News Brief Summary

  • Sunrun, Tesla, and Renew Home said on Wednesday they can offer nearly 17 gigawatts of distributed energy capacity to free up space on the increasingly congested U.S. power grid.
  • The "Capacity as a Solution" agreement combines the capabilities of three of the largest U.S. residential energy providers. Sunrun and Tesla's hundreds of thousands of solar-plus-storage customers are concentrated in key data center markets such as Texas, California, and Virginia, Chris Rauscher, head of grid services and electrification at Sunrun, told Utility Dive. Renew Home manages more than 8 million smart thermostats and other devices.
  • The three companies said their approach aims to address the "speed-to-power" challenge facing hyperscale data centers and utilities, while providing "direct, tangible benefits" to "middle-class American households" through participation in grid services or capacity programs, Rauscher said in an interview.

Deep Dive

The three companies said 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 the one-hour peak load shifting potential of its smart thermostats, the companies said.

In Texas—which Rauscher called the second-largest data center market in the U.S.—the three companies have 1.3 GW of HVAC capacity and 440 MW of battery capacity. In California, the third-largest U.S. data center market, they have nearly 1.1 GW of HVAC capacity and 3.6 GW of battery capacity.

Power system experts have discussed for years the "theoretical" potential of distributed resources to free up grid space, but "I don't think anyone realized the scale of resources currently available," Renew Home CEO Ben Brown 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 total capacity in the region to reach 500 MW by 2030.

Brown said Renew Home and its partners expect adoption of distributed resources to remain strong in the coming years. "When you look at the adoption of (stationary) batteries and electric vehicles, we are in the early stages of growth that is about to come," he said.

Meanwhile, about 80 million U.S. households have controllable HVAC systems, while only 20 million have smart thermostats—"an affordable, low-cost solution that can shift load immediately," Brown said. "That's the sleeping giant in terms of capacity you can bring to the market," Brown stated.

Rauscher said the forces driving U.S. demand for immediately available distributed capacity—rising electricity demand, an aging grid that is costly and time-consuming to expand—are particularly pronounced in Puerto Rico. Rooftop solar systems on the island currently account for 20% of its capacity mix and are increasingly paired with stationary batteries.

Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico's transmission grid in 2017, significantly worsening reliability issues on the island of about 3.3 million people. Rauscher said that, as in most of the mainland, consumer and industrial loads are driving up electricity demand. He added that the island's aging fossil fuel generating units frequently go offline for planned or unplanned maintenance, squeezing already thin reserve capacity.

Puerto Rico experienced about 225 load shedding events in the "last few months of 2025," an executive at LUMA Energy, the private company that has operated the island's grid since 2021, told local media earlier this month.

"Puerto Rico is unfortunately ahead of the curve on all of these dynamics," which could worsen on the island and the mainland before they improve, Rauscher said.

Rauscher said LUMA has called on Sunrun's PowerOn Puerto Rico virtual power plant at least six times this month. He said above-average temperatures are one of the drivers of rising electricity demand on the island this year.

LUMA CEO Janisse Quiñones said in an interview on Radio Isla that more than 200,000 customers with on-site solar and batteries played a key role in shortening an outage in early June that affected about 170,000 homes and businesses. "We always thank residents for supporting us in that regard," Quiñones said, according to an English translation of the Spanish-language report in El Vocero.