With this first-of-its-kind agreement, Voltus will aggregate up to 100 megawatts (MW) of DERs each year – for instance, batteries, smart thermostats, and other flexible assets – from local businesses and homes into a Google-funded VPP in PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S. which spans the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. Voltus will then pay customers who participate in the VPP, turning Google’s capacity demand into real economic benefits for PJM customers, News.Az reports, citing Business Insider.
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By linking these localized, everyday resources through smart software, a VPP acts as a decentralized power plant. When electricity demand spikes, the system automatically orchestrates thousands of devices – like discharging local batteries or slightly adjusting smart thermostats – at the same moment. While these individual adjustments go unnoticed by the end user, synchronizing them swiftly reduces grid stress, creates valuable capacity, and maximizes the efficiency of our existing infrastructure.
Historically, meeting massive new energy demand has required an asset-heavy approach, spending years and billions of dollars expanding the grid to handle short periods of peak demand — a primary driver of costs for electricity customers. As a result, much of the nation’s electricity infrastructure and available capacity sits unused for most of the year. A Brattle Group analysis recently found U.S. consumers could save more than $100 billion over the next decade by better utilizing the grid’s existing resources through solutions like VPPs.
Through this initial deal, Google and Voltus aim to create an industry-leading scalable blueprint for how data center capacity needs can be met affordably and reliably through smarter utilization of the grid. By proving this can be a valuable tool for ambitious data center load growth, the partnership establishes a repeatable path for other large energy users to follow – accelerating clean capacity deployment, bringing direct economic benefits to local communities, and contributing to a robust, reliable grid for everyone.
“We are proud to work with Google to bring clean capacity online while helping our customers save money,” said Dana Guernsey, CEO of Voltus. “This initial phase of our Google partnership is pioneering a model that large load customers can follow, and we expect it to accelerate the role of distributed energy resources as a capacity solution at scale.”
This builds on other ways Google is advancing smart demand-side solutions to strengthen the grid, including by making its own data center demand more flexible to unlock 1 gigawatt (GW) of demand response capacity for U.S. power systems through agreements with multiple utilities.
“Google is committed to ensuring that our energy growth translates into a more reliable, affordable electricity future for local communities,” said Michael Terrell, Global Head of Advanced Energy at Google. “We are excited to add this new solution to a growing toolkit that can accelerate a robust, flexible energy system, and to partner with Voltus to scale a first-of-its-kind model for unlocking capacity to meet new data center growth.”
