As distributed energy resources such as residential solar rooftop increase in the next decade, aggregation into virtual power plants could save US utilities up to US$35 billion, according to The Brattle Group.

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).

Google hails project to retrofit data centre with battery storage as a step towards rolling out similar solutions across global fleet.

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.