When Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun, observed that "the grid of the 1800s cannot power the innovation of 2026," she was pointing to one of the most pressing challenges facing American households and tech companies alike. Now three of the nation's largest home energy companies have announced an agreement that could reshape how electricity reaches American homes — and whether it costs less to run them.
Sunrun, the country's largest rooftop solar and battery operator, has teamed up with Renew Home and Tesla to aggregate more than 16 gigawatts of flexible energy capacity from millions of existing home devices. The coalition draws on hundreds of thousands of home battery systems operated by Sunrun and Tesla, alongside flexible peak capacity from more than 8 million smart thermostats and devices managed by Renew Home. Together, they would form the largest distributed power plant in the country.
The timing could not be more urgent. Hyperscalers — the companies building massive data centers to power AI — are racing to bring compute online while interconnection queues lengthen and energy costs climb. The new framework offers a counterintuitive solution: instead of building costly new power plants, it taps energy resources already sitting inside millions of American homes. Home batteries can inject clean electrons onto the grid during peak demand, while smart thermostats shift household load away from expensive hours. No new hardware, water, land, or interconnection paperwork is required for the data centers receiving the power.
In Virginia, home to the densest cluster of data centers in North America, the companies already have more than 300 megawatts of capacity ready for immediate deployment. That figure is expected to grow to at least 500 megawatts by 2030, rivaling some of the state's largest generation facilities.
The arrangement is also designed to ease costs for everyday ratepayers. New analysis from The Brattle Group estimates that better utilization of the existing power grid could reduce U.S. electricity bills by $110 billion to $170 billion over the next decade. Grid infrastructure is typically sized for peak demand that occurs only a fraction of the year, leaving expensive equipment underutilized most of the time — a bill that gets passed to consumers. By unlocking transmission capacity and easing distribution congestion, the distributed power plant model aims to capture that wasted headroom.
"The stakes are clear. America's grid faces mounting pressure from data centers, electrification, and manufacturing growth that no single infrastructure solution can solve fast enough," said Colby Hastings, Senior Director of Residential Energy at Tesla. "Sunrun, Renew Home, and Tesla believe that a huge piece of the answer is already in place — in the batteries, thermostats, and electric vehicles inside millions of American homes, waiting to be put to work."
The companies have also committed capacity to PJM's proposed Reliability Backstop Process, which could immediately unlock over a gigawatt of power with more deployable in the years ahead. For households, the promise is equally tangible: earn rewards for letting your devices flex with the grid, while keeping the lights on during outages. For data centers, a first-come, first-served allocation of capacity is already available — deployable in months, not the years a new power plant would require.