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Should we get excited about California’s latest virtual power plant?

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Should we get excited about California’s latest virtual power plant?

This is California Wire, a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Wednesday via Substack.

Hi, everyone! Let’s pick up a theme from last week’s newsletter: how California has yet to take full advantage of rooftop solar, backup batteries, and other home devices to create virtual power plants (VPPs) that can help its stressed-out grid — even though it has more of those distributed energy resources than any other state.

Earlier this month, utility Pacific Gas & Electric launched its latest effort to improve on that poor record via an ambitious partnership with friendly neighborhood tech giant Google and pro-electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.

PG&E will recruit more than 20,000 customers with Sunrun or Tesla solar-charged batteries or Renew Home smart thermostats who are willing to let the utility control those resources to help the grid for an as-yet-unspecified reward. 

Google and Rewiring America, meanwhile, will work to get new smart devices into people’s homes, with discounts of $5,000 — or $10,000 for the first 25 customers — on Carrier’s new battery-equipped HVAC units.

Importantly, the costs of the program, dubbed Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency (SHARE), won’t fall on PG&E customers. Instead, Google has pledged to pay for all of it, starting with about $14 million for the first phase, according to Rewiring America.

That’s a big deal for the nonprofit, which has been pushing tech giants to finance VPPs to offset rising energy costs caused by data centers.


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