The Connector

Voltus in June signed a first-of-its-kind partnership with Google to provide energy capacity in the PJM grid region, which serves 67 million across the mid-Atlantic. Under the agreement, Voltus will orchestrate resources such as batteries, smart thermostats, and the energy use of commercial and industrial buildings to reduce demand when the grid needs it—and pay the local homes and businesses that participate. This enables new resources for the system, channels investment into local communities, and strengthens the grid that serves Google's data centers. 

Here, she discusses her path from Thayer School of Engineering, the challenges of an aging grid, and how flexibility can enable better use of the systems already in place.

What was the aha moment that prompted you to start Voltus?

There were two worth talking about. Earlier in my career, I was working at EnerNOC, where I developed a huge appreciation of the business model of demand response. I remember thinking that paying customers to use less electricity—which is that business model—was the neatest thing I'd ever heard of. Everybody wins, customers make money, the grid becomes cleaner and more reliable, and society builds fewer peaking power plants. It totally changed how I thought about energy and electricity.

Part two of the story came when starting Voltus. We envisioned a modern electricity grid that could simultaneously be clean, reliable, affordable, and capable of load growth and, thus, economic growth. That meant a grid where, inevitably, the demand side played as important a role as the supply side. We have one of the most sophisticated engineering systems in the world and yet, for the most part, we control only one side of it, the generation side. I've always thought that demand side, load flexibility, was an equal to what traditionally comes to mind as power infrastructure, so things such as generation and transmission.

Is that what makes your approach unique?

When we founded Voltus, we articulated two things that were important to always maintain. The customer comes first, period. The second was a laser focus on delivering the best value proposition. From those two things—customer first and making sure we have the best product—others followed, such as our product advantage, the tech platform we built, and now, increasingly, the scale and velocity we've reached. It would also be impossible not to mention our team of roughly 250 people. I think we have the best team in the industry, and our customers feel that, too, which then speaks to that first part.

How many customers do you anticipate serving this year?

We're at about 5,000 different commercial and industrial facilities with a bunch more on the residential side. We manage 8.5 gigawatts of flexible load across North America. To put that into perspective, a typical nuclear power plant would be about 1 gigawatt.

How does your recent agreement with Google shift things?

That's part of our growth process plan. As a market leader, we're constantly releasing new products and innovating. Last year, we introduced Bring Your Own Capacity, a program that enables large users, such as hyperscalers, to fund firm, flexible capacity for the grid without having to build new generation plants.

This gets to the center of the narrative right now, which is hard to miss, regarding load growth and data centers and rising electricity costs. I fundamentally believe that the fastest, cheapest, cleanest way to meet load growth is to get more out of the grid we have. Of course there's the need to build more, but in the next two to five years, we need to get more out of what we have already built. We have a system that is massively underutilized. Most of the time we’re using only a fraction of the potential of the grid we've built up. Why wouldn't we do everything we can to make better use of that headroom and increase grid utilization? Voltus does exactly that.

Our BYOC product is a reflection of that. So, it's not just that data centers do no harm; it's that data centers have, through this partnership, the opportunity to invest in the communities where they're located. Our program with Google will create additional revenue streams for the businesses and residents in that community, not to mention avoid building another 100 megawatts of power plant capacity.

How are you hoping to shape the narrative?

I can draw parallels. In the Industrial Revolution, when Carnegie Steel was being built out, there were also lots of efforts to build libraries, right? This is how to build out our equivalent of an Industrial Revolution while making simultaneous investments in the community.

I don't know that folks are doing it perfectly just yet, but in the project we have with Google, they're thinking about what build-ing a data center means for the community. How can you give options to the community for things such as additional revenue streams in addition to not increasing their bills? And then there are investments in resilience. We recently acquired an energy storage company, and one of our growth strategies is putting as much energy storage as possible on site with our customers, which will help them with a bunch of other things.

Now let's shift back to Dartmouth. You earned your AB, then BE and MEM. Was there a course or project that enabled you to develop leadership skills?

The course that really helped me think about leadership skills and was a culmination of everything I had learned was absolutely ENGS 190/290 ["Engineering Design Methodology and Project"]. It was the culminating experience of the BE. It was the first time I experienced entrepreneurship. We were converting one of the old Formula SAE cars to be a hybrid, and it was a massive project. It was never just about building the car, though, because we had to fundraise, project manage, develop marketing proposals, and design and engineer the parts and systems and then integrate them all into a broader system. We really figured out a ton of things on our own.

It represented how I've always thought about the Thayer education, which is more about learning how to learn rather than any one class or project. By necessity, we had to figure out whatever came our way and how to make it all work.

What drew you to EnerNOC and the energy field?

The first was, as I mentioned, the business model. I had heard about EnerNOC from a Tuck professor, as the cofounders [Timothy Healy '91 Tu'02 and David Brewster Tu'02] were alums. The second was that I took environmental engineering and was also interested in understanding the business of engineering, which is what the MEM degree is all about. I wanted to understand how to create commercial opportunities that then furthered something on the engineering side, in this case, the energy transition and climate impact.

So, with almost two decades in global energy markets, are there particular innovations or lessons that brought you to this point?

I just really believe in the work. More recently, Voltus has certainly been a pioneer with the work with data centers, and we coined the term "bring your own capacity," which has become almost ubiquitous in the industry. But it's way more fun to be leading in practice, with deals such as the one we announced with Google, and real capacity being built.

Looking on the horizon, what gets you jumping out of bed in the morning?

Well, I can sleep in knowing that everything's working the way it should. I think this maybe speaks to the fact that I've been doing this work for two decades. We've entered one of the most exciting periods the electricity industry has seen. Electricity is now the constraint behind almost every major ambition we have—be it electrification, affordability, decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, industrial growth, the AI economy itself, you name it—and so it's becoming a priority in a way that it never has been before. Our corner of the industry is no longer fringe, it's actually quite front and center. There's this wide and growing recognition that we can't build ourselves out of the capacity crunch we are in, so I keep coming back to the reality we need to make better use of the grid we have.

And so, in addition to some of the longer-term things going on with engineering innovations and developments, in the near term, we should make better use of the grid we have. The question is no longer whetherthe grid needs flexible demand, it's how we can build in as much flexibility as possible. It's a really exciting time, and the opportunities we're preparing for on the Voltus side are industry wide. It's about execution, scaling up what we're doing as quickly as possible.