Dive Brief:
- Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home could deliver nearly 17 GW of distributed energy capacity to unlock headroom in an increasingly congested U.S. power grid, the companies said Wednesday.
- The “capacity-as-a-solution” agreement combines the capabilities of the country’s three largest home energy providers. Sunrun and Tesla’s hundreds of thousands of solar-and-battery customers are concentrated in key data center markets like Texas, California and Virginia, Chris Rauscher, Sunrun’s head of grid services and electrification, told Utility Dive. Renew Home has more than 8 million smart thermostats and other devices under management.
- The companies’ offering addresses the “speed to power” challenge facing hyperscalers and utilities as data centers race to connect to the grid while providing “direct, tangible benefits to middle-class American families” via payments for participating in grid service or capacity programs, Rauscher said in an interview.
Dive Insight:
The three companies say they can provide 16.8 GW of capacity across 12 million devices in 9 million U.S. homes. Sunrun and Tesla manage 7.8 GW of installed battery capacity and Renew Home has about 9 GW of HVAC capacity based on its smart thermostats’ one-hour peak load shift potential, the companies say.
In Texas, which Rauscher said is the country’s second largest data center market, the companies have 1.3 GW of HVAC capacity and 440 MW of battery capacity. They have nearly 1.1 GW of HVAC capacity and 3.6 GW of battery capacity in California, the country’s third largest data center market.
Power system experts have been talking for years about the “theoretical” potential for distributed resources to unlock headroom on the grid, but “I don’t think anyone realizes the scale of the resource available right now,” Ben Brown, Renew Home’s CEO, told Utility Dive in an interview.
In Virginia, home to one of the world’s largest commercial computing clusters, Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home have 37 MW of batteries and 276 MW of HVAC capacity. They expect the combined capacity there to reach 500 MW by 2030.
Renew Home and its partners expect distributed resource adoption to remain robust for years to come, Brown said.
“When you look at [stationary] battery and electric vehicle adoption, we’re at the early stage of the growth we’re about to see,” he said.
Meanwhile, about 80 million U.S. homes have controllable HVAC systems while only 20 million have smart thermostats — “an accessible, low-cost solution that can immediately shift load,” Brown said.
“That is the sleeping giant of what you can bring to bear for the market in terms of capacity,” Brown said.
Rauscher said the forces driving the need for immediately-available distributed capacity on the mainland U.S. — rising electricity demand, an aging grid that’s costly and time-consuming to expand — are especially acute in Puerto Rico, where the rooftop solar systems that now account for 20% of the island’s capacity mix are increasingly paired with stationary batteries.
Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s transmission grid in 2017, significantly worsening reliability issues on an island of about 3.3 million people. As on much of the mainland, consumer and industrial loads are pushing power demand higher, Rauscher said. And the island’s aging fossil-fuel generators routinely go offline for planned or unplanned maintenance, crimping already-thin reserve margins, he added.
Puerto Rico saw around 225 load-shedding events in “the last months of 2025,” an executive for LUMA Energy, the private company that has operated the island’s power grid since 2021, told local media earlier this month.
“Puerto Rico is unfortunately ahead of the curve when it comes to all these dynamics,” which are likely to get worse before they get better on the island and on the mainlandon the mainland, Rauscher said.
Rauscher said LUMA has called upon Sunrun’s PowerOn Puerto Rico VPP at least six times this month. Above-average temperatures are among the drivers of elevated demand on the island this year, he said.
Janisse Quiñones, LUMA’s CEO, said in an interview with Radio Isla that the more than 200,000 customers with onsite solar and batteries played a critical role in shortening an early-June outage that affected about 170,000 homes and businesses.
“We always thank the residents when they support us in that,” Quiñones said, according to an English translation of a Spanish-language report in El Vocero.
