Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries

Here's a better article:

https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...

Seems like they supply each person with 2 Tesla powerwalls for the $55/month and get a reduction in their bills that depends on how much power they choose to share to the grid during power outages.

They've already closed down 2 peaker power plants because of this, so it doesn't seem to just be about handling power outages, but also handling fluctuating power usage instead of firing up extra power plants.

I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.

It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.

Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".

The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which, if they were doing their job in the first place, should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.

The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.

This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.

I tried to signup for this program but the building code gets in the way. You need 3' from both edges of the battery to a window or door. I don't have a wall with 8-9' between windows. The alternative is to build a fire proof room in your house which takes up a lot of space. Ultimately it was not worth it even with all the financial incentives. The rules might seem innocuous but they're a dealbreaker. It's far easier to get a propane or diesel generator installed.

We have this in CA. I have Tesla batteries and they promote wanting me to enroll my batteries into a larger grid so their capacity can be used during higher load events.

I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.

Any news on the sodium based batteries? Cheaper but heavier would be perfect for home batteries

I love this. It’s basically an edge cache for power, with an enormous amount of side benefits - smooths out solar power, smooths out the duck curve, and allows the grid to size closer to the average load and absorb the spikes at the edge, instead of cascading into the core.

There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.

And as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.

What is average length of outage? If it is a few hours then the battery seems like a good idea. If it is days then the battery will probably run out.

> around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels

I'm assuming most of these outages are from snow storms. Do these people have to go up on the roof and clear the solar panels?

DER (distributed energy resources) is getting popular. This program is like a UPS for the house.

I think there's suppose to be a feel good in here, but it feels like another race to the bottom. Power companies dont invest their profits they take them and then when the grid becomes unreliable put it on the customers with interesting excuses and eco-fashionable handouts to help the pill go down.

I live in Vermont. This is the first I've heard of this. But I like it!

I couldn't read the article because of paywall issues. I have a Tesla powerwall that I pay $50 / month to lease from green mountain power. I have piece of mind for power in a rural area - the power company get peaker benefits. Seems like a great deal. I wish we had this in Massachusetts. Mad river valley area.

>The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.

>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.

Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?

Why would you put it in peoples homes and not at substations/next to residential transformers?

http://archive.today/2MIaJ

Base power is doing something similar in Texas. AFAICT, they take a loss on the equipment, charge the batteries when electricity prices are cheap, then sell power out of the batteries when prices are high and keep the difference. The homeowner enjoys only most likely having backup power.

I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.

That infrastructure fee isn't going to go down despite your new capex (and opex) costs. Congratulations, everyone just got duped.

Sure it starts out covering edge cases but the more they realise they can shift a burden - and cost - to homeowners, it'll spread. I don't want grid infrastructure in my home personally

What happened to economies of scale?

It's more important for shareholders to increase profits than to actually invest in infrastructure.

Vermont continues to be a leader in anarchism and distribution of power (pun intended).

Distributed power storage/generation has been a thing for a century and it’s finally economical enough to be mainstream.

This was the whole pitch of the solarcity/tesla solar tiles + power wall a decade or more ago.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot.

The way an electricity utility works, you need power plants (or to buy power from someone with power plants), transmission lines and some form of last mile delivery. You have substations and other infrastructure too. That infrastructure has ongoing maintenance costs but also capex to build it in the first place.

So your per kWh price is the sum of the electricity cost, the maintenance cost and the amortized capex plus some profit.

Utilities are heavy regulated but only the electricity cost tends to be highly regulated. Any maintenance or capex costs can be passed on directly to the consumer. Private equity has realized this. Data centers have realized this where they can negotiate a lower electricity rate and the build out for multi-gigawatt transmission and power generation can be passed on to consumers. This has gotten creative enough that people in unrelated states end up paying more because of upgrades required for shared infrastructure for interstate utility compacts.

The obvious endpoint for all this is for users to eventually opt out. Disconnect from the grid and use totally renewable energy plus batteries. Generally in any urban environment you can't avoid the monthly connection cost even if you use no power. The city will declare your house unlivable. I can see this changing in the coming years with soaring prices that basically go to share buybacks and bonuses for private utilities.

But what if the connection to the grid drops significantly shifting maintenance costs to the rest?

I think the future is going to move away from large connected grids towards self-sufficiency and smaller localized grids, ideally municipally owned. But you can't gradually move from a large grid to smaller grids like this because of the problems of who pays for the grid in between.

Vermont is stuck in the 19th century

Note I have a Tesla powerwall at home. They installed it inside before I bought the house. I always wonder what happens when these things catch fire

I've seen a program funded by a utility that integrated batteries with air conditioners.

That's a lot of spin. I didn't expect that from the BBC.

If they can claim "extreme weather" is why rural areas are finally getting their shit together, I can claim the decline of BBC is a sign of the times.

Batteries only store power, not produce it. Headline reads as misleading.

Or they could use EVs. Require cars to have V2X (Vehicle to Grid, Vehicle to Load) feature. EV batteries are humongous.