 3X increase in customer meters
95% decrease in manual work of key operations
Go deeper: Read about sonnen’s return-on-investment from integrating Leap’s API suite
Timely Revenue Tracking & Customer Payments
Leap’s advanced revenue forecasting and modeling tools provide sonnen with preliminary revenue estimates — often long before final grid program settlements are complete. sonnen can view performance results soon after grid events and flag any underperforming batteries for quick troubleshooting, ensuring they stay on track to meet their revenue targets.
Through Leap’s revenue dashboard or API, sonnen can:
Access preliminary and finalized earnings summaries from all its grid events.
Export revenue reports directly to their internal financial systems.
Project and distribute customer earnings on a monthly and quarterly basis.
This enables sonnen to issue payments to customers on a consistent cadence across grid programs, improving satisfaction and trust while maintaining operational efficiency.
Transparent, Flexible & Competitive Market Access
Leap provides a transparent pricing structure and low-risk revenue share model and has helped sonnen capture competitive value stacks, increasing opportunities to monetize their batteries every day in grid services. Through a single interface, sonnen can manage all of its Leap-powered VPP offerings and quickly expand its portfolio to new programs.
“Leap has been a key partner for monetizing our batteries in California, providing access to the greatest value stack of grid services products in the state.”
Geoff Ferrell
Senior Vice President, Global C&I and VPP Project Business - Americas
“Leap has been a key partner for monetizing our batteries in California, providing access to the greatest value stack of grid services products in the state.”
Geoff Ferrell
Senior Vice President, Global C&I and VPP Project Business - Americas
A Strategic Advocacy Partner
Leap’s technology is backed by energy market and policy experts who advocate for regulatory frameworks that maximize the full potential of distributed energy resources (DERs), including championing programs that offer year-round dispatch opportunities for DERs, export compensation, shorter dispatch windows, and lower minimum participation thresholds. Leap’s proactive policy work aligns with sonnen’s goal for daily battery dispatch in grid programs.
In California, Leap’s advocacy and guidance directly helped shape the Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) initiative, a statewide grid services program launched in 2023 designed to maximize DER capabilities. DSGS provides compensation for exports, leverages data directly from the battery to simplify enrollment, and offers a performance calculation methodology that is favorable for batteries; these program characteristics make battery participation easier and more lucrative for sonnen.
What’s Next
With Leap as a strategic partner, Sonnen plans to scale its platform across the Western Hemisphere, providing VPP offerings to new markets and to other OEM batteries.
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© Leapfrog Power, Inc. 2025. All Rights Reserved.
© Leapfrog Power, Inc. 2025. All Rights Reserved.