PG&E launches Google-funded SHARE virtual power plant in the Bay Area

Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced on September 3, 2026 a virtual power plant it calls SHARE (Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency), which the utility says will enroll nearly 21,000 existing home energy devices and put new battery-enabled heat pumps into Bay Area homes, with Google paying for the program. PG&E's release describes SHARE as a proof of concept, expects the enrolled devices to begin supporting the grid as early as fall 2026, and says the program is expected to run through 2027, with initial findings expected in late 2026 or early 2027.

The partner list is long: Rewiring America, Google, Carrier Global Corporation, Tesla, Sunrun, Renew Home, Demand Side Analytics, encoord, and "other partners," per the release. The division of labor is more specific. Tesla, Sunrun, and Renew Home enroll the existing devices. Carrier is the launch partner for the new installations, supplying its Performance Series variable-speed heat pump with EnerSync, which the release says stores energy and shifts its use to lower costs and support the grid during peak demand. Rewiring America works directly with households and local installers. PG&E and Demand Side Analytics orchestrate the whole fleet into what the release calls a distributed power plant "with the goal of unlocking additional capacity on the regional electric transmission system," and PG&E leads planning, analysis, and validation.

Google's role is the checkbook. The program "will be fully funded by Google to support customer incentives, technology deployment, and program delivery," the release says. It does not say how much that costs, and it gives no capacity figure in kilowatts or megawatts for the 21,000 devices or for the new heat pumps. The release's subheadline says the initiative aims to deliver "hundreds" of discounted upgrades and enroll "over 20,000" existing devices, so by device count the new hardware is the small half of the plant. The wire copy on PR Newswire carries the same text.

The SHARE program page, hosted by Rewiring America, fills in the consumer terms. Eligible households get $5,000 off the Carrier system, and the first 25 get $10,000 off. Eligibility, per the page, runs to owner-occupants of a single-family home, townhome, or two-to-four-unit building at an eligible address in Alameda or Santa Clara county who have lived there at least a year, have central air conditioning, are not already enrolled in a demand response program, and do not have rooftop solar or a whole-home battery. A footnote says savings are not guaranteed and vary with customer behavior, geography, and rate plan. The page says the offer is "coming this fall"; PG&E's release says outreach to eligible customers begins in fall 2026.

One phrase the release does not contain is "data center." The nearest it comes is "new and growing energy users," and a line from Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of energy and power, that the current grid can bridge the gap as demand scales if it is optimized correctly. The release says SHARE "reflects a shared commitment to responsible energy growth" and is structured so that existing customers benefit from growing grid capacity needs; the sentence after that one is where Google is named as the funder.

The idea has a paper trail that is less coy. On September 18, 2025, Rewiring America published a report, Homegrown Energy, arguing that hyperscalers should pay for heat pumps, rooftop solar, and home batteries to free up the grid capacity their data centers need. Rewiring America's announcement of the report put planned data center demand at 93 GW of the 128 GW of US demand growth it projected over five years, and claimed that hyperscalers paying for heat pumps in select homes that rely on inefficient electric heating, cooling, and water heating could meet one-third of their projected additional capacity needs. SHARE is that thesis with one hyperscaler's name on it, at a scale of hundreds of homes rather than the report's national arithmetic. Rewiring America's CEO Ari Matusiak is quoted in both documents.

Google has funded a VPP before, in a different market. On June 2, 2026, Voltus announced a three-year Bring Your Own Capacity agreement under which it aggregates up to 100 MW of distributed resources from local businesses and homes each year into a Google-funded VPP in PJM, a structure The Duck Curve covered when Sunrun agreed to supply home battery capacity to Voltus's hyperscaler deals. That release states its motive. It says Google and Voltus aim to create a blueprint "for how data center capacity needs can be met affordably and reliably through smarter utilization of the grid," and Michael Terrell, Google's global head of advanced energy, described it as a model for "unlocking capacity to meet new data center growth." The PJM deal is also denominated in accredited capacity. SHARE is denominated in devices and addresses: the release calls it a "location-based approach" meant to inform future solutions for transmission constraints, local capacity challenges, and rising demand across the electric system. PG&E's other recent residential flexibility offer, the V2X program expansion announced on August 24, 2026, was similarly modest in scale, with 250 early-adopter incentive slots.

Outlook

PG&E says initial findings are expected in late 2026 or early 2027 and that the concept "could expand beyond residential customers to include commercial, industrial, and utility-scale applications." Whether it expands will likely turn on figures the launch release does not contain: the megawatts the 21,000 enrolled devices deliver when called, and what Google paid per kilowatt of that. If the Voltus agreement is the template, the disclosure to watch for is an accredited capacity number rather than a device count. The difference between Google's two funded programs is in what they say out loud. The Voltus release names data center load growth as the reason for the June deal and calls it a repeatable path for other large energy users; PG&E's release names no load at all. Read together with Rewiring America's report, which spells out the mechanism SHARE implements, the September program looks like the same idea, hyperscaler money buying grid headroom where its own growth needs it, applied to two named counties, though PG&E's release does not say so and does not identify the transmission constraint its location-based approach is meant to relieve.