Google is expanding its virtual power plant agreement with Voltus in the PJM Interconnection by 1,070 megawatts, on top of an initial 100 megawatt agreement signed in June, the companies said on Thursday. Google will pay Voltus to aggregate distributed resources from residential, commercial and industrial customers, including batteries, smart thermostats, on site generation and industrial process adjustments, and Voltus will offer the combined resources into PJM’s market when the grid is strained.
Voltus expects to ramp to the programme’s full capacity over three to four years and then run it under contract with Google through 2040, a company spokesperson told Utility Dive. Ellen Zuckerman, Google’s head of energy market development for the Americas, said expanding the initial commitment tenfold demonstrates the company’s effort to actively bring its own capacity to the grids that serve it.
The context is a capacity squeeze of Google’s own industry’s making. PJM, the largest US wholesale power market, covering 13 states and the District of Columbia, has recently fallen short of its reliability margins despite sharply higher capacity auction prices, due in large part to rising data centre demand. Demand response revenue in PJM jumped 240 percent from 2024 to 2025 to 523.5 million dollars, according to Monitoring Analytics, the market monitor.
The market monitor has been pressing for requirements that data centres supply their own new generation before connecting, and PJM proposed a bring your own capacity framework that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission largely rejected earlier this month. Google’s contract is the voluntary version of that obligation: a hyperscaler paying for a gigawatt of flexible demand as if it were a power station, on a contract long enough, through 2040, to finance against.