Ameet Konkar thinks data centers’ opportunity to appease the local communities where they’re facing backlash is bigger than hand-outs alone.“These hyperscalers and energy buyers are trying to see what they can do for communities, and a lot of it is philanthropic — $10 million here, $20 million there,” he told Latitude Media.
Konkar, who for years worked as head of sustainability at Airbnb, is the CEO of new startup Resilience Energy, which is pushing the idea that hyperscalers and other large loads could, and should, be funding the installation of residential batteries and solar panels. This would reduce the households’ energy bills, while the hyperscalers reap the benefits of the added capacity brought to the local grid by the new distributed energy resources. It’s essentially a third-party-funded virtual power plant.
“The idea is that we are bringing the whole transaction together,” Konkar said.
Resilience Energy is entering the nascent sector of data center-backed VPPs. In a report released last year, Rewiring America suggested that if hyperscalers fund a portion of their capacity needs by backing distributed energy resources they could free up at least 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing grid. The concept has been gaining traction ever since, with large tech players like Google leading the way by signing a 100-megawatt VPP deal with Voltus and, most recently, agreeing to fund PG&E’s latest VPP pilot.
Compared with these companies, Resilience Energy is still very much in its early days, having raised just $5 million through a SAFE instrument. The company doesn’t yet have any installed distributed energy capacity or signed customers.
The community PPA
Resilience’s approach to the model involves aggregating large numbers of homes, initially through partnerships with institutional owners such as state housing agencies and low-income housing providers that can offer properties at scale. Konkar said registered interest covers more than 100,000 homes nationwide.
Once the homes are lined up, Resilience will calculate the capacity that installing solar and batteries in them would provide; for 20,000 to 25,000 homes, it would be the equivalent of up to 125 megawatts, according to Konkar. From there, the startup will track down a large energy user willing to pay for it.
The plan is that Resilience would then sign a 15- to 20-year capacity offtake agreement with the local utility, with the large load user covering the cost.
“It’s a three-way transaction where our contract is with the utility, and then the large load is basically paying for that capacity, so that it doesn’t go to the utility ratepayers,” Konkar said. The company could also contract bilaterally with the large load, and then “bring the utility in [through some other mechanism,” even if that wouldn’t be its first choice.
Resilience would then use that agreement, which it calls a “community PPA,” to raise third-party financing to buy and install the equipment.
A capital-light model
Unlike other VPP companies such as Renew Home or Voltus, which orchestrate systems owned by the households, Resilience plans to own them outright, making the systems free to residents. However, it won’t manufacture or install them. Konkar said the company is in talks with more established providers, who would take care of the hardware and dispatch software.
“The model right from the start is very capital-light for us. One of the core founding theses was that we did not want to recreate what others have already done,” Konkar said. “We don’t want to set up our own battery factory… or set up our own installation crew.”
This way, Konkar said the model could become profitable from the first transaction, on which Resilience will take a tolling fee. And if capacity prices are the ones that PJM recently cleared, “that’s more than enough to say we can give [the systems to residents] for free,” he said.
In July, PJM’s capacity auction for 2028–2029 reached its $325 per MW-day price cap, and in some areas, it would have reached up to $777 per MW-day without it. For its emergency backstop auction, scheduled for later this year, the proposed price cap is $555 per MW-day. Being technology neutral, the auction considers capacity coming from demand-response and distributed energy resources as eligible — which could be a real boon for VPPs.
Besides PJM, Resilience is also in conversations with large loads, utilities, and communities in MISO.
But Resilience’s capital-light model also means that its success will have a lot to do with other companies’ performance installing hardware and coordinating the VPP dispatch in times of need. Part of Resilience’s value will lie in its ability to bring communities into its programs, something that has historically been one of the main challenges of scaling VPPs.
“The value is that we are going in and engaging with local community leaders from day one,” Konkar said, explaining that finding the community leaders and starting a conversation with them is one of the first things Resilience Energy does when entering a new market. “The first market we went in… it took us 12 months to get to a place where we really were accepted by the community. Now it’s getting faster and faster.”
