California’s new gold rush is hidden in homes across the state. In 2024, PG&E territory alone hosted over a third of the country’s behind-the-meter storage capacity. Now, Google is footing the bill to grow this grid gold mine.
The tech titan is funding a PG&E-led VPP pilot in the Bay Area, known as the SHARE program. The aim is to enroll over 20K existing home devices (customers can also receive free or steeply discounted tech like batteries and heat pumps). Over the next year, SHARE will reveal whether hyperscaler funding can add much-needed grid capacity while benefitting surrounding communities.
At this year’s DERVOS, we caught up with Trevor Udwin, PG&E’s VPP and grid optimization manager. He told us what SHARE could mean for other utilities, and laid out his future grid flexibility vision:
The SHARE program stands out because it’s fully funded by Google. How do you think it could impact the country’s broader VPP landscape?
We hope to find that our proof-of-concept may support speed-to-power engagement with large loads. So, it could be a model where hyperscalers are funding this VPP resource.
At the same time, we’re making sure that this has to be rate-reducing, even for those who aren’t participating. Increasing volumetric sales and maintaining relatively stable costs on the grid should have pretty significant downward pressure on rates. We want to make sure that’s actually the case.
Have you run into any challenges in encouraging customers to participate in VPP programs?
That’s the DER challenge of the century—customer behavior is a tricky thing. In California, our ratepayers are generally very engaged. But as we look to see if they're able to adopt new technologies, that provides an extra layer of technical challenges. There's a back-and-forth of wanting to do this with customers, but making sure that the grid is capable of bringing them on.
It looks like electric vehicles are the next major grid asset. What will it take to ramp up bidirectional charging to support the grid?
EVs are a huge potential resource for us. We've decided to pull in a cohort of vehicle-to-grid resources to SHARE—that's a really great opportunity for us to understand the challenges here. For example, what will it take to get customers to plug in at a certain time? And what level of compensation really derives the value and is competitive?
What DER developments are you most excited for in the coming months and years?
Ultimately, being able to use existing behind-the-meter resources and develop new ones that have impact across the layers of the grid, including distribution and transmission. Historically, the way we’ve planned for distribution and transmission in California has been more siloed. We need to work on reducing the barriers to collapsing that stack.
I think we're coming into a new phase of advancement in that direction. The next five years are really an inflection point for us.