Voltus Just Raised $225 Million to Pay You to Use Less Electricity

When a warehouse turns its freezers down for two hours, it looks to the grid like a power plant switching on. Voltus pays thousands of businesses to do exactly that, every day of the year.

Voltus, the largest demand-flexibility company in North America, just announced a $225 million Series D led by Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. Today's guest, co-founder and CEO Dana Guernsey, plans to use it to grow from 8.5 gigawatts of flexible capacity to 20 by 2030, a quarter of the Department of Energy's target for the whole country.

Google is already a customer, paying Voltus to line up as much as 100 megawatts of that flexibility in PJM, the grid that runs from Illinois to Virginia, so its data centers can connect faster. It's the first deal of its kind, and Dana's argument is that "do no harm" is too low a bar for a company with Google's balance sheet; a data center can leave the grid better than it found it.

In this episode:

• What a Walmart, a winery, a glass factory, and a sewage plant each do when Voltus calls
• The church that stayed open and the factory that kept a whole shift, both because of Voltus checks
• From $25 a year for a thermostat to $11 million for a data center, who gets paid what for turning things down
• How 50,000 homes become 100 megawatts, and the PJM rule that kept them out until August
• The year governors and the White House learned what PJM is
• Why Google is paying its neighbors to flex instead of building a gas plant that runs 25 hours a year

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