Virtual Power Plants for the Decentralized Internet

Virtual Power Plants for the Decentralized Internet – Daylight brings Power Control Integration to the DAWN Black Box

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TLDR:

• Daylight × DAWN Partnership: Every DAWN Black Box will now include Daylight's Virtual Power Plant (VPP) technology to manage energy use and reduce strain on the local power grid.
• Problem: The exponential growth of AI and digital infrastructure is intensifying global electricity demand, creating fierce competition for limited power resources.
• Solution: Daylight empowers households with telemetry, modulation, and incentive mechanisms, enabling real-time control of power usage to collectively stabilize the grid through voluntary reductions, generating virtual power capacity.

The people are building a new Internet—one household, and one Black Box at a time. As a decentralized Internet moves from possibility to inevitability, certain core technologies and protocols emerge as essential foundations of this landscape. In this series, we explore these history-defining protocols, highlighting their unique roles in enabling a consumer-owned digital infrastructure, why each is indispensable, and how the Black Box is designed specifically to bring their benefits directly to households.

‍Power: The Real Backbone of the Internet

If you’ve been following DAWN’s vision, you know we see a future where the Internet isn't controlled by centralized data centers, but rather powered directly by its users. We’ve introduced decentralized wireless, consumer-owned compute, and distributed storage—all encapsulated in a single, hyper-converged edge device: the DAWN Black Box.

But underpinning all of these innovations is something more fundamental than bandwidth, storage, or compute—it's electricity itself. Electricity is the silent foundation upon which the entire digital economy is built. And as digital infrastructure expands rapidly, driven by AI and increasingly demanding workloads, global electricity consumption is surging dramatically, and modern grids are just not ready for it. 

Yet the shift toward decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) presents a remarkable opportunity to address this issue. As the DAWN Black Box moves core digital infrastructure out of distant data centers and directly into people’s homes, it also moves the power consumption associated with running that infrastructure closer to the end-user. This proximity opens the door to new possibilities, specifically allowing households to participate directly in balancing and managing power consumption in ways that are both sophisticated, and elegantly responsive to the grid's needs. To realize this vision, however, households need clear visibility into their energy use, the ability to precisely modulate it, and compelling incentives to participate in helping out these power companies. This is exactly the intersection where Daylight Energy is leading by providing the tools and cryptoeconomic structure needed to unlock the full potential of the grid that powers the Internet of today, and tomorrow.

Virtual Power Plants: Earning Rewards for Using Less

Daylight Energy creates Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) by incentivizing and financing distributed solar and storage. Its network of distributed batteries can dispatch to support the grid, delivering electricity to the market exactly when it's needed. Daylight’s distributed approach can scale new energy capacity much faster than traditional power plants, helping resolve the tight electricity supply facing power grids today. 

To better grasp why these systems are called Virtual Power Plants, consider how a network of batteries across numerous homes can act together as if they're one large, unified power station. Individually, each battery may seem modest, but coordinated together, these distributed resources behave like a cohesive, centrally-managed plant, virtually expanding the grid's capacity during critical periods without the need for new centralized generation.

However, generating, storing, and dispatching power from batteries is just one way Daylight’s platform alleviates grid stress. Daylight can also manage the consumption of energy-hogging appliances directly, reducing consumption during critical periods to effectively create new surplus capacity on the grid when it is needed most. This precise, coordinated reduction across many homes essentially "unlocks" hidden power reserves through voluntary participation.

But for such a sophisticated orchestration to work, Daylight leverages three critical elements:

• Telemetry: Real-time insights into household energy consumption, so you know exactly how your energy is being used at every moment.
  
  
• Modulation: Dynamic, automated control over power usage, making participation effortless and effective.
  
  
• Incentives: Attractive rewards, ensuring households benefit directly from their contributions to grid stability.

Daylight seamlessly integrates these capabilities into a user-friendly system, enabling households to effortlessly monitor their power use, automatically respond to grid signals (without having to get involved), and earn meaningful rewards for helping to keep the power grid online. This approach makes active participation in our power infrastructure possible, while providing one of the most clear cut examples of using incentives to avoid tragedies of the commons.

Daylight × DAWN: Orchestrating Power Needs for the Internet of the Future

It's one thing for households to occasionally help the grid during moments of crisis like in that heatwave scenario, but as the Internet moves more infrastructure directly into people's homes through this edge computing trend (of which the Black Box is a prime example of), homes themselves become demand centers for power. 

Given this shift, the need for intelligent power management at the edge is absolutely essential. That’s why we’re excited about integrating Daylight's power modulation capabilities directly into the DAWN Black Box. The Black Box includes a HomeAssistant-aware smart plug, providing real time visibility of power usage directly in the DAWN app. This integration allows users to sacrifice computational workloads, like inference, for separate rewards in cases when the grid needs that headroom.

Picture your Black Box running a local DeepSeek model. During a period of peak grid stress, your DAWN app would automatically scale down from running a powerful 14-billion-parameter model to a smaller 7-billion-parameter model, temporarily reducing your home's power draw. Just like slightly adjusting your thermostat, this subtle change can be the difference between grid stability and rolling blackouts. And, of course, you're rewarded for this voluntary reduction controlled by automated thresholds.

Even if you decide to not allow Daylight to reduce your Black Box’s consumption, your smart plug provides Daylight with valuable voltage data from your home. Paired with one of their energy monitors, you can contribute data to reinforce their energy forecasting models for individual homes, unlocking better management and results for their portfolio of distributed energy resources.

Through this collaboration, DAWN and Daylight are bringing simplicity and real rewards to the task of balancing power for the Internet of the future that is powered by users. It’s hard to imagine a world without VPPs and we’re thrilled to help make Daylight’s vision a reality.