Green Mountain Power partners with Sunrun to expand BYOD storage program

Dive Brief:

Green Mountain Power (GMP), Vermont's only investor-owned utility, is continuing to expand its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) battery storage program with the addition of Sunrun's Brightbox home solar battery system.
Customers can choose from six battery providers. Sunrun said its battery can provide up to 12 hours of backup electricity and will power four essential circuits — i.e. lighting, internet, kitchen and garage door.
To enroll in GMP's BYOD program, customers must give the utility permission to access their storage systems for grid-management purposes. GMP lunched its BYOD battery program in 2018 after a successful exclusive partnership with Tesla.

Dive Insight:

GMP, which serves around 265,000 residential and business customers in Vermont, continues to bet big on battery storage in its pursuit to transform the state's power grid to 100% renewable energy.

The utility aims to be 100% carbon free by 2025 and 100% renewable by 2030.

GMP offers customers enrolling in their battery system in the BYOD program for 10 years an upfront payment of $850 per kW of storage, or an equal amount of ongoing bill credits.

The security of having a backup battery system is critical to Vermont customers, who face second longest blackout times in the nation, Sunrun said in a release. Only customers in Montana face longer outages, according to Eaton's Blackout Tracker.

GMP was one of the first utilities in the country to embrace home battery storage and data has proved its success. During a heatwave in July 2018, customers saved $500,000 in one hour when GMP was able to reduce peak demand through about 500 locally installed Tesla Powerwall batteries.

GMP in May introduced a pilot that will use battery storage systems as meters, in order to provide a clean back-up power source and energy savings. The utility has partnered with Tesla for years.

The pilot includes 250 customers enrolled with the utility and 250 customers enrolled with third-party vendors, using GMP's BYOD incentives, to add two Tesla Powerwall battery systems per customer. The utility is working on testing the Resilient Home pilot for 18 months, filing updates along the way. GMP aims to test other batteries to use as meters in the future.

With the introduction of Brightbox in Vermont, Sunrun is offering its battery system in nine states and Puerto Rico.

The New England market, however, is nothing new for Sunrun. Earlier this year, the Independent System Operator-New England became the first capacity market to accept an aggregated residential solar-plus-storage bid, awarding Sunrun for 20 MW of distributed grid capacity to be online in 2022.