Home battery virtual power plant programs, state by state (2026)
The 41 documented home battery VPP programs across 24 states in our data, named by administrator, with honest limits on what the source table can tell you.
A virtual power plant program pays you to let a utility or aggregator dispatch energy from your home battery during grid stress. Our VPP glossary entry explains the mechanism and the catches. This page is the inventory: which states have documented programs in our data, who runs them, and what our source can and cannot tell you.
Our incentive data documents 41 virtual power plant programs across 24 states. Every one of them is listed below by the name and administrator our source records. What follows is a map of where to look, not a promise that a given program is open to you today.
Where this list comes from, and its limits
The program records come from a public DSIRE export plus a vendored copy of the Clean Energy States Alliance virtual power plant programs summary table, refreshed in manual research waves rather than by live feed. The entries carrying a VPP type were verified in our data on July 8, 2026.
Two limits follow, and they are the reason this page is written the way it is.
The first: our records carry no payment amount for any VPP entry. Not one of the 41 has a clean dollar figure attached. So this guide names programs and administrators and stops there. Any number you see elsewhere for these programs came from somewhere other than a program record, and you should treat it as a claim to verify rather than a rate.
The second: a listing means the program has been documented, not that enrollment is open. Many of these are explicitly pilots. Pilots fill, pause, and close. Verify current enrollment with the administrator before it affects a purchase decision.
The states with documented programs
California has the most entries of any state in our data, with seven: CalReady, Local PeakShift Power, and Peak Power Rewards Program (Sunrun); Sunrun Brightbox VPP (Sunrun and Southern California Edison); Emergency Load Reduction Program, or ELRP (Southern California Edison); Seasonal Aggregation of Versatile Energy, or SAVE (PG&E); and Demand Side Grid Support Program VPP Pilots (California Energy Commission). The state-level picture, including how these interact with SGIP and the net billing tariff, is in our California report.
Texas has three: Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource, or ADER (ERCOT); Tesla Electric Virtual Power Plant Pilot with ERCOT (Tesla Electric and Sunrun); and TXU Energy and Sunrun Battery Rewards (Vistra and Sunrun). Texas has no statewide battery purchase rebate, so grid-services participation is most of what is on offer there. See the Texas report.
Vermont has three, and they are unusually varied: Battery Leasing Program (Green Mountain Power), Flexible Load Program (Vermont Electric Co-op), and Vermont Income Qualified Residential Battery Storage Program (Vermont Electric Co-op). See the Vermont report.
Massachusetts has three: ConnectedSolutions (Eversource, National Grid, Unitil, and Cape Light Compact), Clean Peak Energy Standard (Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and the Department of Energy Resources), and the Cape & Vineyard Electrification Offering (Cape Light Compact). See the Massachusetts report.
Arizona has two, both administered by Arizona Public Service: the APS Storage Rewards Pilot program and the Arizona Public Service Residential Battery Pilot.
Illinois has two: a Virtual Power Plant Program, listed as applying to electric utilities serving more than 300,000 customers, and a Distributed Generation and Storage Rebate listed against public utilities.
Maine has two, both administered by Efficiency Maine Trust: the Maine Energy Storage System Program and the Small Battery Management Initiative.
New York has two, both geographically narrow: the PSEG Long Island Battery Storage Rewards Program (Long Island only) and the Rooftop Solar/Battery Backup Pilot Project (Sunrun with Orange & Rockland Utilities).
Washington has two: PSE Flex (Puget Sound Energy) and the Wattsmart Battery Program (Pacific Power).
One program each: Colorado, with Xcel Renewable Battery Connect (Xcel Energy). Georgia, with the Solar Plus Storage Pilot Program (Georgia Power). Hawaii, with BYOD Plus (Hawaiian Electric). Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, each with the Wattsmart Battery Program (Rocky Mountain Power). Oregon, with the Wattsmart Battery Program (Pacific Power). Kansas, with the Home Battery Storage Pilot (Evergy). Louisiana, with the Entergy Energy Smart Battery Program, listed for New Orleans only. Maryland, with the Elk Neck Battery Storage Pilot Program (Delmarva Power and Sunverge). Missouri, with the Evergy Home Battery Storage Pilot Program. New Hampshire, with the Battery Storage Pilot Program (Liberty Utilities). New Jersey, with a Virtual Power Plant Program listed against utilities and third-party suppliers. Rhode Island, with ConnectedSolutions. And South Carolina, with the EnergyWise Home and Power Manager Battery Control Program (Duke Energy). See the Utah report for one example of how a single-program state reads.
Three patterns worth noticing
The same program spans state lines. The Wattsmart Battery Program appears in four states in our data under two utility brands, Rocky Mountain Power in Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, and Pacific Power in Oregon and Washington. ConnectedSolutions appears in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. If you are researching one of these, material written for a neighboring state is often closer to relevant than material written for your own state about a different program.
