This issue is about the scramble for capacity. Google is paying other customers to move load around in PJM. R Street is making the case that competitive transmission builds faster and cheaper than the incumbent model. DTE is buying Michigan-made batteries for a grid suddenly full of large-load suitors. Constellation's Three Mile Island restart got a critical FERC waiver. And DigitalBridge is buying a power platform because the data center industry has learned what every industry eventually learns: whoever controls the energy controls the future.
The Lede
VIRTUAL POWER
Google Funds 100-MW Virtual Power Plant in PJM
Google will fund a three-year, 100-MW virtual power plant in PJM through a new deal with Voltus, which will aggregate flexible load from homes, businesses, electric vehicles, smart thermostats, batteries, and industrial customers. Google has worked on making its own data centers more flexible, but its energy chief told Utility Dive the harder truth: when billions of dollars of chips are sitting in a facility, the company would rather pay other people to shift load than idle its own machinery.
That is the interesting part. This is not philanthropy or green branding. It is a large energy user paying for flexibility where the grid actually needs it, instead of waiting for new generation or transmission to arrive on the usual utility timeline. PJM is already dealing with rising capacity costs, shrinking reserve margins, and load growth from data centers. Google's VPP is a small answer, but it is the right kind: use existing infrastructure better, and stop treating peak demand as an unavoidable weather event with invoices.
Grid Take: This is what a more mature data center strategy looks like. The grid does not only need more supply. It needs customers rich enough, sophisticated enough, and desperate enough to pay for smarter demand.
Other Things to Check Out
C3: A Consumer-First Grid Arushi Sharma Frank's piece on Texas is a great read and works well alongside the Google VPP story. ERCOT is moving toward a framework where large loads can accept curtailment in exchange for faster energization. The mechanism is Provisional Controllable Load Resource status, where developers commit to operational flexibility and enter a new batch interconnection process with defined study timelines, firm-load floors, and binding commercial commitments.
E3: Data Center Grid Utilization and Cost-of-Service E3 argues that data centers do not inherently raise costs for everyone else, since high-utilization loads can spread fixed grid costs over more kilowatt-hours, but outcomes depend on system conditions, tariff design, collateral, exit fees, and whether incremental revenues exceed incremental costs.
The Economist: Europe's Problem of Too Much Power The Economist looks at the strange new European problem of having too much electricity in some markets at some times. This is what happens when intermittent supply grows faster than storage, transmission, and flexible demand. Scarcity is not the only way to fail at energy policy.
Bloomberg: China Wastes More Clean Electricity Bloomberg reports that China's emissions rose as more clean electricity went to waste. Building renewables is not the same thing as integrating them. Without enough transmission, storage, and dispatch flexibility, clean power becomes a stranded asset with better public relations.
National Center for Energy Analytics: America's Electricity Grids at a Crossroads This report puts the current load-growth fight in a broader historical frame. The U.S. grid was built over a century into an enormous machine for reliable power, but that machine has frayed over the past 15 years just as demand is returning through data centers, reshoring, and electrification. The question is no longer whether demand will grow. The question is whether the institutions around the grid still know how to build.
Major Stories
REPORT - TRANSMISSION
R Street Makes the Case for Competitive Transmission
R Street's new report from Kent Chandler and Olivia Manzagol looks at whether competitive transmission projects can beat the incumbent utility model on speed and cost. The authors reviewed results from FERC Order 1000's removal of federal rights of first refusal, which forced significant regional transmission projects into competitive solicitations rather than handing them automatically to the incumbent. The first finding is familiar but important: the data are bad. Incumbent transmission cost and timing data remain too inconsistent and opaque to support the kind of clean comparison policymakers should already have demanded.
The available evidence still points somewhere useful. Competitive greenfield transmission projects generally came online faster than comparable incumbent projects in CAISO, MISO, SPP, and ISO-NE. The report also finds competitive projects appear to produce savings around 30 percent compared with incumbent projects, while often bringing in-service commitments, financial penalties for lateness, cost caps, and return-on-equity caps. That is not an ideological argument for competition. It is a practical one: when the incumbent knows the job is theirs by birthright, the ratepayer tends to inherit the family curse.
Grid Take: The country needs transmission badly enough that it cannot afford to treat incumbent monopoly control as a tradition worth preserving. If competition can produce faster projects, lower costs, and enforceable commitments, blocking it is not prudence. It is protectionism wearing a hard hat.
