Jennifer Hiller
The U.S. needs to build more power plants, poles and wires to meet rising electricity demand, but projects and supply chains are backlogged in every direction.
One of the quickest ways to add more electrons to the system could be tapping resources that already exist.
Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home this week said they would team up to create power plants out of U.S. households.
The plan would tap into latent capacity sitting under our noses: hundreds of thousands of home battery systems, operated by residential solar-and-storage company Sunrun and battery-maker Tesla, along with more than 8 million smart thermostats and other devices operated by Renew Home.
The companies said they will aggregate their residential networks into a collective resource that could deliver more than 16,000 megawatts of flexible capacity to the grid.
That's roughly 14 or 15 large nuclear reactors. An aggregated power plant wouldn't be available all the time the way a nuclear plant is, but it could send power for a few hours during crunch periods.
"When data centers are asked to throttle down operations during the most expensive and stressful hours of the day, we can activate our distributed power plants to help provide them the power they need while also protecting American families from footing the bill for costly new infrastructure," said Sunrun Chief Executive Mary Powell.
The companies aim to sell capacity to big tech companies that are rushing to bring energy-hungry data centers online, or to utilities facing a capacity crunch.
They aren't the only ones in this market, but it's a major pairing of some of the biggest home-energy companies. It's coming at a time when electricity demand is rising, in large part because of the artificial-intelligence race and the need to plug in more data centers.
The challenges facing the power grid are acute and much of the country's equipment is decades old and in need of replacement or repair.
Unlike any prior customer, new AI data centers can consume the same amount of electricity as an entire city, with high demand around the clock. Commercial power use is likely to surpass residential use next year for the first time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Beyond AI, many utilities are trying to keep up with growth in manufacturing, electric vehicles and residential markets, too.
While it takes several years to build traditional utility-scale generation and transmission lines, the companies say these distributed resources can be coordinated and deployed in months.
The companies didn't provide details but said that customers who decide to opt in would share in the rewards.
In Virginia, the data-center epicenter, the companies have more than 300 megawatts available now.
In Texas, another data center hot spot, they have 1,700 megawatts.
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June 25, 2026 09:25 ET (13:25 GMT)
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