Google’s smart home division has joined a group of companies including Ford, Sunpower and Sunrun in founding a new partnership centred around scaling the market for virtual power plants (VPP).

Carbon-free energy deals signed by Google and a California community energy group could be a widely replicable model.

Microsoft, Google and 10 other companies have joined the Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) Council, a CEO-led organisation launched at COP26 in November to push for the global deployment of technologies that can store and discharge energy for eight hours or longer.

Google will procure energy from a US$600 million portfolio of renewables and energy storage assets specially-designed to enable the search engine company’s data centres in Virginia to run on 90% carbon-free electricity.

Nevada utility NV Energy and Google are plotting a major solar-plus-storage facility outside of Las Vegas in a deal being billed as the largest battery-backed solar corporate agreement in the world.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has claimed that his company is already sold out of stationary storage products for next year before the first ones have even been shipped to customers.