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Residential solar and battery storage company Sunrun is joining the emerging market for edge computing by turning homes into decentralized data centers.
The company last week announced a pilot program to install “nodes” equipped with Nvidia chips in homes equipped with Sunrun’s solar and storage systems. The pilot is similar to one rolled out by the smart electric panel maker Span in April. Span said it is testing its approach in 100 newly constructed homes this year.
The edge computing trend comes as the electricity demands of artificial intelligence are outstripping the pace of new power generation and transmission lines added to the grid. That gap is due in part to years-long interconnection queues and equipment shortages. Around the world, up to half of the planned data centers scheduled to come online this year may be delayed, according to research by Sightline Climate.
“There’s aging poles and wires and ever increasing complexities and timelines to build a new generation,” Paul Dickson, Sunrun’s president and chief revenue officer, told Latitude Media. He noted that it can take a decade or more to build a one gigawatt nuclear power plant. By contrast, Sunrun builds the same amount of capacity every year, with more than 1 million residential customers already using solar and storage.
