Google funds PG&E's virtual plant, and the price stays private

Google is paying the full cost of SHARE, a PG&E proof of concept that will enroll nearly 21,000 already-installed residential devices—Tesla and Sunrun batteries and Renew Home thermostats among them—into a block the utility can dispatch. The three vendors begin work with PG&E this fall, and the program runs through 2027. PG&E calls the arrangement privately funded distributed energy capacity, and the phrase is doing real work: what Google is buying is coordination rather than hardware, most of which is already sitting in customers' homes.

That enrollment is plausible because the fleet math was already on the table. Renew Home counts 4 GW and counting of controllable load across millions of smart thermostats, and in June the three companies said they could collectively unlock nearly 17 GW of flexible energy capacity nationwide. California represents 4.7 GW of that, roughly three-quarters batteries to one-quarter thermostats, and PG&E says those existing resources could begin supporting the grid through SHARE later this year.

PG&E's description of the design is the tell. The utility calls SHARE a location-based approach, meant to inform future solutions for transmission constraints, local capacity challenges and rising demand across the electric system; that aims a distribution-level asset at transmission-level scarcity. It is the argument this publication has been making about grid access becoming the underwriting variable: a constrained substation prices capacity better than a nameplate does.

Carrier's role points to what comes after the existing fleets. Last year the manufacturer said it would begin deploying variable-speed residential-scale heat pumps with up to 10 kWh of integrated battery capacity, and it started an Electric Power Research Institute pilot to test load shifting in the field, according to Canary Media. Hakan Yilmaz, president of Carrier Energy, said SHARE would demonstrate how the company can help deliver "distributed capacity with the firmness to scale as a fast and reliable grid resource." The sequence runs from devices already sold to devices Carrier has yet to ship.

What the program does not disclose is its price. Google is funding SHARE in full and the coverage does not say what the check is for, which leaves the pilot doing two jobs at once: a procurement decision and a statement. Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of energy and power, says SHARE will show that today's grid, with proper optimization, can meet rising power demand without burdening ratepayers, a claim with a deadline attached—PG&E says initial findings arrive later this year or in early 2027.

Set SHARE beside Google's other September moves and a pattern appears. Google's offtake already anchors a $1.9 billion DOE nuclear loan, and a solar-plus-storage project on a reclaimed West Virginia coal mine paired long-duration storage with a hyperscaler buyer of capacity rather than energy. SHARE is the demand-side bookend to both, and the question worth asking is not whether the pilot works but whether it scales past one: PG&E says the concept could expand to commercial, industrial and utility-scale assets, at which point the cheapest megawatts on the system are the ones customers have already paid for.