Voltus raises $225M to turn homes and batteries into power for data centres

Voltus has raised $225 million in a Series D round. The San Francisco company pays businesses and homes to cut, shift or supply power when the grid needs it. Generation Investment Management led the round, with Activate Capital and the energy trader Vitol as co-leads.

Broadscale Group, Climate Investment, NGP, Ajax Strategies and All Aboard Fund also invested. Voltus called the round oversubscribed. It did not disclose its valuation.

“Electricity is now the constraint behind almost every major ambition we have, but it doesn’t have to be,” said Dana Guernsey, Voltus’s chief executive.

A power plant made of batteries and air conditioning

Voltus runs what the industry calls a virtual power plant. It draws on batteries, cooling systems and industrial processes at thousands of businesses and homes. It then sells that flexible capacity into electricity markets every day. Participants earn money and can lower their energy bills.

Its website puts the capacity on its platform today at 8.5 gigawatts (GW). The company expects to reach 20GW by 2030, across the US and Canada.

Voltus cites a forecast from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). NERC expects peak demand to grow 24% over the next decade, according to Voltus. That is more than double the growth NERC forecast two years ago.

Capacity for data centres

Much of the growth will come from a programme Voltus calls Bring Your Own Capacity. Large power users pay for capacity gathered from homes and businesses. In June, Voltus signed a three-year deal with Google to gather up to 100 megawatts a year in PJM, the grid region that covers much of the eastern US.

In August, Sunrun agreed to supply capacity from its home solar and battery systems for Voltus’s deals with AI hyperscalers. The new money will expand the programme in PJM and in MISO, the grid region across the central US.

“Voltus turns the flexibility of businesses, homes and batteries into reliable power, helping the AI buildout meet its growing energy needs while reducing pressure to build new fossil-fuel infrastructure,” said Dave Easton, a partner at Generation Investment Management.

In June, US federal regulators ordered a grid fast lane for data centres. In July, AI data centres were reported to be raising power bills at Rust Belt factories. In September, Google and Nvidia launched an alliance to make data centres more flexible.