BATTERY STORAGE
DTE Buys 6 GWh of Michigan-Made Batteries
DTE Energy will procure 1.5 GW, or 6 GWh, of battery storage systems from LG Energy Solution Vertech in a $1.6 billion deal, with batteries manufactured in Michigan and deployed over the next two years. The storage will be used across eight projects. DTE estimates the work will generate $2.3 billion in economic impact while supporting roughly 1,800 jobs at LG's Holland plant and more than 350 additional construction and operations jobs.
The local manufacturing angle matters, but the grid angle matters more. DTE says the batteries will reduce strain on the grid and decrease the need to cycle generation up and down as demand fluctuates. The company is also trying to serve a new Oracle data center and is awaiting approval for a 1-GW Google data center deal. This is not storage as boutique climate policy. This is storage as industrial plumbing for a Midwestern utility watching large-load demand walk up the driveway.
Grid Take: Batteries will not replace firm power. But storage is becoming one of the basic tools utilities need to make large load less jagged, less expensive, and less politically radioactive.
NUCLEAR
Three Mile Island Restart Gets a FERC Boost
Constellation's plan to restart the Crane nuclear unit, formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1, got a significant boost when FERC approved a waiver allowing the company to transfer 760 MW of Capacity Interconnection Rights from its Eddystone plant near Philadelphia to Crane. The transfer could let Crane deliver more of its power when it restarts, potentially before the end of 2027, rather than waiting for transmission upgrades that may not be complete until December 2030.
The practical meaning is simple: a nuclear plant with a 20-year deal to serve Microsoft data centers in PJM may now be able to get its power onto the grid sooner. The market monitor objected, but FERC said the waiver solves a concrete problem and makes more efficient use of rights Eddystone cannot currently use. This is how the nuclear comeback will actually happen, if it happens at all. Not in speeches, but in waivers, interconnection rights, and procedural fights where the future waits in the hallway.
Grid Take: Restarting nuclear is hard because the plant is only half the problem. The other half is the grid around it, and right now America has a growing number of power plants that are useful before the paperwork says they are convenient.
M & A
DigitalBridge Buys Into Power
DigitalBridge, a data center and digital infrastructure investor, plans to buy ArcLight Capital Partners in a deal valued at up to $1.05 billion. ArcLight owns one of the country's largest private power generation portfolios, including about 20.8 GW as of June 2025, roughly 7 GW in PJM, and a 15-GW project pipeline.
The move is the clearest signal yet that the data center industry is no longer content to be merely a customer of the power sector. It wants expertise, assets, development rights, and options. DigitalBridge is also being acquired by SoftBank, and the ArcLight deal would bring power investment directly into the platform. The old joke was that the cloud is just someone else's computer. The new reality is that the cloud increasingly wants to own the power plant, too.
Grid Take: Data center investors are moving upstream because the grid bottleneck is now a business bottleneck. The next phase of digital infrastructure will not be defined only by land, fiber, and chips. It will be defined by who can secure firm power without waiting years in a queue.
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Quick Signals
Offshore wind litigation escalates: Seven states sued the Trump administration over its buyout of TotalEnergies' offshore wind leases, arguing the administration illegally terminated contracts already in development. The legal fight is now a referendum on whether the federal government can unilaterally extinguish existing lease agreements — which matters well beyond offshore wind.
EEI's three-word summary: Labor, AI, affordability. Utility executives at this year's Edison Electric Institute conference spent the week wrestling with a workforce pipeline that can't build fast enough, AI load that's arriving faster than interconnection queues can process, and a rate environment where customers are already pushing back. The squeeze is structural, not cyclical.
Samsung signs Vietnam's first corporate PPA: Samsung's Vietnamese subsidiary inked a direct power purchase agreement for 70 GWh of solar generation — the first of its kind in the country. Another data point in the quiet repositioning of hyperscaler supply chains toward energy-constrained emerging markets where securing your own electrons is becoming a competitive moat.
Foxconn and Intel partner on AI infrastructure: The two companies announced a collaboration on next-generation AI infrastructure buildout. Neither disclosed financial terms. What matters is the hardware-to-power supply chain tightening: every partnership like this is another block of committed load looking for guaranteed megawatts.
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