It's Monday. The biggest power plant news of the week involved no turbines, no fuel, and no concrete. Google is paying for capacity that lives in other people's basements, and PJM gets the benefit.
In today's edition:
⚡ Google funds a first-of-its-kind virtual power plant in PJM
🔌 Quick Hits: a nuclear restart jumps four years, geothermal hits a wire problem
💰 Capital: software-defined storage comes out of stealth
📋 Policy Watch: $850M for coal, offshore wind in court
📊 Chart: China's nuclear build-out, in one picture
The Big Story
Google funds a 100-MW virtual power plant in PJM.
Google announced Tuesday it will fund a three-year, 100-MW virtual power plant in the PJM Interconnection, partnering with VPP operator Voltus in what the companies call a first-of-its-kind "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement. Voltus will aggregate distributed energy resources from residential, commercial, and industrial customers across the RTO and dispatch them when the grid needs relief.
"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." Utility Dive, June 3, 2026
Batteries, smart thermostats, EVs, and other flexible devices from homes and businesses will make up the fleet, with participants paid from Google's capacity commitment.
Google is the first hyperscaler to directly fund a VPP under the Bring Your Own Capacity framework Voltus launched in September 2025.
The VPP is expected to be operational in 2027.
The companies say the deal "establishes a repeatable path for other large energy users to follow."
Source: Utility Dive · Voltus announcement
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Nuclear restart accelerates, a pipeline hits wires, and the build-out keeps getting more expensive.
Constellation won approval to shift 760 MW of capacity interconnection rights from its Eddystone gas plant to the Crane nuclear unit, pulling the Three Mile Island restart from 2031 to 2027 by routing around stalled transmission upgrades. Power Engineering
Fervo Energy faces western transmission constraints that Jefferies analysts say could slow the roll-out of its 42-GW geothermal pipeline across Nevada, Utah, and Idaho; the company is eyeing behind-the-meter workarounds. Utility Dive
Google and Intersect will build their first project since Google acquired the developer: co-located wind, solar, battery storage, and some on-site gas in Texas, all dedicated to powering a single data center. Latitude Media
Waymo is sending its retired robotaxi battery packs to recycler B2U, which will repurpose them as second-life grid storage. Latitude Media
Rystad Energy projects global grid capex will top $650 billion in 2026, more than double 2020 levels, with a transformer manufacturing expansion wave running through 2028, most of it driven by U.S. demand. pv magazine
The Capital Stack
Volt Harbor emerges from stealth with $2M to make storage software-defined.
Michigan-based Volt Harbor closed a $2 million seed round led by MFV Partners to commercialize its patented MAC-BESS platform: modular, software-defined battery storage aimed at data centers and the grid. The pitch is treating storage capacity the way cloud computing treats servers, provisioned and reconfigured in software rather than fixed at install. Small check, but it lands where the market is pulling: storage vendors are racing to sell flexibility to data centers, not just megawatt-hours.
Source: CleanTechnica
Also in the capital stack:
Open Circuit asks whether NextEra's bid for Dominion would be the biggest utility merger in US history, and debates whether distributed AI computing changes the data-center power equation. Listen
Policy Watch
DOE committed up to $850M to build two new coal plants and modernize 14 more, while ordering OUC's Stanton coal unit to keep running; federal capital propping up thermal capacity changes the near-term competitive math for clean firm power chasing the same AI load. E&E News
Seven states sued over the administration's $928M deal paying TotalEnergies to cancel offshore wind leases; the projects at stake represent 28% of planned generation in the New York Bight. CNN
GAO found DOE may have broken the law in shifting appropriated energy funds, putting quadruple the appropriated money into geothermal while slashing solar and wind, a reshuffle of which technologies get federal demonstration support. Latitude Media
Chart of the Day
China's nuclear power capacity nearly doubled since 2016.
China added 24 GW of nuclear capacity from 2016 to 2024 and another 3.3 GW since, with 36 reactors under construction, more than 49% of all nuclear construction on Earth. Data via EIA and the IAEA.
Source: EIA Today in Energy · June 5, 2026
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