Voltus raises money to sell flexibility, Google writes a check for nuclear uprates, and in North Carolina everybody's arguing over who pays for the wires. Friday's a money day. This is The Data Center Daily. And fair warning, I might actually like a couple of these. Duke, Amazon and Google on one cost deal? I want to see who's on the hook. Hold that thought. First, Voltus, and what two hundred twenty-five million actually buys. Follow the show and the next briefing lands in your feed on its own. Latitude Media writes:
A little over a year after launching the first “bring your own distributed capacity” program for data centers in the Mid-Atlantic, virtual power plant provider Voltus announced today it has raised $225 million to scale that offering even further. The oversubscribed Series D is Voltus’ first raise since 2021, when it raised a $31 million Series C.
Okay, I'll say it, I kind of like this one. Data center pays to turn the neighbors' batteries and demand response into capacity, hands those megawatts to the utility, and nobody pours concrete for a new peaker. Latitude Media has the numbers. Two hundred twenty-five million, oversubscribed Series D, Voltus's first raise since a thirty-one million dollar Series C in 2021, back when it had 1.7 gigawatts under management. Google's the first named bring-your-own-capacity customer, announced in June. The CEO calls it 'an execution play.' Great. Then tell me how many BYOC megawatts are signed in PJM, because a raise doesn't dispatch anything. Yeah, and my question's the January peak. Half those home batteries are already drained, PJM calls the capacity, and it doesn't show. Who eats that shortfall, Google or Voltus? That's the clause I'd want to read. APS has roughly 400 megawatts of flexible agreements actually signed, so put Voltus's contracted book next to that number. Seven times the last round is a lot of conviction to bring to that comparison. Data Centre Magazine, with Ben Craske:
Duke Energy has reached a settlement in North Carolina that would require data centres and other large-load customers to pay upfront for the grid infrastructure built to serve them. The agreement was struck between the company’s two North Carolina utilities – Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress – and the North Carolina Public Staff, the state agency that represents utility customers.
And here's another one I like. Duke's North Carolina deal makes data centers pay upfront, nonrefundable, for the substation that only serves them. So if the tenant walks, ratepayers aren't stuck holding a stranded substation. And for shared upgrades, like new transmission, they post deposits and security before the work proceeds. The protections kick in for qualifying loads at 50 megawatts. One small thing, though: this is a settlement between Duke's two utilities and the Public Staff. The commission hasn't approved it yet. Fair, it's paper until the commission signs off. But look who's on the paper. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, even the Defense Department. When the hyperscalers co-sign their own bill, I'm not gonna argue with them. Put it next to Michigan, where Google took 20-year DTE terms with 80 percent minimum billing. So that's two states moving the risk onto the big load. The difference is Michigan's a single contract, and North Carolina wants this to become the tariff rule for everyone. POWER, with Sonal C. Patel:
Hyperscaler Google and Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., have signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) designed to support $4.3 billion of upgrades at 11 nuclear units across the PJM Interconnection, which is slated to add 890 MW of generating capacity from Constellation’s existing reactors by the end of 2032.
And credit to Google here, too. Eight-ninety megawatts of new capacity out of reactors that already have the wires, the cooling water, and the site permits. And they signed for twenty years. That's how you add supply without getting stuck in a transmission queue. And POWER's Sonal Patel lays out the structure we were reaching for yesterday. A twenty-year PPA backs four point three billion dollars of upgrades across eleven units at six sites in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The twenty-seven-hundred-megawatt piece is a separate fifteen-year supply deal on the existing fleet. Different contract, different term. Yeah, but look at the calendar. The first uprate lands in 2028 and the last one by the end of 2032. Nobody's training cluster is waiting six years for the back half. Nuclear has never cared much about anyone's training schedule. Add Amazon's Calvert Cliffs contract from a week earlier and Constellation has roughly eleven hundred megawatts of uprates under tech contracts. Signed, scheduled, and not one of those megawatts is online yet. Got feedback, a story idea, or a correction? Email us at datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. We'd love to hear what you're seeing in the data center world.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so dig into whichever ones caught your attention. That's The Data Center Daily for today. Until next time, this is a Lantern Podcast.