Google is putting far more weight behind an unusual answer to the AI power crunch: paying households and businesses to use less electricity at the moments the grid needs relief most. On Thursday, Google and distributed energy platform Voltus announced a tenfold expansion of their "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement in the PJM region, adding 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100 megawatts the two companies first committed in June.
The result is a virtual power plant with roughly 1.17 gigawatts of capacity, which Voltus describes as one of the largest distributed capacity portfolios deployed by a hyperscaler to date. A virtual power plant is not a single building full of generators. It is a network of thousands of smaller assets — home and commercial batteries, smart thermostats, on-site generation, and industrial equipment that can pause or shift — coordinated by software and offered into PJM's market when the grid is strained. Google funds the arrangement, and participating customers receive bill savings and direct payments in return for making their energy use flexible.
The setting explains the scale. PJM Interconnection is the largest wholesale power market in the United States, overseeing the grid in 13 states and the District of Columbia and serving about 67 million people. It has recently fallen short of its reliability margins despite skyrocketing capacity auction prices, due in large part to rising demand from data centers. Demand response revenue in PJM jumped 240 percent from 2024 to 2025, reaching 523.5 million dollars, according to Monitoring Analytics, the grid operator's market monitor. Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission largely rejected PJM's plan to curtail large loads that lack new generation, sending the question of curtailment priority back to the states.
"Distributed energy resources are powerful tools for managing a modern, reliable grid while keeping energy affordable," said Ellen Zuckerman, Google's head of energy market development for North and South America. "Expanding our initial commitment tenfold demonstrates our core effort to actively bring our own capacity to the grids that serve us." Voltus chief executive Dana Guernsey said the expansion "translates data center growth into direct economic benefits for businesses and homes," and has compared contracts of this kind to the power purchase agreements that unlocked financing for utility-scale wind and solar. Voltus expects to ramp up to the plant's full capacity over three to four years and then run it under the Google contract through 2040; the first, 100-megawatt phase is fully subscribed. The company says it has about 8.5 gigawatts of distributed assets under contract across North America and aims to reach 20 gigawatts by the end of the decade.
The deal is the latest sign that the race for AI power is widening beyond power plants. Hyperscalers have signed nuclear restarts, long-term renewable contracts, and direct generation deals, but new supply takes years to build. Flexibility is faster: a thermostat adjusted for an hour or a factory process shifted off peak is capacity that exists today. It also answers a growing political question, as regulators and PJM's own market monitor press large loads to bring their own capacity rather than push the costs of the buildout onto household bills. Flexibility has limits — it moves demand around rather than creating energy — but a gigawatt-scale portfolio on a contract running to 2040 moves virtual power plants from pilot projects into grid infrastructure.