Inside PG&E’s SHARE VPP: Why Google is Paying for Household Heat Pumps
Pacific Gas & Electric is teaming up with Rewiring America, Carrier Global Corporation, Tesla, Sunrun, Renew Home, Demand Side Analytics, Encoord, and Google to develop a “first-of-its-kind Virtual Power Plant called (Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency) or SHARE.
PG&E will work with Tesla, Sunrun, and Renew Home to enroll 21,000 existing flexible energy devices, totaling about 12 MW, starting fall of 2026.
Carrier will bring battery-enabled heat pumps to the VPP, with batteries to help manage peak demand. Participants from Alameda and Santa Clara counties must live in single family homes with central AC, and can get a $5,000 discount.
Rewiring America will work with households to deploy and enroll energy-saving electric technologies and ensure contractors meet quality and performance standards.
Encoord will be responsible for software and modeling, and PG&E and Demand Side Analytics will coordinate the thousands of distributed resources.
Google will pay for it all, even though it doesn’t directly help them interconnect new data loads. But it may serve future model for freeing up capacity on the grid edge that it can claim for future gridinterconnections
It’s doing that with DR aggregator Voltus for 100 MW but it’s building thousands of MWs of data centers and will need more. Data companies can easily pay for this. Crusoe says it can lease 1,000 MWs for about $15 bn a year, or $1.25 bn per month. Bloomberg New Energy Finance recently put that revenue figure at around $1.76 billion per gigawatt per month.
So Google and other AI players may decide to develop as much DR capacity in exchange for being able to connect more quickly to the grid.
Of course, data centers can also increase their own operational flexibility but that capability hasn't yet been fully stress-tested or demonstrated.
At this point, it’s not an either-or. It's both. But neither is fully here yet.