The co-location plus VPP approach sounds promising on paper—essentially the grid's version of telling everyone to play nice. Reality check though: the implementation costs are brutal. Operationally it's messy, fragmented, and honestly, the scaling timeline doesn't match how fast we need these solutions. Between managing distributed energy resources, coordinating data center loads, and maintaining system stability, the complexity compounds faster than deployments can handle. The urgency of the energy transition demands something more agile.