A virtual power plant hidden in Vermont homes is keeping the lights on during storms

Spread across thousands of ordinary homes, this 'power plant' has become Vermont's largest power source. It's protecting owners from outages and providing cheaper, cleaner energy.

Vermont has faced an increase in extreme weather events in recent decades, including some of its worst storms in recorded history. For Pollyanna Bladyka, such events used to mean losing power a dozen times every year, often for multiple hours. 

"I don't mind being cold… but I just want my coffee in the morning and I want to be able to watch my news," says Bladyka, who lives in the rural town of Springfield in eastern Vermont with her husband Andy and her dog.

Bladyka became so fed up with the frequent power outages that in 2024 she was on the verge of buying a gas generator, as many of her neighbours had already done. But the electrician she hired to install it told her about a programme providing a compelling alternative.

Run by Vermont's largest utility, Green Mountain Power (GMP), the scheme installs two batteries in participants' home for $55 (£41) a month over a 10-year lease agreement. After doing some research, Bladyka and her husband decided it was a better option than the $12,000 (£9,000) cost of the generator they had planned to buy. They have not lost power a single time since the system was installed in 2024.

More than 5,500 people in Vermont have similar home battery systems. As well as providing individual homes energy security during power outages, these batteries form the backbone of a new kind of system known as a virtual power plant that mimics the resources of a traditional power plant.

The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.

Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.   

A power cut safeguard

For Bladyka, avoiding outages was the main reason she got the battery. "I'd like to say I did it for the environment, but I did it for myself," she tells me on a visit to her home in May 2026. "But I don't mind helping."

She describes previously waking up without power multiple times per year and not being able to go about her morning routine, with storms the most frequent cause, she says.

Virtual power plants can give a huge advantage over traditional systems when it comes to resilience against power outages.

Rise of the virtual plant

Virtual power plants are an aggregation of thousands (or even millions) of consumer devices into one orchestrated system that fits into the wider grid like a traditional power plant. Everything from home batteries and rooftop solar to smart thermostats and even EV batteries can be incorporated.

This system is coordinated to reduce demand on the grid – replacing the need to build extra fossil fuel-powered plants. 

The concept has been around for decades, but has gained popularity in recent years as energy demand has risen and more distributed energy resources like rooftop solar have been added to the grid. Virtual power plants are now being built everywhere from Germany to China.

Climate change is driving an increase in extreme weather globally and Vermont has seen that trend firsthand, from flooding to snowstorms. It may not come as a surprise then that the state has experienced an increase in outages in recent decades (as has the US as a whole), according to a 2022 Associated Press analysis of government data.

In fact, seven of the 10 most damaging storms in GMP's history have happened in the last decade, the company tells the BBC, causing more........

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