Last month, Google announced a deal with Voltus for a virtual power plant (VPP) of up to 1,070 MW in PJM, roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. Rather than build a plant, Voltus will offer homes and businesses financial incentives to trim usage when the grid is strained, through smart thermostats, batteries and flexible equipment.
The deal represents an inflection point for the power and utilities sector, where “speed to power” innovations are defining the moment. It also underscores the importance of the equipment that will decide how far such programs go: the electric meter.
Capacity you find instead of build
NEMA’s 2026 Grid Reliability Study projects U.S. economy-wide electricity demand as much as 55% by 2050, with data center consumption alone growing 300% over the next decade. New generation and transmission can’t keep pace, as permitting, capital needs and equipment and skilled labor backlogs protracting project delivery timelines.
As a result, operators are looking for capacity in the system they already have. On the transmission side, grid-enhancing technologies show what’s possible: PJM modeling finds they could unlock between six and seven GW of usable capacity.
At the grid edge, the opportunity may be larger. Demand response contributed 33.3 GW of enrolled wholesale capacity in 2024, about 6.5% of peak demand in organized markets and could reach 20% of U.S. peak by 2030. Behind-the-meter resources, which include microgrids and aggregations of customer-sited resources (i.e., VPPs), are scaling too.
What these grid-edge resources share is a need for measurement. A demand response event or VPP dispatch only has value if someone can prove the load dropped and pay the customer who dropped it.
That job falls to the electric meter.
Barriers to scale
Despite the momentum, only 6.5% of U.S. electricity customers are enrolled in retail demand response programs. NEMA’s research points to several reasons: metering and communication rules written for large power plants that burden small participants, too little public data on how flexible resources perform during grid emergencies and market rules that vary by region.
Underneath them is a question of trust. Some grid operators and utilities still doubt that distributed resources will deliver when called. But confidence at scale requires consistent, verifiable measurement across millions of devices and many vendors.
That is the role of ANSI NEMA C12.1-2026. C12.1 sets performance criteria for new types of watthour and demand meters, defines accuracy classes and test methods and establishes acceptable in-service performance for revenue meters. When a meter reading decides whether a customer is paid for curtailment, or whether an operator can count an aggregation as capacity, those criteria make the number credible.
A 20-year meter decision
Timing makes this pressing. Millions of first-generation smart meters, many installed between 2010 and 2015 with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, are reaching end of life. Utilities in every region are planning or executing large-scale replacements through the late 2020s, driven by aging hardware, obsolete communications and the need to support distributed energy resources, EVs and resilience. Indeed, as NEMA member company Honeywell has noted, first-wave meters lack the speed and accuracy of newer models and networks and security practices evolve faster than meters can be replaced. This is a replacement market, not a first deployment and the meters chosen now will likely stay in service for 15 to 20 years or more.
The 2026 edition of C12.1 arrives at the right moment. It folds the former C12.20 accuracy-class standard into a single document covering the entire metering code and adds guidance on non-Blondel metering. Referencing C12.1-2026 in procurement specifications gives utilities, regulators and vendors a common baseline for safety, accuracy and interoperability across vendors and networks and protects ratepayers’ two-decade investment.
The same long-term lens applies to where grid equipment comes from. NEMA’s Make It American® program is an industry-led, third party-certification program. Accredited auditors evaluate manufacturers against the NEMA 70901-2026 process standard and certified facilities and products are listed in a public Build America, Buy America registry. The Federal Highway Administration and the Texas, Arkansas and Montana transportation departments recognize it and a pending bill in the U.S. Senate features language treating Make It American documentation as sufficient evidence of domestic-content compliance.
NEMA has prioritized product-level specifications for the equipment utilities buy most, including high- and medium-voltage distribution equipment, grid management and automation equipment and wire and cable. That lets procurement teams verify domestic content product-by-product, with certification that reflects actual production practices.
Virtual power plants may be the fastest new capacity on the market. But a virtual megawatt is only as real as the meter that proves it was delivered.
