Voltus

Thank you to Jeff St. John at Canary Media Inc. for the conversation and for bringing more attention to this issue! This is truly a huge win for the distributed energy resource industry and for energy users in PJM. Voltus & Mission:data proved that utilities are not reasonably making AMI data available and that PJM should allow statistical sampling for homes with AMI as they already do for homes without AMI. When that sampling methodology is allowed, we’ll be able to register many more homes that want to participate in Demand Response than we are currently able to - unlocking much needed capacity for PJM. The team at Voltus will keep working to help ensure this results in a new statistical sampling process that brings much more flexible residential load to the market. Big shout out also to Lydia Estreed Kimaya Abreu Emily Orvis Jon Wellinghoff Dana Guernsey and the whole team at Voltus and Mission:Data that worked on this. https://lnkd.in/gn-7_kHA

Celebrating 10 years of Voltus 🎊 A decade ago, our founders started Voltus based on the idea that businesses and homes flexing their energy use would be central to creating the power grid that we need. Today, that idea has become a reality. Not only are flexible resources like those on the Voltus platform a reliable, clean, and affordable approach, they’re the ideal way to bring new capacity to the grid fast enough to meet rapidly growing demand. Alongside our 10th birthday, we are celebrating a few other milestones: · $500M+ in value to customers · 2M MWh delivered for the grid · 1M metric tons of CO₂ avoided · A first-of-its-kind partnership with Google · Our first major acquisition: Brightfield A million thanks to our customers, partners, investors, and Voltus team members. You are the reason we keep striving. Here’s to the next 10!

In a precedent-setting ruling, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled in favor of Voltus and Mission:data’s data access complaint, citing the need to “remov[e] barriers to the participation of demand response resources” in wholesale markets and acknowledging the obstacles residential data access poses industry-wide. Nearly 40% of all electricity consumption in the U.S. is residential (EIA), but these customers are often excluded from wholesale market participation because data-sharing systems aren’t built to scale — a barrier that uniquely limits this customer class. FERC has validated these concerns and, with them, the importance of this data to residential wholesale market participation — a meaningful step for an industry that’s long flagged this as a barrier.

Proud of this one. Will Lachance, one of Voltus’s staff engineers, wrote up why Voltus moved its internal data tooling to marimo, and it captures two things I care a lot about: 1) Reproducibility by design — predictable execution and clean version control, which matter enormously in a regulated space like energy. And 2) a more collaborative culture, where analysts and engineers build on the same tools instead of working in silos. The best tools don’t make you choose between rigor and accessibility. Read the blog below -- Thanks Will! https://lnkd.in/gr9Uqnsv

Shout out to Eduardo Garcia at Reuters for calling out two of the most important things about #virtualpowerplants in his recent article. One, flexible capacity is a winning solution when it comes to meeting growing demand for electricity: it’s fast, and as this year’s Utilize Coalition report highlights, it’s amazingly cost effective. And two, the best approaches to addressing massive growth in energy demand meet the needs of the grid while also benefitting energy customers in direct, tangible ways.  By connecting customers — from  residential energy users to commercial building tenants, hotels, big box retailers and manufacturing facilities  —  with financial benefits for flexing their load, Voltus has grown into one of the largest VPP operators in the world. Now we’re bringing those customers even more value and delivering the fast, flexible capacity the grid needs through our #BringYourOwnCapacity (BYOC) model. As our own Dana Guernsey commented: “The key element is that it’s the data center that funds the resources that Voltus is building. This ultimately serves to both create additional revenue streams for the businesses and residents that participate with Voltus, while also demonstrating that new loads can come online without raising electricity rates.” https://lnkd.in/gF-vF43J

Voltus is thrilled to welcome Arielle Bertman as VP of Product and Jessica Gunter as VP of Marketing. 🎉 Arielle brings 20+ years building products at the intersection of energy, software, and AI, with experience spanning SPAN.IO, Google, Amazon, PG&E, and Bain & Company. She'll lead Voltus's Product and Design teams. Jess brings two decades of energy sector expertise across PG&E, Opower, Nest, Google, and Renew Home. She's a full-stack marketing leader with deep experience in B2B and B2C, hardware, and software — and she'll be leading everything from brand to growth to corporate communications. This news comes on the heels of our BYOC™ partnership with Google and our acquisition of Brightfield AI — a pivotal chapter for Voltus and the customers we serve. Welcome to the team, Arielle and Jess. 🎉 Read the full story, here: https://lnkd.in/gWAcQiTP

