“Bring Your Own Capacity” – Google And Voltus To Deploy Virtual Power Plant
Google signed a three-year Bring Your Own Capacity (BYOC) agreement with Voltus for up to 100 MW of accredited distributed capacity in the PJM Interconnection. Voltus will aggregate batteries, smart thermostats, electric vehicles, and other flexible assets from homes and businesses into a Google-funded Virtual Power Plant (VPP). When the grid needs relief, the software dispatches those resources in concert. Participants get paid, and Google gets capacity without waiting for traditional interconnection queues. A VPP is not a physical plant at all. It is coordinated software that turns thousands of small, customer-sited resources into something that behaves like dispatchable generation. Distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar panels, batteries, smart thermostats, and flexible loads already sitting on the grid become a decentralized fleet. Instead of building another transmission line or expensive peaker plant that sits idle most of the year, the VPP squeezes more value out of what already exists. Brattle Group analysis suggests better utilization of existing infrastructure could save U.S. consumers over $100 billion this decade. Voltus has positioned itself as the leading …
