It's Monday. The cheapest megawatt in a hyperscaler's portfolio may be bolted to a garage wall next to somebody's water heater. Getting it there takes three signatures.
In today's edition:
🏠 Big Story: a startup wants data centers to fund home batteries
⚡ Quick Hits: Moss Landing smokes again, Bechtel walks, Australia clears 80%
💰 Capital: robots that build solar farms
📋 Policy Watch: Virginia's data center rules and Ofgem's queue fees
📊 Chart of the Day: coal sets a record
Presented by Moiz Kapadia
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The Big Story
Resilience Energy wants data centers to pay for household batteries
Resilience Energy, a startup run by former Airbnb sustainability head Ameet Konkar, launched with a plan to have hyperscalers and other large loads fund residential solar and batteries, then sell the resulting capacity to the utility. It has $5 million through a SAFE and says it has no installed capacity and no signed customers yet. Konkar told Latitude Media that registered interest covers more than 100,000 homes, and that fitting out 20,000 to 25,000 would be worth up to 125 MW.
It's a three-way transaction where our contract is with the utility, and then the large load is basically paying for that capacity, so that it doesn't go to the utility ratepayers.
Resilience would sign a 15 to 20 year capacity offtake with the utility and own the home systems outright, free to residents, where Renew Home and Voltus orchestrate hardware households already own.
It plans no factories and no installation crews, contracting hardware and dispatch software out and taking a tolling fee on each deal.
The math leans on capacity prices. PJM's 2028-29 auction cleared at its $325 per MW-day cap in July, would have hit $777 in some zones without it, and the backstop auction carries a proposed $555 cap.
Rewiring America estimated last year that hyperscaler-funded DERs could free at least 100 gigawatts on the existing grid. Google has signed a 100 MW Voltus deal and agreed to fund a PG&E pilot.
Source: Latitude Media
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack.
Vistra saw smoke rise again from its Moss Landing battery plant Friday morning, after the January 2025 fire that wrecked the site, this time as it is being demolished. Canary Media
Loudoun County supervisors voted a 12-month pause on new data center applications, halting intake in the world's densest data center market. Data Center Dynamics
Bechtel is leaving Bill Gates-backed TerraPower's nuclear project and filed a Virginia WARN notice covering about 200 Reston employees. EPC continuity constrains any reactor schedule. Construction Dive
Australia's National Electricity Market met 80.5% of demand with renewables on Saturday, a first, and RenewEconomy reported it could have passed 100% without heavy curtailment, a live test of a mostly inverter-based system. RenewEconomy
Yunnan University researchers reported perovskite cells tuned to the light that reaches 10 meters down, hitting 34.71% efficiency at simulated depth with an estimated 5.5 years before output drops to 80%, in Joule. IEEE Spectrum
The Capital Stack
Planted raises $31.8 million to send robots into solar fields
Planted, an Oakland company, raised $31.8 million to scale autonomous solar deployment aimed at data center load, Power Engineering reported. Labor and schedule now set the pace on utility-scale solar more than module supply does, and a machine that builds racking bets on that.
Source: Power Engineering
Also in the capital stack:
AI infrastructure led the week's ten largest US venture deals, according to Crunchbase's weekly tally, a running measure of private capital chasing compute and the power to run it. Crunchbase News
Policy Watch
Virginia Gov. Spanberger issued a data center framework meant to push large loads toward cleaner supply and keep cost shifts off ratepayers, RTO Insider reported. Virginia is where large-load tariff design gets tested first. RTO Insider
Ofgem plans to charge battery developers fees to hold positions in Britain's connection queue, pv magazine reported, an attempt to price out speculative applications that other congested regulators will watch. pv magazine
Chart of the Day
Coal sets a record in the middle of a clean tech sprint
Global coal consumption is set to rise 1.2% from 2025 to a record high, the IEA now says, reversing its own forecast. Fossil fuel emissions should still dip slightly this year, Canary Media reported, citing Carbon Brief, with China's Q2 emissions down 1% even as coal burn rose.
Source: Canary Media, Chart of the Week · September 18, 2026
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