Virtual power plant (VPP) platform profile
Lunar Energy: the Gridshare software behind Sunrun’s VPPs
How Lunar’s Gridshare platform runs mixed-brand battery fleets for Sunrun, California community choice aggregators, Japanese utilities and Octopus Energy.
VPP Economics has no affiliation with, sponsorship from, or endorsement by any utility, aggregator, platform, or device maker named here.
The short answer
- Lunar Energy sells a home battery, but its larger grid role is software. Its Gridshare platform runs all of Sunrun’s virtual power plants (VPPs), including nearly 130,000 home batteries, most of them made by other manufacturers (Lunar Energy).
- Scale is about 650 MW. Lunar reports 650 MW of devices under management across several continents and raised $232 million in 2026 (POWER).
- Its buyers are utilities, community choice aggregators (CCAs) and retailers. Gridshare runs VPPs for seven of Japan’s ten major power companies (Lunar’s Japan case study), several California CCAs, and Octopus Energy’s battery plan in Texas.
- It is moving from events to daily dispatch. Newer programs dispatch every day against prices or schedules, and a PG&E pilot dispatched batteries by substation every 30 minutes (Lunar).
Where Lunar Energy fits
Highlighted boxes are the roles this company plays; the green bar shows where its programs sit from demand response to an orchestrated VPP.
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What Gridshare does
Gridshare forecasts each home’s solar, load and battery state, then schedules charging and discharging for the fleet. For Sunrun it has managed 22 grid service programs since 2022, 13 of them live, covering 170 MW, more than 7,000 dispatch events and 12.5 GWh of energy, for programs with PG&E, National Grid and Eversource (Lunar’s Sunrun case study). Sunrun holds a stake in Lunar and uses Gridshare in about a dozen markets, including New England, Hawaii and Puerto Rico (Latitude Media).
Its best-known U.S. result is the 2023 Sunrun and PG&E Peak Power Rewards program, which delivered a daily average of 27 MW over two hours for 90 consecutive days, peaking near 32 MW (Lunar).
Gridshare in megawatts
Megawatts (MW) of capacity, by measure. Targets, program results and fleet totals are different measures
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California CCAs and distribution value
Central Coast Community Energy (3CE) signed a three-to-four-year deal for a Gridshare VPP, starting with home batteries and targeting 5 MW by the end of 2026 and 30 MW by 2030 (3CE). Ava Community Energy and Silicon Valley Clean Energy also use Gridshare (Lunar). For WestLight Energy, formerly Peninsula Clean Energy, Gridshare runs a daily dispatch strategy that aims to deliver more than 95% of the fleet’s available energy in each event (Lunar).
In PG&E’s Seasonal Aggregation of Versatile Energy (SAVE) pilot, May to October 2025, Lunar forecast flexible capacity for more than 500 devices across 25 substation groups every 30 minutes; PG&E then sent substation-level dispatch profiles back (Lunar). That is grid flexibility aimed at local distribution limits, not only the system peak.
Japan and Texas
Lunar has optimized home batteries in Japan since 2018. Chubu Electric Power Miraiz’s NACHARGE program is its third Japanese VPP program (Lunar), and in early 2026 it added direct control of Daikin EcoCute heat pump water heaters (Lunar).
In Texas, Lunar and Octopus Energy built PowerStore: a 30 kWh Lunar battery leased for $45 a month plus a three-year electricity plan at 8 cents per kWh. Gridshare charges when wholesale prices are low and discharges when they are high (Lunar). That model earns from wholesale price spreads, not from a utility program payment.
What it means for program design
Hardware-neutral fleets
Gridshare mostly runs batteries Lunar did not make, so a utility can buy dispatch software without picking one battery brand.
Ask for delivered energy
Targets such as delivering 95% of available energy each event give a measurable standard to write into contracts.
Distribution signals are coming
The PG&E pilot shows utilities sending 30-minute, substation-level profiles, not just system-wide event calls.
Method and caveats
Figures are company-reported or from partner announcements, checked October 16, 2026. Lunar’s 650 MW covers devices under management worldwide and is not the capacity available in any one program. Gridshare software pricing is not public.