Tesla, Sunrun team up on 16 GW virtual power plant for data centers

- Tesla and Sunrun are partnering to create a 16-gigawatt "virtual power plant" (VPP) — a network of thousands of distributed home solar + battery systems that can be coordinated to send electricity back to the grid when needed, acting like a single large power plant. - This VPP would supply power to data centers (the buildings that house cloud computing and AI servers, which consume enormous amounts of electricity). The idea: instead of building new gas plants or transmission lines for data center growth, aggregate existing home batteries to meet that demand. - Sunrun is the largest residential solar installer in the US; Tesla makes the Powerwall home battery and runs its own energy software platform. The deal signals a major push to use home batteries as grid-scale infrastructure — a concept that has been small-scale and experimental until now. 16 GW is roughly equal to 16 nuclear reactors' worth of capacity.