It's Friday. The cheapest capacity in Northern California this winter may already be bolted to somebody's garage wall. It just needed a buyer with a balance sheet.
In today's edition:
🔌 Big Story: A hyperscaler pays for 21,000 home energy devices
⚡ Quick Hits: a geothermal drilling first, GM's cell lab bet, India's sodium-ion tender
💰 Capital: $3.1 billion for AI cloud, an activist fight at a storage fund
📋 Policy Watch: a Virginia gas loophole, a transmission review that won't wait
The Big Story
Google fully funds a 21,000-device virtual power plant at PG&E
Pacific Gas & Electric said on Sept. 3 that it is working with Google, Rewiring America, Tesla, Sunrun, Renew Home, Carrier and Demand Side Analytics on SHARE, a proof-of-concept virtual power plant enrolling tens of thousands of distributed energy devices across two Northern California counties. Google funds it in full through 2027. The structure is the point: a hyperscaler paying directly for distributed capacity, an early test of whether DER can absorb near-term AI load more cheaply than new gas.
"This program unlocks the potential of local distributed energy resources to strengthen grid capacity and resiliency while delivering meaningful benefits for local communities,"
Tesla, Sunrun and Renew Home will begin enrolling nearly 21,000 existing residential flexible energy devices this fall, PG&E said. The three said in June they could collectively unlock nearly 17 GW nationwide.
California accounts for roughly 4.7 GW of that pool, split about 75/25 between batteries and thermostats, and PG&E said those resources could start supporting the grid this year.
Carrier will support new deployments, including residential heat pumps with integrated battery capacity. PG&E called SHARE a "location-based approach" meant to inform future solutions for transmission constraints and local capacity challenges, with initial findings due later this year or in early 2027.
Source: Utility Dive
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Six stories from across the stack, from a new drill bit to a tandem cell.
Dig Energy completed its first commercial project using a novel low-cost drilling method aimed at cutting the cost of geothermal boreholes. Canary Media
GM expects to finish its Battery Cell Development Center this year, Latitude Media reported after a campus tour, a rare US automaker bet on owning cell chemistry rather than buying it. Latitude Media
AI data center developers are turning to industrial boilers and steam turbines as gas turbine slots sell out, POWER reported, against a US interconnection queue of 12,000-plus requests totaling about 1,570 GW. POWER
NTPC issued an expression of interest on Sept. 9 for a grid-connected sodium-ion battery, submissions open until Oct. 15, one of India's first tenders written around the chemistry. Energy-Storage.news
Victoria cancelled the proposed Central-North Renewable Energy Zone, saying the region has limited remaining grid hosting capacity for more solar and wind. RenewEconomy
Longi and Soochow University reported a 34.0% efficient perovskite-silicon tandem cell built on a dual-anchored interfacial passivation design. pv magazine
The Capital Stack
Zankore raises $3.1 billion in debt to build AI cloud capacity
Zankore secured a $3.1 billion senior term loan facility to fund an initial 100 MW of AI cloud capacity, with a stated path toward 1 GW. Debt rather than equity is the tell: lenders will now underwrite AI compute on infrastructure terms, and those megawatts land in an interconnection queue.
Source: DatacenterDynamics
Also in the capital stack:
NeoVolta received a $20 million senior credit facility from RoHo Capital Opportunity Fund, a Horizon Technology Finance and Roth Capital joint venture, expandable to $30 million and funded in full at closing. POWER
Gore Street's chair urged shareholders to reject activist investor Saba's proposal as a German asset sale fell through, a stress test of the listed-storage financing channel. Energy-Storage.news
Global cleantech investment fell in the first half of 2026, with the decline concentrated in China while other markets held up, according to Rhodium Group data. ESS News
Policy Watch
Dominion is invoking a reliability provision in Virginia's Clean Economy Act to justify new gas generation, months after legislators strengthened the 2020 law, a reading that would let a utility add gas inside a decarbonization mandate. Canary Media
West Virginia's PSC refused to pause its review of NextEra's MidAtlantic Resiliency Link, keeping the PJM-selected project on schedule while route and need challenges proceed. Utility Dive
Chris Bowen will ask energy ministers on Sept. 11 to move technical oversight of home solar, batteries and EVs into his department rather than an independent regulator, RenewEconomy reported, over objections about how DER standards get set. RenewEconomy
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