The US state replacing power plants with home batteries

A Vermont utility, Green Mountain Power, has built a large virtual power plant by leasing home battery systems to customers for $55 a month on a 10-year contract; more than 5,500 homes now participate. Individual users like Pollyanna Bladyka and Megan Browning report no outages since installation, and batteries typically hold enough reserve to power a house for days if used conservatively. GMP began a pilot in 2017, saw a surge in enrollments after regulators lifted a cap in 2023, and now aggregates home batteries, rooftop solar, EVs and other demand-response resources into a coordinated system that provides about 110 MW of capacity - making it the single largest power source in the state. Customers retain some backup power and GMP has piloted giving batteries free to the most outage-prone households as part of a goal to eliminate outages by 2030.

Virtual power plants pool distributed devices with software orchestration to reduce peak demand, replace expensive fossil-fuel “peaker” plants and improve resilience during storms. The US currently has over 40 GW of virtual capacity, with the Department of Energy estimating up to 160 GW could be available by 2030 (roughly 20% of expected peak demand), and GMP says its program saved customers $11m last year. Utilities elsewhere, such as Rocky Mountain Power in Utah, are pursuing similar replacements of peaker plants, and analysts project national consumer and system savings measured in billions from wider deployment.