A community power program for data centers
Data centers are losing sites to moratoriums, zoning denials, and voters who blame them for higher bills. Money can't buy that back. A small battery in every nearby home can. Fund it, and the neighbors' summer bills go down, their lights stay on in an outage, and the town that was fighting you starts defending you. The grid relief comes with it: curtailable load off the evening peak, no interconnection study, and capacity you can carry into the speed-to-power queue.
The bind
Towns are voting data centers down, passing moratoriums, and running candidates against them. Residents see the trucks, the substation, and a higher electric bill, and they show up to the hearing to say no. The industry now lists a social license to operate, earned community acceptance, as a precondition to build, right alongside power and interconnection. In Virginia the share of voters uncomfortable with a nearby data center went from 24% to 59% in two years. This is the one input a checkbook can't accelerate, and the town can stop you cold before you ever reach the queue.
The reframe
The wall in front of you is the evening peak, the two hours when every air conditioner in the neighborhood runs at once and the local wires hit their limit. That peak lives in the homes around your site. Move it a few hours earlier and you free the exact headroom your load needs, on the exact feeders you're trying to connect to.
The offer
A boombox-sized battery sits in the home and plugs into a wall outlet. The window AC plugs into the battery. No electrician, no panel work, no hole in the wall.
The battery fills overnight, when power is cheapest and the grid is quiet.
Through the evening peak the home's AC runs off the battery instead of the grid.
No power flows to the grid, so there's nothing to permit and nothing to study.
The hardware is off-the-shelf. The software that schedules it is open source and running today. It's called PeakShift, it's brand-agnostic, and it already reads live electricity prices across the US, UK, Europe, and Australia.
What the neighborhood gets
“We stopped fighting the data center when it started paying our July bill.”
The sentence you want said at the zoning hearing
Running the AC on cheap overnight power cuts the summer bill that hurts households most.
When the grid goes down, the battery keeps the AC and the fridge running.
It's free, it's already installed, and it costs the household nothing to run.
What you get
This doesn't generate your power, and it doesn't lower your own meter's bill. What it does is win the town, now a hard requirement to build alongside power and interconnection, and hand you curtailable megawatts to offer into PJM's speed-to-power trade for a faster connection. Grid programs pay for the shed, which funds part of the cost. For a project stuck behind a permit and a queue, those are the two constraints that decide whether you build.
The math
The centralized version of this relief is a substation upgrade. It costs about the same or more, buys zero goodwill, and arrives years later behind its own queue. You fund the batteries once. Grid programs, entered through an existing aggregator, sell the pooled shed into the demand-response market and cover part of the running cost. The household's offer is a free battery plus a lower bill plus backup power, not a token check, which is what keeps them enrolled. On a hyperscale campus where a single year of permitting delay costs tens of millions, the program can cost less than the delay it removes.
It already works
Spent about $200M on distributed power instead of $1B on new wires to serve growing load, and kept the lights on.
Raised $1B to put batteries in homes and trade the pooled capacity into the ERCOT market. The model is funded and scaling.
Its VPP Liftoff work puts pooled home batteries at roughly 40% the net cost of a utility-scale battery for the same service.
Gives free AC batteries to apartments and gets paid by Con Edison to shave the peak. Scaling from 200 kW to about 2 MW across 1,000-plus homes this summer, and now expanding into PJM.
The pilot
A pilot of a few thousand homes around a single contested site runs roughly $3 to $5 million and proves the three things that decide the project: a community that shifts from fighting you to defending you at the hearing, curtailable megawatts you can carry into the speed-to-power queue, and dispatch economics from live grid programs. It scales the way software does, by adding sites in a config file, not by pouring another foundation.
PeakShift is open source at github.com/steps-re/peakshift
Figures are planning estimates for discussion, drawn from public program data and typical hardware pricing as of 2026. Peak-relief and revenue numbers depend on local rates, climate, home participation, and grid-program terms, and would be sized against a specific site before commitment. The no-export design keeps the program behind the meter, so it needs no interconnection. Any future grid-export option is regulated per market and is not part of this offer.