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Three of the largest residential VPP players in the U.S. are teaming up to deliver capacity for data centers. Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla announced today an agreement to deliver a combined 16 gigawatts of flexible capacity to hyperscalers and utilities.
They’re essentially developing many smaller VPPs in places where new data centers may strain the grid. The flexible capacity would be delivered under what the group is calling a “capacity-as-a-solution” framework: Data centers pay for VPP capacity from nearby distributed energy resources, then in moments of grid stress, the utility calls upon those resources rather than asking the data center itself to curtail its load.
“When data centers are asked to throttle down operations during the most expensive and stressful hours of the day, we can activate our distributed power plants to help provide them the power they need,” Sunrun CEO Mary Powell said in the press release.
It’s not an entirely new concept. Momentum to leverage distributed energy resources to meet data center load growth began last September, when VPP provider Voltus announced a partnership with data center infrastructure developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure to establish the first “bring your own capacity” framework for VPPs and data centers.
