An alternative vision of residential flexibility for data centers

Three companies that manage smart home energy devices — Renew Home, Tesla, and Sunrun — say they can offer a combined 16 gigawatts of power capacity to data center companies. The idea is to use smart thermostats, home batteries, and solar systems already installed in homes to shift electricity demand and ease pressure on the grid as data centers driving the AI boom strain power supplies.

Renew Home, which grew out of Google, manages around 9 gigawatts of home devices, mostly smart thermostats. Most customers with these devices are not enrolled in any special utility program. Instead, when someone sets up a smart thermostat through Renew Home, the company can automatically adjust things like pre-cooling a home before peak-price hours to save energy costs. That same flexibility, the companies argue, can also be packaged and sold to data center operators or utilities without changing anything the homeowner sees or does. In other words, hyperscalers (large tech companies operating data centers) could end up indirectly funding the rewards homeowners get, replacing or supplementing what utilities have historically paid.

For now, the practical plan includes bidding one gigawatt of this flexible capacity into an upcoming emergency power procurement in the PJM grid region, which covers much of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest. If you already have a smart thermostat, battery, or solar system enrolled with one of these companies, this news mostly means your device's flexibility could soon be used for a new purpose — supporting data center power needs — without requiring you to sign up for anything new or change your daily routine.