MIT Technology Review · AIJun 4, 2026, 00:51 UTC+8

How Virtual Power Plants Could Provide Energy for Data Centers

How virtual power plants could provide energy for data centers

Google is funding Voltus to build a virtual power plant in the PJM grid, aggregating up to 100MW of distributed energy resources per year, with operations planned for 2027.

Why it matters: HKR-H/K/R all pass, but this is AI-infrastructure reporting rather than a model or product release. MIT Technology Review plus the 100MW and 2027 details lift it to the featured threshold.

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Google is paying Voltus to build a PJM virtual power plant that aggregates up to 100MW per year, with operations planned for 2027. That says the data-center bottleneck has moved from annual energy volume to peak interconnection rights. The mechanism is blunt: Google funds local curtailment from EVs, thermostats, and other distributed assets so its regional data centers get breathing room when the grid is tight.

The Duke study gives the scale: about 40 hours of data-center demand reduction per year could let roughly 100GW of new load connect without immediate new plants or transmission. Nice story, but AI workloads split badly here. Training can slide; inference demand hits now. Google choosing to buy flexibility from other customers is an admission that its own compute load is not as interruptible as the data-center-flexibility narrative likes to imply.

Source: MIT Technology Review · AI · technologyreview.com
Published: Jun 4, 2026, 00:51 UTC+8 · Jun 4, 2026