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# What Your Battery Earns When the Utility Borrows It
- URL: https://genius-energy.ghost.io/what-your-battery-earns-when-the-utility-borrows-it/
- Published: 2026-09-04T11:01:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T11:01:24.000Z
- Author: Mason Vance

Last year a New England program paid more than $5.4 million to homeowners who let their batteries discharge on command during summer peaks. Roughly 5,251 residential battery participants split it. That is real money moving in the direction most people do not expect, and the program is now extending the same deal to electric vehicles.  

## How a Virtual Power Plant Actually Works

The program is **ConnectedSolutions**, run across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. The concept behind it has a clumsy name, **virtual power plant**, and a simple mechanism.

On a hot afternoon when regional demand approaches its annual peak, a utility has two options. It can fire up a rarely used and expensive peaking plant, or it can ask a few thousand home batteries to discharge into the house they are attached to, which drops those homes off the grid's demand curve for a couple of hours. The second option is cheaper, so the utility pays for it.

Compensation is performance-based. Participants earn roughly **$275 per average kilowatt** they contribute across the summer events, which works out to something in the range of **$1,375 to $2,750 per season** for a typical residential battery. Payment depends on what you actually delivered during the events, not on enrollment alone.

What the homeowner gives up is control during a small number of announced windows. The battery discharges when the program calls, not when your own optimization software would prefer. Most platforms hold back a reserve so the pack is not sitting empty if the grid then fails, but the reserve level is a setting worth checking before you sign up.

The scale is worth noting. In Massachusetts these enrolled devices delivered about **40 MW of net summer capacity savings in 2025**, with **28.9 MW** of that coming from residential installations. That is a modest power plant assembled entirely out of equipment homeowners bought for their own reasons.

The next step is vehicles. Massachusetts is opening the program to bidirectional EVs, starting with models including the **Ford F-150 Lightning, Nissan Leaf, Kia EV9, Polestar 3, and Volvo EX90**, at compensation comparable to batteries. A truck battery is several times the size of a wall unit, so the arithmetic there is different.

### The Hardware Stack

**Tesla Powerwall 3:** The most commonly enrolled residential battery in performance-based programs, with utility dispatch handled through Tesla's own platform.

**EnergyHub:** The demand-response platform that administers enrollment and dispatch for utilities across many of these programs.

**Ford F-150 Lightning:** One of the first vehicles eligible for the bidirectional expansion, paired with Ford's Home Integration System for whole-home discharge.

### Vulnerability Score

**Unpaid idle capacity:** A battery that only serves its own house sits at full charge most of the year doing nothing, while the utility pays a peaker plant for the same service.

**Peak exposure:** Homes without storage ride the full peak-demand pricing curve in territories with time-of-use rates, at exactly the hours when power costs the most to produce.

**Slow payback:** Home storage bought purely for outage insurance depends on outages to justify itself. Without a revenue stream attached, the payback period stretches well past the warranty in most regions.

### Reading the Fine Print Before Enrolling

If you already own a battery, checking whether your utility runs a program like this is a short call with a clear answer, and in a good territory it can meaningfully shorten payback. If you are still deciding whether to buy, treat program income as a bonus rather than the basis of the model. Rates get revised, event counts change, and program terms are set annually.

The two questions worth asking are what reserve level the program leaves you during an event, and how many events a season you are committing to. Both are usually published, and both determine whether this feels like a good arrangement or an inconvenient one.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e6/ee/e6ee1e2b-d1a5-4bf5-9ea4-466c4fb0764d/content/images/2026/09/vpp-truck.jpg)

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*Written by Mason Vance*