Big news! 🎉 We are thrilled to announce our acquisition of Brightfield AI to accelerate C&I energy storage deployment. The C&I sector accounts for 60% of total U.S. electricity consumption, yet it hosts less than 1% of installed battery capacity. By integrating Brightfield’s AI-native battery development platform and their team of distributed storage veterans, we are removing the traditional bottlenecks to scale energy storage for our partners and customers. As our CEO, Dana Guernsey, puts it: “Brightfield’s execution expertise and proven industry credibility are precisely what we need to scale storage and provide our customers with another answer to their challenge of higher energy costs." Read the full press release below:  https://lnkd.in/gbRmyqEe #virtualpowerplants #distributedenergyresources #energystorage

Google will fund a three-year, 100-MW virtual power plant in the PJM Interconnection with the aim of creating an “industry-leading scalable blueprint” for unlocking capacity to meet data center demand, the tech giant announced Tuesday. The company is partnering with VPP operator Voltus, which will aggregate distributed energy resources from residential, commercial and industrial customers across the regional transmission organization, a spokesperson for Voltus said in an email. Google has also worked to make its own data centers flexible, Amanda Peterson Corio, the company’s global head of data center energy, told Utility Dive, but reasons that it is often faster and more cost effective to pay other customers to shift their electricity usage. “The cost of capital in the data center, of our chips, can be billions and billions of dollars of hardware that only gets utilized to our customers if it’s running,” she said. “While there may be optionality for flexibility for some of our training of those chips, we want to make sure that we’re bringing all resources to bear from the system.”

Today, we’re announcing a three-year agreement with Voltus to unlock up to 100 megawatts (MW) of new electricity capacity annually in the PJM grid region. We are doing this by tapping into flexible distributed energy resources to create what's known as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). So, why is a VPP so transformative for our energy future? By grouping together everyday devices—like smart thermostats and home backup batteries—we can coordinate them to reduce power usage during the times when the grid needs it. Research shows that U.S. consumers could save more than $100 billion over the next decade through these types of smart solutions. This is a transformative model because it creates new, clean capacity for the system AND channels investment directly into local communities by paying participating homes and businesses for their energy flexibility. 🏡💡 I’m incredibly proud of my colleagues and our partners for embracing new models like this that move us toward a more robust, clean, and affordable energy system. Read more about the agreement here ⤵️ goo.gle/4dH3QKA

How do you scale data centers while lowering electricity bills for everyday homes and businesses? You build a Google-funded Virtual Power Plant 🤓 Just announced - Voltus, Inc. and Google just launched a landmark, 3-year Bring Your Own Capacity (BYOC) partnership to meet fast-growing data center load growth through a smarter, decentralized grid. How? Well we're connecting everyday devices like smart thermostats and local batteries to create a decentralized, software-driven power plant. When electricity demand spikes, the system automatically synchronizes these resources to reduce grid stress instantly without the end user even noticing. Here's what this deal means by the numbers: 🟢 Voltus will aggregate 100 MW of clean, distributed capacity annually into a Google-funded Virtual Power Plant (VPP). 🟢 The initiative strengthens the system for the 67 million people living and working across the PJM grid region. 🟢 Better utilization of existing grid assets could save U.S. consumers over $100 billion over the next decade (!!!), according to The Brattle Group. 🟢 Google has now unlocked a total of 1 GW of demand response capacity globally through its various utility partnerships. Instead of building expensive, slow-to-deploy physical infrastructure, this software-driven approach orchestrates everyday assets like batteries and smart thermostats to slash grid stress during peak times. The best part is that the participating local businesses and homes get paid directly! Read more on the Keyword - https://lnkd.in/gdrX7tPN #VirtualPowerPlants #GridReliability #DataCenters #Sustainability #EnergyTransition