PG&E’s SHARE program will recruit more than 20,000 California customers willing to let the utility control their Sunrun or Tesla solar-charged batteries or Renew Home smart thermostats to support the grid; participant rewards remain unspecified.
Google has pledged to cover all program costs, including about $14 million for the first phase, so PG&E customers will not pay for it. Google and Rewiring America will also help bring smart devices into homes, with discounts of $5,000 on Carrier battery-equipped HVAC units, or $10,000 for the first 25 customers.
Google and PG&E say SHARE is unrelated to costs from Google’s planned 250-megawatt San Jose “cloud research and testing facility,” whose grid-connection costs are disputed. The writer notes PG&E has canceled past virtual power plant pilots; clean-energy investor Jigar Shah called SHARE “not a success story,” while a PG&E manager described it as a complementary near-term pathway. Separately, Tesla and Sunrun’s California home-battery virtual power plant delivered a record 580 MW of peak power from more than 110,000 batteries; one program enrolling the batteries is set to lose funding next year.
