New bill in California senate could turn your home battery into a moneymaker

California senate bill 913 would allow utilities and grid operators to treat home backup batteries like real power plants, opening the door for programs that can pay homeowners to share excess energy capacity during peak demand.

State senator Josh Becker (D), SB 913’s lead sponsor, reported that California utility customers add around 8,000 new home batteries to the grid each month – about 100 MW of new storage capacity according to data from the California Public Utilities Commission. That’s capacity that could go a long way towards reducing the strain on the state’s grid during its hottest summer days.

“California has spent years incentivizing and encouraging consumers to invest in distributed energy resources such as EV chargers, smart thermostats, rooftop solar and batteries to reduce their energy demand across the state,” explains Brandon García, California director for Advanced Energy United. “(But) our policies still undervalue how these resources can be part of the solution to the energy affordability crisis.”

By allowing energy aggregators to bundle the energy stored in thousands of home batteries into a virtual power plant and bid that capacity into California’s resource adequacy and utility markets, SB 913 could give residential storage real representation at the state level — and maybe even a fat paycheck, too.