Voltus will aggregate batteries, smart thermostats, electric vehicles, and other flexible assets from homes and businesses into a Google-funded Virtual Power Plant (VPP). 

When the grid needs relief, the software dispatches those resources in concert. Participants get paid, and Google gets capacity without waiting for traditional interconnection queues.

A VPP is not a physical plant at all. It is coordinated software that turns thousands of small, customer-sited resources into something that behaves like dispatchable generation. Distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar panels, batteries, smart thermostats, and flexible loads already sitting on the grid become a decentralized fleet.