Powerstack: Dana Guernsey on the grid's flex layer

Hope you're staying cool out there 🌡️ These heat domes have been pushing US electric output to record highs: earlier this month, weekly generation hit 100,996 GWh for the first time ever.

With that top of mind, we spoke with Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey about how distributed capacity can help the grid deliver. And not just during emergencies, but for economic dispatch, congestion relief, and reserves, every day. Watch the interview on our YouTube here, and read on for the main takeaways.

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Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey joined us to talk about the moment flex is having, and why it took this long. From Voltus’ Google partnership to its Brightfield acquisition to what it actually means to dispatch into wholesale markets every single day, Dana gave us the full picture on distributed capacity right now. The Q&A below is edited for length and clarity, but catch the full interview on our YouTube here.

Dana: We saw that distributed capacity and flexible capacity were going to be the way to build the modern grid. It's fastest, cheapest, cleanest, and it puts money back into consumer pockets and businesses. Grid utilization is a popular term right now, but I think it just means we're going to get more use out of the things we've already built, which feels very obvious in other industries. But for some reason in the power sector, it's not always the first thing people gravitate towards. They gravitate towards new steel on the ground, which we also need. But the way we approach the market is: how can we unlock more capacity really quickly by using what we already have?

Speed to power is also really front of mind right now. On average, we bring a megawatt online in roughly five months. Being able to build very quickly using what we already have is core to how we think.

As for Voltus: we've got roughly 8.5GW under management, we're across all of North America, about 250 people, and we're really excited about the industry. One way to think about us is, we are the flex layer of the grid. Our customers range from small thermostats and EVs and homes, all the way through small and medium businesses, big box retail stores, school systems, wastewater treatment plants, community centers, universities, larger industrial facilities, and data centers. All of that aggregated together. We primarily focus on wholesale markets, and we work with utilities directly as well.

The really exciting thing about being in this industry right now is that the demand has flipped from when we started. We used to be convincing people. Now everybody needs capacity. The conversation has shifted to: how much can you do, how quickly can you do it, and can you just do more? That's a fun spot to be in. It's everyone from the grid operators who have shortages, to utilities trying to figure out how to plan for the load growth projections they're seeing, to regulators, to the hyperscalers themselves. 

Dana: No matter what you may feel about what's causing the load growth or how we got here, I think everyone would agree we are at a point of massive load growth. A lot of the driver is data centers, and a lot of them, like in our deal with Google, are trying to do it responsibly. Distributed capacity can be the unlock to all of this AI economy and economic growth. That's why even politicians are paying attention, because the overall economy of America very quickly becomes entwined with the power situation. And that applies to industrial load growth, manufacturing, electrification, EVs, all of those things. 

Dana: The capacity crunch has become so acute and it caused us a couple of years ago to really start thinking: if power capacity is how businesses are going to grow in the tech space, then why should they not be buying power capacity directly? Of course there were renewable PPAs. To us it just didn't seem that far off that they would also be purchasing VPPs. It's really just another form of bringing supply online. What it does for our business is open up markets. 

If you think of what Voltus does most simply, it's building power supply, building capacity through distributed capacity. So then how do we do that, and what new types of resources can we unlock with these bring-your-own-capacity constructs? A lot of them are segments that haven't really been fully unlocked before.

Can we do more with residential? That was the partnership with Octopus. Can we do more with storage? Definitely. 60% of the electricity usage in the country comes from commercial and industrial businesses. 1% of behind-the-meter storage is commercial and industrial. So there's a chasm there, where there's so much more market potential. We have a ton of commercial and industrial facilities on our platform, they're experiencing the pain of rising electricity prices, energy storage costs are coming down, and acquiring Brightfield helps us bring those costs down further and have a really great solution for what are now a bunch of raised hands from customers saying, seems like maybe a battery could help. And we're like, yes. We're deploying more distributed capacity through batteries on site. And that is the answer to the original question of how you build more, sooner, faster — because distributed capacity can go to where the need is, more or less, and you can move faster without massive land permits and interconnection timelines that you'd have with a utility scale project.

We actually started the company thinking capacity is table stakes for flexible resources. But at the end of the day it's also the delivery of energy and ancillary services like reserves that are really where the value hits. Capacity is just a call option on energy.

Dana: We had PJM dispatches for emergency across the whole RTO. We have real-time telemetry on our facilities, and we were able to show that we overperformed across all the days. I believe the whole industry did, and that's actually a really important point. Looking at forecast versus actual, something like 6GW of response on days like last week is really, really impactful. People build trust, and that kind of thing takes time. As an industry, we've been doing that well.

