Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Rewiring America and Google have launched the Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency (SHARE) program, a virtual power plant (VPP) designed to deploy and manage flexible residential energy devices in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In comments to pv magazine USA, PG&E and Rewiring America said they expect the SHARE program to reach approximately 12 MW of capacity by 2028, including capacity from new battery-enabled heat pumps and as many as 21,000 existing distributed energy resources like Tesla Powerwall batteries and smart home thermostats owned by PG&E customers.
Rewiring America will handle customer signups and manage installer relationships, and funding for program operations and any incentives paid to participants will come from Google.
PG&E will operate the VPP through its DERMS platform, issuing dispatch instructions and measuring performance. The utility plans to use the program to test the locational value of customer-sited resources, with both the enrollment of existing home energy devices and the regional development of privately funded new technologies structured around specific regional grid needs.
“This is about delivering power at the speed our economy demands—while improving affordability and reliability for the people we serve,” said PG&E Chief Commercial Officer Chelle Izzi in a statement. “SHARE shows how investing in customers can unlock grid capacity, support growth, and bring real benefits back to communities.”
To support the program’s operational goals, Demand Side Analytics will assist with distributed power plant orchestration, while software provider encoord will supply modeling analysis to evaluate how the VPP impacts and shapes demand on both the distribution and transmission grids.
How homeowners can participate
PG&E customers in Santa Clara and Alameda counties will be eligible to receive new high-efficiency, battery-enabled heat pumps from Carrier, with the cost of equipment and installation partially subsidized by Google. A report from Fast Company indicates that customers will receive a discount of at least $5,000 toward a heat pump installation, with $10,000 available to the first 25 households to sign up.
Eligible Bay Area homeowners with existing distributed energy resources such as home batteries and smart thermostats will be invited to join the program from a pool of customers of Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home. The three companies first revealed plans to provide aggregated customer-sited resources to utilities and hyperscalers in June, and the SHARE program is the first publicly-announced program to utilize that offering.
PG&E says homeowners in the Sunrun/Tesla/Renew pool could receive ongoing incentives in exchange for participation (paid to customers separately from their electric bills), with the exact amount of those incentives dependent on technology, eligibility and enrollment wave.
As an example of current compensation for VPP participation, Powerwall owners enrolled under Tesla’s existing Virtual Power Plant partnership with PG&E’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP) are compensated with $2.00 for every additional kilowatt-hour (kWh) their battery delivers to the grid during a dispatched event, which can total up to $350 per year depending on the number of grid emergencies.
PG&E and Rewiring America say they will begin reaching out to eligible customers starting fall 2026. The partners expect the SHARE program to run through 2027, with initial findings from the program expected to be shared in late 2026 or early 2027.
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