CPower Energy, a virtual power plant platform, said Monday that its customers delivered 38 GWh of load relief to the grid from January to September, 137% more than they did in all of 2024.
CPower, an NRG Energy subsidiary, says it has about 6.7 GW of distributed energy resources under contract, making it one of the largest providers in the U.S. In 2024, CPower’s customers delivered a total of 16 GWh of load relief, the company said.
“Together, customers contributed enough energy to power more than 8 million homes during a peak event, or approximately every household in the state of Texas,” CPower said, citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
CPower said more large energy users like industrial facilities, data centers and hospital systems are “leveraging their flexible energy” to alleviate the pressure of increased electricity prices, “and in some cases, interconnection barriers.”
“At the same time, advances in demand-side technology enable customers to support the grid with minimal disruption to their operations,” the company said.
Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said in a September report that VPP deployments jumped 33% from 2024 to 2025 – along with a 38% increase in unique offtakers, a 35% increase in monetized programs and a 13.7% increase in VPP capacity.
“While data centers are the source of new load, there’s an enormous opportunity to tap VPPs as the new source of grid flexibility,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid edge for Wood Mackenzie in a release accompanying the report.
Wood Mackenzie said that PJM and ERCOT, “the regions with the greatest utility commitments to data center capacity, also have the greatest disclosed VPP offtake capacity.”
CPower CEO Michael Smith said in the company’s release that conversations about load growth often miss the “biggest piece of the puzzle: customer flexibility.”
“It’s affordable, available and reliable — and we don’t need to build new infrastructure to scale it,” Smith said.
