Google funds 100 MW virtual power plant in PJM with Voltus

In short: Google is paying for a three-year program in the PJM power market that rewards homes and businesses for using less electricity when the grid is strained.

What happened

Google is funding a virtual power plant, or VPP, of up to 100 megawatts in the PJM electricity market. A VPP is not a single building with generators. It is more like a team of many small devices that can act together, like a stadium doing a coordinated wave.

Voltus will run the program and sign up residential, commercial, and industrial customers across PJM. Participants can include people and businesses with batteries, electric vehicles, or smart thermostats. When electricity demand is high, Voltus can ask these devices to briefly reduce power use, or to send stored power back, and participants get paid when their flexibility is used.

Google said this approach can add extra capacity faster than building new power plants and wires that are only needed for short spikes in demand. The company also linked the effort to rising electricity needs from data centers, which are large buildings filled with computers.

The project is expected to be operational in 2027. At 100 megawatts, it is small compared with PJM’s record peak demand of 168.2 gigawatts.

Google is also fully funding a separate pilot with PG&E in the San Francisco Bay Area, called SHARE. That program aims to enroll more than 20,000 existing devices, and add heat pumps that can work with batteries.

Why it matters

If these programs work, they could lower the chance of blackouts during extreme heat or cold by paying people to reduce demand at the exact moments the grid is under stress. It is a bit like paying drivers to avoid the highway at rush hour instead of building a bigger highway for just a few hours a year.

Source: NYTimes