Google Bets Big on Virtual Power Plants With 1 Gigawatt Voltus Deal

North America has about 37.5 gigawatts of total virtual power plant capacity, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s latest estimate, published last year. That capacity is spread across roughly 2,000 VPPs, which aggregate distributed energy resources like batteries, smart thermostats, and heat pumps to cut, shift, or supply electricity when the grid is under strain — effectively turning them into a single, coordinated power plant.

On Thursday, Google and VPP operator Voltus announced plans to add another 1 gigawatt of clean capacity over the next three or four years — or nearly 3% of North America’s existing total. Under Voltus’ “bring your own capacity” model, Google will fund the VPP to help meet its booming data center power needs, while Voltus will enroll businesses and households across the PJM Interconnection, the notoriously overstrained grid region spanning parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, compensating them for their participation either directly or through electricity bill credits.

The announcement expands on a three-year, 100-megawatt deal the two companies signed in June, extending their commitment through 2040. Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey told me that the smaller deal gave the companies a starting point for a much more ambitious partnership. “It’s a lot easier to explain to people how you’re going to 10x if you’ve already 1x, and so we had to start somewhere,” she said. “We always had our eyes set on bigger things.”

Earlier this month, Voltus closed an oversubscribed $225 million Series D round led by Generation Investment Management to scale its VPP portfolio to 20 gigawatts by 2030. The first phase of the Google partnership is also oversubscribed, Guernsey told me. While that flexible power won’t come online until next year, this means Voltus has already lined up over 100 megawatts of accredited capacity that PJM can count on to deliver when needed, much as it would a natural gas plant or solar-plus-storage installation.

In the meantime, the VPP operator says its broader PJM portfolio has already demonstrated what it can do. Last week, an unseasonably warm stretch of fall weather required PJM to activate its Emergency Load Response Program twice. With 46 gigawatts of generation offline for planned maintenance or construction and another 15 gigawatts unexpectedly unavailable, “distributed resources came through,” Guernsey posted on LinkedIn. “This is how a modern grid should work.” Based on preliminary data, she told me that Voltus delivered about 105% of its committed load reduction during the events.

And VPPs can do more than help avert emergencies. Grid operators are increasingly calling on distributed resources for routine grid management too, such as to ease daily price spikes, reduce emissions when the sun or wind isn’t available, or relieve congestion on a local line. “It’s nearly constant. I think soon we’ll be able to say it’s like every hour,” Guernsey told me.

So far this year, Voltus has reduced electricity demand in PJM by more than 200 gigawatt-hours. Now the company plans to lean more heavily on batteries, particularly at commercial and industrial sites, to accelerate its growth. Guernsey told me that with battery costs falling, electricity prices rising, and fixed payments to participants through 2040, the math now works to deploy batteries at scale, without exposure to unpredictable wholesale electricity prices.

She’s betting that other hyperscalers will see the value in large-scale battery deployments too. Most of the buzz today has revolved around hyperscalers bringing their own generation online — both to secure power faster and head off community opposition by paying their own way. Thus far, Google is the only hyperscaler committed to bringing its own distributed capacity through a VPP. But getting the big players to embrace these new “bring your own capacity” contracts, which Voltus launched last September, is central to its growth strategy.

Guernsey has likened these novel capacity contracts to the corporate renewable power purchase agreements that Google also helped pioneer in the early 2010s. Now she sees a similar opportunity for VPPs to move from a promising concept to a mainstream procurement tool.

“There’s been this notion that we’re coming up on an inflection point for a very long time,” she said of the VPP market. “And I want to be able to say we came up on the inflection point, we went past it, and now we are scaling. And this is an awesome proof point.”