It's Friday. Illinois just handed a few hundred thousand home batteries a summer job. Starting this season, ComEd can pay customers to push stored power back onto the grid when demand spikes, and it has cleared regulators to do so.
In today's edition:
⚡ Big Story: Illinois signs off on a utility-run fleet of home batteries
🔌 Quick Hits: A $3.26B Texas transmission loan, a Chinese solar plant that runs after dark, and a geothermal drilling record
💰 Capital Stack: A Swiss utility buys 90% of a UK battery platform
🏛️ Policy Watch: Oregon makes data centers pay their own way, and Britain speeds up solar
📊 Chart of the Day: Who is actually buying the world's grid batteries
The Big Story
Illinois approves ComEd's battery-based virtual power plant
The Illinois Commerce Commission has approved Commonwealth Edison's "scheduled dispatch virtual power plant," a program that will pay customers to discharge home and small-business batteries onto the grid during peak demand. It replaces a narrower VPP that ComEd withdrew last November after the state passed its Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, which directs Illinois utilities to deploy 3 GW of energy storage by 2030 and to build VPPs out of distributed resources like residential batteries, EV chargers, and smart thermostats. The approval landed the same week a heat wave pushed the PJM grid, which reaches into northern Illinois, to within 3 GW of its all-time demand record
"This is an important step in bolstering the potential of customer-sited energy resources to make the grid more resilient during periods of peak demand while helping customers receive additional value for their support at a time when supply costs are rising."
Participants must commit to five consecutive seasons, each running from June 1 to September 30, and are paid seasonally based on the amount of energy they inject into ComEd's distribution grid during peak events.
PJM's instantaneous load hit 162.7 GW on July 2, less than 3 GW shy of its 2006 record; the operator said it likely would have broken the record without heavy demand-response participation.
ComEd says it has already connected roughly 1.8 GW of distributed energy resources across its territory, the raw material a scheduled-dispatch VPP draws on.
The program is designed to shave load peaks in the densely populated Chicago area without waiting on new transmission or generation, and regulators framed it as the template the state's new law intended.
Source: Utility Dive
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Federal money for wires, a lithium-free battery bet, a geothermal speed record, and solar that keeps working after dark.
AEP Texas closed a Department of Energy loan of up to $3.26 billion to fund roughly 2,800 miles of new and upgraded transmission across its ERCOT footprint, infrastructure meant to carry as much as 41 GW of new load through 2030, much of it from data centers. Latitude Media
Frontier Power USA exercised its rights on four Texas battery projects totaling about 230 MW and 920 MWh that will use Eos Energy's zinc hybrid-cathode chemistry, one of the largest US commitments yet to a lithium-free, long-duration storage technology. Energy-Storage.news
Fervo Energy said its Sawtooth 7 rig set a drilling-pace record at Cape Station, reaching 19,448 feet with a 7,500-foot lateral in 21 days, cutting drilling rates by 143% since its first well and pushing enhanced geothermal closer to cost parity with conventional power. Fervo Energy
The EIA projected in its July Short-Term Energy Outlook that US power-sector natural gas use will hit a record in 2027 as electricity demand climbs, even as it expects summer wholesale power to average about $45/MWh, down from last summer on cheaper gas. EIA
New Hampshire enacted a law legalizing plug-in "balcony" solar, joining a small but growing set of states letting residents feed small panel setups into a standard outlet without a formal interconnection process. New Hampshire Bulletin
China Three Gorges brought its 1 GW Gobi Desert hybrid plant into commercial trial operation, pairing 900 MW of solar panels with a 100 MW concentrated-solar unit whose molten-salt heat lets the site keep feeding the grid for about eight hours after sunset without any batteries. The Cool Down
The Capital Stack
Alpiq buys 90% of UK battery platform Harmony Energy
Swiss power company Alpiq has agreed to acquire a 90% stake in Harmony Energy, one of the UK's larger grid-battery developer-operators, which will keep running under its own brand. The deal is a marker of how established European utilities are consolidating merchant storage platforms into their portfolios rather than building fleets from scratch, a pattern US utilities and IPPs are watching closely as batteries move from speculative assets to core grid infrastructure.
Source: Energy-Storage News
Also in the capital stack:
EQT agreed to buy Copia Power from Carlyle in a roughly $2.6 billion deal, taking over a platform with more than 2.6 GW of generation in operation or construction and a 9 GW-plus pipeline of data centers sitting behind co-located solar, storage, and gas, a bet on owning generation and large load at a single interconnection point. EQT
A new wave of clean-energy advocacy groups is reframing nuclear, geothermal, solar, and storage around domestic economics and jobs rather than climate policy, an argument aimed squarely at where the capital and the votes now are. CleanTechnica
Lithium-ion remains the long-duration storage benchmark to beat even at eight-hour durations, with pack prices now well below 2023 forecasts, a cost curve that keeps raising the bar for the zinc, iron, and thermal challengers courting the same capital. Latitude Media
Policy Watch
Oregon regulators approved a 29.7% rate increase for Portland General Electric tied to data-center load under the state's landmark large-load law, an early test of whether new tariffs can push the cost of serving hyperscalers onto the hyperscalers rather than ordinary ratepayers. OPB
Nearly every US state took some action in 2026 to curb rising power bills, from large-load tariffs aimed at data centers to efficiency programs for low-income customers, a scramble that is quietly reshaping which distributed and demand-side technologies get deployed and where. Canary Media
The UK scrapped mandatory pre-application consultations for large-scale solar projects, a permitting change the government says could cut up to 12 months from development timelines and speed connections onto a congested grid. pv magazine
Chart of the Day
Battery storage goes system-critical, and Asia is buying most of it
Global battery-storage capacity climbed to roughly 300,000 MW by 2025, and Asia alone installed more than the rest of the world combined between 2020 and 2025, a reminder that the deployment center of gravity for grid storage sits in Asia even as North American and European projects multiply.
Source: Reuters, "Five charts that explain the energy world right now" (Gavin Maguire), using the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy.
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