Some programs are run by a company, not a utility. Several California and Texas entries name Sunrun, Tesla Electric, or Vistra as administrator, sometimes jointly with a utility. Those are usually tied to buying or leasing through that company. That is a very different commitment from a utility program open to any approved battery, and it is worth establishing which kind you are being offered before the paperwork.
A few names do not match what you would expect from a VPP. Vermont's entry for Green Mountain Power is called a Battery Leasing Program. Illinois has an entry called a Distributed Generation and Storage Rebate. Both are typed as virtual power plant programs in the source table. A name that says rebate or lease, typed as a grid-services program, is exactly the situation where you should read the actual terms rather than the label, because a rebate cuts your upfront cost once and a grid-services payment arrives over years.
What enrollment usually requires
The programs above set their own rules, so treat this as the shape of the questions rather than the answers. Most require an approved battery model, a persistent internet connection so the operator can dispatch, and an agreement about how much of your stored energy the operator may use and how often. Many reserve a portion of capacity or cap the number of events per season. Some require installation by a participating contractor.
The part that surprises people is the loss of control. During a dispatch event, the program decides what your battery does. If you bought the battery mainly for outage resilience, ask specifically how the program handles reserve capacity and whether events can leave you with less stored energy than you expected.
How to check your own situation
Start with your utility, since almost every program above is administered by a utility, a state agency, or a company you would be buying from anyway. Ask whether a battery program exists, whether enrollment is currently open, what it pays and on what basis, and what equipment qualifies. Get the answer in writing before it changes your purchase.
Then cross-check with DSIRE, the canonical public database of state and utility energy incentives, and with our incentive finder, which shows the programs recorded for your state alongside the honest federal picture. On the federal side there is nothing to look up for a cash purchase: the Section 25D residential credit expired December 31, 2025, so a 2026 outright buyer receives no federal credit in any state.
Finally, keep VPP income out of the core decision. Model the battery on bill savings and backup value in the calculator first. If a documented program turns out to be open to you, add it as upside on a purchase that already made sense without it.
What a home battery actually does
The general version, in 3 minutes. Every figure in it is one we publish and date on this site.
Correction, October 2026: SGIP's general budget was already closed when this was recorded. Only income-qualified equity funds remain, most of them waitlisted.
Read the full transcriptHide the transcript
Almost every explanation of home batteries you will find was made by someone selling one. So here is the version from people who are not. A home battery does three things. It keeps your lights on when the grid goes down. It buys electricity when it is cheap so you can use it when it is expensive. And it can earn you money by letting the utility borrow it. In most states only one of those is worth real money, and it is usually not the one you called about. Start with backup. A mainstream battery holds about thirteen and a half kilowatt hours. Run a fridge and some lights, about a quarter of a kilowatt, and that lasts you roughly two days. Back up your whole home's essential circuits instead, around two point two kilowatts, and the same battery gives you about six hours. Same battery, same kilowatt hours. The only thing that changed is what you asked it to carry. Anyone quoting you days of backup without asking what is plugged in is guessing. Second job: buying low and using high. This one only works if your utility charges different prices at different times of day. In California the blended average is about thirty-four cents a kilowatt hour. Peak can pass fifty-five. Off-peak can drop under twenty-five. That gap is the entire business case. Charge at twenty-five, use it at fifty-five, keep the difference. In Texas and Florida, at about fifteen cents flat, there is no gap to work with. The battery still runs. It just is not earning. Third job, and the one most people have never heard of. Your utility may pay you to let them borrow your battery during a grid emergency. These are virtual power plant programs. In California that runs four hundred to fifteen hundred dollars a year. In Texas and Florida, for a residential customer, it mostly is not available yet. Then the rebates, which is where the real money is, and where the bad information is worst. California's SGIP pays a hundred fifty to two hundred dollars per kilowatt hour, and up to around a thousand if you are in a high fire-risk area or on a medical baseline. Now the federal credit, and listen closely, because this is the one that gets sold wrong. The thirty percent that homeowners used to claim directly on their own taxes is gone. There is still a thirty percent credit, under Section 48E, but on a lease or a power purchase agreement it is the company that owns the system that claims it, not you. They may pass some of it back as a lower price. That is a different thing from a check from the IRS. If someone selling you a battery says you will get thirty percent back on your taxes, they are describing a program that no longer works that way. So, is it worth it? It comes down to your state, how your utility prices power, and what you actually need to keep running. Those three things, in that order. We track incentives across twenty-seven states and we put a verification date on every number. Check yours before you take anyone's word for it. Including ours.