That broad PJM emergency example is of course one of generation capacity. But when you have distributed resources spread all over a geographical area, they're also naturally suited to help with transmission constraints and distribution constraints. A lot of what we do, and a lot of why a customer will be able to participate in more and more programs, is working with the local utilities or transmission and distribution operators to provide local congestion relief.

New York does this really well. There's the NYISO level program, and then Con Edison will have a distribution load relief program focused on a very specific congestion zone at the distribution level, or a more citywide New York-focused commercial program. All three are able to interact. Part of what we'll do for customers is figure out how to stitch it together.

Dana: I really do think we will probably not see as many gigawatt-scale data centers as people think. Whether by necessity or innovation, or because the grid has certain pockets of capacity and not others, we will start to see smaller scale compute just kind of fit into where the grid allows it. As inference continues to take off and people want compute near population areas, there's just not space for gigawatt scale in those locations. I think at the pace of innovation we're going to see a lot more compute distributed into the pockets of the grid, which helps with grid utilization. And it fits very nicely with our business because we're also putting a lot of distributed capacity into those same pockets.

And my other hot take: I used to say data centers in space would never work, and I've actually changed my mind. When there are a lot of smart people really believing something's going to happen, I try to be smart enough to know when I'm not smart enough about a specific topic.

Dana: If there are businesses out there who feel like they have capacity that's not connected to markets, we'd love to talk. And just generally propping up the whole industry — it benefits us all when we all perform. On the policy side, this industry's advocacy cohort is still a bit fragmented. If there ever was a time to unify more as an industry, it's now. And lastly, we're about to be hiring a lot more, so check out our jobs page and reach out.

Dana covered a lot of ground. What stuck out to me were a few things that tied in to how we’re thinking about speed to power:

Watch the full interview here.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$2.6bn // EQT Infrastructure VII’s price to acquire Copia Power from Carlyle. It's EQT's second gigawatt-scale power-and-AI-infrastructure move since the GIP-led, EQT-backed AES take-private cleared its shareholder vote last month. This deal is for Copia Power, a developer that bundles solar, storage, thermal, and digital infrastructure into single gigawatt-scale campuses. The PE capital rotation into power and data centers continues, even accelerating. 

$76.5m // Plug Power sells a 164MW ERCOT interconnection position to a data center developer. Part of a $275m-plus liquidity push, the hydrogen developer is monetizing this live grid interconnection slot instead of building the green hydrogen project it originally sited there, showing where the value is concentrating in ERCOT right now.

£70.50/MWh // New price of power for Sizewell C nuclear plant extension. The UK government and EDF agreed on a 20-year Contract for Difference (2025 prices, starting 2035) to keep Sizewell B running to 2055, with Centrica (a 20% owner) funding part of an £800m ($1bn) refurbishment. It’s roughly a third of what Hinkley Point C's new-build CfD locked in. The extension is dramatically cheaper firm, near-24/7 power than building new nuclear from scratch. 

$51-129/MWh // Lazard's 2026 Levelized Cost of Energy+ report. New-build combined-cycle gas at its highest unsubsidized cost in 15 years, rising fast. Utility-scale solar ($40-98/MWh) stays the cheapest new-build option on the market, but solar construction costs jumped 18% year-over-year on tariffs and financing costs.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Nuclear fuel and fusion hitting the public markets this week. General Fusion (GFUZ) began trading as the first publicly listed pure-play fusion company, SPAC’ing at roughly a $1bn valuation. The stock opened at $12.80 and swung more than 60% intraday. Standard Nuclear (STDN), meanwhile, had a rougher path to market: the TRISO fuel maker cut its IPO by 58% before pricing Wednesday, raising $150m at $15/share for a $2.4bn market cap, down from the $356m it originally targeted. Even though nuclear’s a hot sector, watch how public markets treat these companies with sky-high valuations. 

FERC's large-load generation adequacy reports come due. Under the Section 206 show-cause orders FERC issued last month to all six RTOs/ISOs (PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO-NE, NYISO), each grid operator must show the Commission how it intends to keep generation adequate to serve existing and incoming large loads, the first concrete deliverable in the agency’s proposed reforms.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

New Mexico's June auction shows an accelerating geothermal land race. It cleared $16.4m across 153k acres, nearly double Nevada's October 2025 sale and more than any prior full year of BLM geothermal sales except 2025. We crunched a decade of lease data to find who’s buying, from the new entrants to the big names. Clients can read it here, including a ranked leaderboard of every major buyer since 2014.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.