VERNON, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 14: An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center (C) with closed-loop cooling system on April 14, 2026 in Vernon, California. A surge in demand for AI infrastructure is fueling a boom in data centers across the country and around the globe. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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The tech companies driving America’s surge in electricity demand have mostly answered questions about where their power will come from by thinking big: new gas plants, new transmission lines, and in some cases their own dedicated supply. Google is now testing a much smaller answer. It is paying to put heat pumps and batteries in people’s homes.
The program, called SHARE, is a virtual power plant: a network of home batteries, smart thermostats, heat pumps, and other household devices that a utility can signal to ease demand or feed power back to the grid when it is strained. It allows utilities to avoid buying expensive power on spot markets and to defer building new plants and wires. Pacific Gas & Electric is running it in Bay Area communities, Rewiring America is signing up households, and Google is paying the entire bill.
Virtual power plants are not new. What is new is treating homes as infrastructure. Indeed, the unanswered question is whether homes can be counted on like a power plant and called on in the precise places where the grid is congested. If they can, the household becomes part of the electricity system—not just an end user.
“If I had bells, I’d ring them,” Trevor Udwin, a principal product manager who leads PG&E’s virtual power plant efforts, told me. “Google is paying for this. Ratepayers are not paying for this.”
After roughly 25 years of flat demand, electricity use in PG&E territory is climbing, driven by hyperscalers, industry, and electric vehicles. The utility’s service area alone accounts for about one-eighth of the country’s EVs, Udwin says. California’s rates are already among the highest in the nation. And the conventional fix, building new transmission lines, takes years to plan and years more to construct.
SHARE is meant to buy time and room on the existing system. Google is funding the customer incentives, the equipment, and the program’s delivery. Through Tesla, Sunrun, and Renew Home, the program is enrolling nearly 21,000 devices already installed in customers’ homes, which are expected to provide about 11 megawatts of capacity. It will also deliver hundreds of deeply discounted upgrades, starting with battery-equipped heat pumps from Carrier. PG&E and Demand Side Analytics will coordinate the whole fleet as a single resource. The demonstration runs through 2027, with the new installations adding another megawatt by 2028.
Can We Depend On Homeowners?
ESCHENBURG, GERMANY – APRIL 27: A worker assembles heat pumps for residential buildings at a Bosch Home Comfort Group factory on April 27, 2023 in Eschenburg, Germany. The German government, as a major part of its climate policy, is pushing homeowners to invest in heat pumps to replace fossil fuel heating systems such as those based on heating oil and natural gas. New legislation will require new residential heating systems to be based at least 65% on renewable energy systems. (Photo by Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images)
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What separates SHARE from the demand-response programs utilities have run for two decades is precision. The old model was an on-off switch: at a system-wide peak, the utility asked everyone across its territory to cut back. SHARE instead targets specific stretches of the grid where congestion is building. It sends the whole portfolio of devices hour-by-hour instructions. Batteries, thermostats, heat pumps, and electric vehicles able to send power back to the grid will all follow the same signal.
The goal is to give PG&E’s planners something they don’t yet have: proof that household devices can be relied on with the same confidence as a transmission line. Until planners can count on these resources, they can’t build them into decisions about how much new demand the grid can take on.
Google pays only for what it gets. Existing battery owners are paid only for the additional power they deliver when PG&E calls, not for what their systems would have produced anyway. As for the heat pumps, their batteries run the device itself during peak hours for homeowners. In the hotter parts of PG&E territory, air conditioning makes up a large share of peak demand, so an efficient heat pump running on its own battery eases the grid exactly when it’s most stressed.
The rollout is happening in two stages. PG&E has already begun sending test signals to batteries in customers’ homes. Rewiring America will start signing up households for new equipment this fall, continuing into next year. Participants won’t have to change their habits.
“You’re not doing anything behaviorally here,” Ari Matusiak, Rewiring America’s founder and CEO, told me. The equipment belongs to the homeowner, and the battery does double duty: it gives the household resilience during outages, and it gives PG&E a resource it can call on when the grid is strained.
Matusiak sees SHARE as a test of a much bigger idea. “The household should be considered as energy infrastructure and not simply as the end of the line customer paying the bill every month.”
A data center developer today chooses among building new generation, paying for transmission upgrades, or supplying its own power. Matusiak wants homes on that list. Instead of spending that money on a power plant or transmission line, the hyperscaler would invest it in households, bringing down the upfront cost of heat pumps, rooftop solar, and batteries. Matusiak says the upgrades would be heavily discounted, and in some cases, effectively free. The pitch is speed.
“Household upgrades can start this afternoon,” he says. “They don’t take years to permit and get built.”
The Skeptics’ Case
MIAMI, FLORIDA – JANUARY 14: In an aerial view, high voltage power lines run through a sub-station along the electrical power grid on January 14, 2026 in Miami, Florida. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that AI tech companies need to ‘pay their own way’ when it comes to their electricity consumption so that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their data centers. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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The skeptic’s case is straightforward. Economics 101 says more demand with no new supply means higher prices, and data centers are a major new source of demand. PG&E and Google stress that SHARE isn’t tied to any specific data center project. But the current demonstration is a test case for how data centers might someday buy their way onto a crowded grid.
Homeowners who get a deeply discounted heat pump may call it a good deal. Their neighbors, living down the road from a new server farm, may conclude that the community is subsidizing Big Tech’s electricity.
There are practical doubts too. Locating a solar-and-battery farm next to the data center might be easier than having utilities try to get equipment into customers’ homes; no enrollment data exists yet. Moreover, hyperscalers remain largely inflexible, unable to cut their own use when the grid is stressed.
Then there is scale. SHARE’s roughly 12 megawatts would cover only a sliver of a single data center, which can draw 100 to 500 megawatts or more.
The answer lies in how the grid’s costs actually work. Poles, wires, and substations are fixed costs, already paid for whether the system runs full or half-empty.
“There are times of the day on our grid right now where there is ample space,” PG&E’s Udwin says. “The highway is devoid of cars.” Selling more power in those hours, and cutting demand when the grid is jammed, spreads the same fixed costs across more electricity sales. That should push rates down for everyone.
Matusiak concedes that systemwide benefit is real but slow, and invisible to families paying the bill. That’s the point of putting the investment directly into homes: the benefit is felt immediately, in a new heat pump and a lower bill. PG&E, for its part, says it won’t expand the model until the analysis proves the reliability and rate effects.
“We don’t want to scale something without being 100% sure,” Udwin says. The largest unknown may also be the biggest opportunity: the cars in people’s driveways. “These are huge batteries compared to what we’re used to,” he adds.
The fight over data centers has so far pitted Big Tech’s appetite for power against residential electricity bills. SHARE tests whether that fight can be reframed so that householders become part of the solution—not the ones stuck with the bill.
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