Google expands its Voltus virtual power plant in PJM to 1 GW

Google will pay for a gigawatt of other people's flexibility in PJM. Google and Voltus announced on October 22, 2026 an expanded agreement to build a 1 GW virtual power plant in the PJM Interconnection region, adding 1,070 MW of capacity to the up to 100 MW a year the companies agreed in June. Voltus will sign up businesses and homes whose batteries, smart thermostats, industrial processes and other flexible assets can cut demand when the grid is under strain, and pass on the benefits of Google's funding, such as bill savings and direct payments. Google calls it a tenfold expansion and "one of the largest known distributed capacity portfolios deployed by a hyperscaler to date."

The figures do not quite add up. An additional 1,070 MW on top of 100 MW is 1,170 MW by our arithmetic, which is neither 1 GW nor ten times the first deal. Latitude Media puts the deal at 1,070 MW, a size Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey said came from an assessment of what and where Voltus could sign assets, the size of the market and, above all, what batteries can do. Neither company's announcement reconciles the three numbers.

Terms from the CEO

The price, the delivery schedule and the data centers the capacity serves are all unpublished; Google has not shared a timeline, Canary Media reports. Guernsey filled in some of the terms. Google's contract extends through 2040 and will offset load from multiple data centers in PJM, she told Latitude Media. Voltus is securing commitments from its customers to cut demand or supply battery power at peaks through 2040, she told Canary Media, a much longer commitment than most demand-response programs ask for. PJM's annual capacity auction buys resources three years ahead, and the June agreement with Google was a three-year deal.

Long-term contracts like Google's can help make battery deployments financeable, Latitude Media reports. Guernsey declined to say how much of the gigawatt will be batteries beyond "a chunk," most of them commercial-scale, and said of the contract: "We're actually creating a market where they don't need to take merchant risk anymore because we have the longer-term contract here." Voltus also draws on some residential batteries through partners such as Sunrun, which agreed in August to supply capacity to Voltus's hyperscaler programs.

The gigawatt comes on top of what Voltus already bids into PJM's capacity market, Guernsey told Canary Media, and Google has committed to 100% carbon-free capacity from the virtual power plant, ruling out fossil-fueled backup generators. She also told Latitude Media that the first 100 MW has been fulfilled and was "over-subscribed."

When Voltus raised $225 million on October 8, it said it expected to grow its platform to 20 GW by 2030 and named no buyer for its Bring Your Own Capacity (BYOC) product. The next contract turned out to be the first one, in what Google calls a tenfold expansion.

A deal without a rule

Voltus's BYOC product predates the PJM rule it would have fit, and has now outlived it. On October 9 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected PJM's Interim Resource Adequacy Service, under which new large loads could be curtailed in shortages unless offset by new capacity from PJM's backstop procurement or a Bring Your Own New Capacity (BYONC) arrangement, and the BYONC rules went with it. Voltus had backed the package.

Google opposed the mechanism, not the idea. Its September 3 protest agreed that new large loads that do not bring sufficient new capacity should be curtailed before other firm wholesale customers in tight conditions, but asked FERC to reject IRAS: companies spending billions to bring new capacity need assurance of firm service, it argued, and without it, which it said PJM is legally precluded from providing, "BYONC is a gamble, not an investment." The same filing argued that "PJM's current demand response regime sidelines significant quantities of flexible load" and asked for bounded demand response products with defined availability. The Voltus contract buys demand-side capacity by private agreement instead, with no PJM rule attached.

It is Google's second gigawatt of flexibility in 2026. The protest cites 1 GW of executed demand response contracts Google announced earlier in 2026 with utilities including Indiana Michigan Power, under which its own data centers reduce demand during defined grid stress. That gigawatt flexes Google's load; this one pays other people to flex theirs.

The need is not in doubt. PJM's 2028/2029 capacity auction cleared 6,831.3 MW short of its reliability requirement at the $325/MW-day price cap, the second straight year short, per PJM's August 13 filing to FERC (our coverage). On October 6 Google also agreed to back 890 MW of Constellation nuclear uprates in PJM, a deal Constellation called "a direct response to PJM's 'Bring Your Own Power' proposal." Both deals now outlive that proposal. By our arithmetic, 1,070 MW is about 16 percent of the auction shortfall, though the October announcements do not say how much of it PJM would count toward reliability.

Outlook

FERC's order left PJM free to refile, and PJM told FERC in August that it intended filings by early to mid-November in its separate large-load proceeding that would include new transmission services for flexible large loads. If those give flexible demand a defined place in PJM's rules, contracts like Google's could gain a regulatory use alongside the commercial one. Until then the gigawatt is what Google chooses to pay for, and the 2040 term, if Voltus's customer commitments hold to it, will test, over a far longer span than demand response usually runs, whether distributed capacity can be contracted like a power plant.