The good news

In June, Tesla, Sunrun and Renew Home announced a framework to use installed home technologies to offer nearly 17 gigawatts of flexible capacity, helping stabilize the grid.

Earlier that month, Voltus signed a deal with Google to provide 100 megawatts of capacity by effectively leveraging consumers’ excess home energy draw.

In August, Sunrun and Voltus inked an agreement to link residential solar to VPPs to power AI hyperscalers.

This is all good news. Through partnership and innovation, companies are creating new tools for consumers to manage their own energy use and earn money to offset rising electricity bills.

Geography, adoption and scale

Dig one layer deeper however, and you’ll find a geographic disconnect. The Tesla, Sunrun and Renew Home deal will deploy in Texas and parts of California. Voltus’ agreement with Google will serve data centers only in the PJM jurisdiction — the Northeastern states. The latest Sunrun and Voltus partnership will cover slightly more territory, operating across PJM and MISO, which serves the Midwest and some Southern states.

In addition to being a pain point for American consumers, energy supply may be the single variable that makes or breaks the next wave of innovation. Why aren’t these innovative energy solutions available to American consumers and industry more consistently and on an even wider scale?

A new Consumer Technology Association (CTA)® whitepaper reveals that the home technologies behind these headlines — rooftop solar, smart thermostats, home batteries and electric vehicles — have existed for years and are already widely deployed in American homes. Consumers are also mostly willing to participate in programs often supported by VPPs, with 66% of U.S. adults willing to participate in behavioral demand response programs in a 2026 study. At CES® 2026, we saw new innovations in smart plugs, connected thermostats, solar, EV charging and other energy management devices. For CES 2027, we can expect to see these technologies continue to evolve to better meet energy demand and solve challenges in our energy system.

So, what’s keeping Americans from using resources we already have?

Fragmentation prevents efficiency

For technology policy wonks the answer may sound familiar: uneven regulation across states and, in this case, U.S. energy jurisdictions.

Commercial deployment and adoption of distributed energy technologies can only go so far in a national energy system defined by fragmentation. Each state regulates energy slightly differently — but in general, existing cost structures tend to incentivize the utilities that manage grid resources to maintain the status quo. To power more VPPs in America, we need to incentivize utilities by financially rewarding observability and interoperability across all states.

Federal rules were supposed to fix this. FERC’s Order 2222, issued in 2020, requires wholesale markets to let aggregated home devices compete alongside power plants. Six years on, most haven’t finished. PJM has pushed its deadline to 2028, MISO and the Southwest Power Pool to 2030. Until then, there’s no standard way for a company to bundle thousands of home batteries and thermostats into a single resource and sell energy, capacity and grid services with it. What’s left is a slower path; a utility has to volunteer for a program and a state regulator has to approve it.

In order to harness the power (pun intended) of tech already in millions of American homes, regulations at the federal and state level need a reset to encourage and reward efficiency. The energy system must let consumer technologies already deployed in U.S. homes function as what they are — grid assets, not just consumer devices.

What’s at stake

One smart thermostat in one home can’t deliver the energy that consumers and industry need, but millions could. By 2030, VPP capacity in the United States is projected to reach anywhere from 80 to 160 gigawatts. The 80-gigawatt difference in that projection is what’s at stake for federal and state regulators in creating new incentives for utilities.

To learn more about how consumer technologies can serve as grid assets, download CTA’s whitepaper “The Untapped Grid” for free.