FERC unlocks 4.9 gigawatts in PJM by changing how virtual power plants are measured

FERC's late-July order told PJM, the country's biggest grid operator, to accept statistical sampling, not household smart-meter data, as proof that demand-response and virtual-power-plant programs deliver when the grid is tight.

A virtual power plant is a network of homes, smart thermostats, batteries, and other small devices that get paid to collectively cut or shift electricity use when the system is strained, behaving like a power plant that does not need a smokestack. The aggregators that run these fleets, companies like Voltus, have spent years trying to enroll residential customers into PJM's capacity market, the auction where the region's power is paid to be available years in advance. PJM's data requirement was the gate that kept them out.

FERC's order said PJM's existing rules would be "unjust and unreasonable" to allow to stand because PJM applies a different evidentiary standard to the resources it controls directly than to third-party aggregators. Statistical sampling is a standard tool in load research, used inside utility planning for decades.

FERC found PJM is missing out on at least 4.9 gigawatts of capacity under its current rules, the rough equivalent of several large power plants. PJM serves 67 million people across 13 states, and its own filing cited what the order calls "unprecedented load growth driven in part by hyperscale data center development." The country's biggest organized capacity market was blocking distributed flexibility while absorbing hyperscale data-center demand at the same time.

The first concrete deal under the new rules is already on the books. Voltus and Google signed a "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement for a 100-megawatt virtual power plant in PJM, the companies said in a joint announcement. Utility Dive framed the arrangement as a first-of-its-kind deal in which Google offers its data-center load into the PJM capacity market as a dispatchable, behind-the-meter resource, with Voltus as the curtailment-services provider.

Marissa Galizia, Voltus's senior director of partnerships, told Canary Media the ruling "unlocks hundreds of megawatts of residential load over the next several years" that had been blocked at the metering-data wall.

The pushback is real and worth naming. PJM and several of its incumbent utilities warned that statistical sampling is too loose a screen for a capacity market that pays resources to be available when called. PJM's filings described the metering-data requirement as essential to protecting ratepayers from being paid for performance that did not happen. FERC did not adopt that view, but the underlying question, whether aggregators can deliver at the household level, is now a compliance and audit problem PJM will have to solve under the new evidentiary rules.

Mintz's energy regulatory team noted the same evidentiary shift is showing up in adjacent FERC dockets, including the separate order directing PJM to revise its rules for co-located load, a category that increasingly includes data centers operating partly behind the meter.

The R Street Institute argued the pattern is broader: the absence of easy, standardized data access is what brought FERC into the metering fight, and the Voltus decision will harden as a precedent against utility-style gatekeeping of distributed resources.

Outside PJM, Renewable Energy World reported Mission:data and other residential aggregators are pointing to the same evidentiary standard as the lever they want pulled in MISO, CAISO, and ERCOT, where similar fights are still pending. The Voltus-Google 100-megawatt deal, due to register for PJM's next capacity auction, is the first concrete test of whether statistical sampling actually opens the door the order promises.