Voltus, a virtual power plant operator and distributed energy resource platform, on June 2 announced a Bring Your Own CapacityTM three-year agreement with Google.
With this first-of-its-kind agreement, Voltus will aggregate up to 100 megawatts of DERs each year – for instance, batteries, smart thermostats, and other flexible assets – from local businesses and homes into a Google-funded VPP in the PJM Interconnection. Voltus will then pay customers who participate in the VPP.
"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," Voltus and Google noted.
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," they said. "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."
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 of demand response capacity for U.S. power systems through agreements with multiple utilities.
