Three different Google energy stories have crossed my desk in the last week and a half, each attacking the same problem from a completely different angle. First there was the coal mine in West Virginia getting a solar-plus-storage installation shaped to match Google’s own data center appetite hour by hour. Then MISO’s “zero injection” fast lane, which Google backs, letting colocated generation skip the interconnection queue because it never actually touches the grid. And now this: Google, Rewiring America, Tesla, Sunrun, and PG&E enrolling roughly 21,000 Northern California households’ batteries and thermostats into something called SHARE, a virtual power plant meant to shave demand more cheaply than building a gas plant would.

I wrote a few days ago about VPPs getting described as gardens: you plant them, then you have to actually tend them, unlike a power plant you just build and walk away from. Google, apparently, decided to hire the gardener. This is a company testing three theories of how to get enough electricity to run its machines, all at once, in the same season, like it doesn’t trust any single approach to land in time. Given the state of interconnection queues lately, that seems reasonable.

What I keep coming back to is who’s actually the backup generator here. Twenty-one thousand households in two counties are about to become, functionally, a power plant that Google didn’t build and doesn’t own, financed by subsidy instead of rate base. If it works, it’s a genuinely elegant trade: cheaper than a peaker plant, and the money lands in people’s pockets instead of a utility’s capital plan. If AI demand cools next year, though, I wonder what happens to the subsidy check.

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