Dive Brief:
- Octopus Energy and Lunar Energy will offer Texas customers an electricity plan that pairs a high-capacity home battery with fixed energy pricing for three years, the companies said on April 22.
- Participating customers get a 30-kWh Lunar Energy battery at no up-front cost and a monthly subscription fee of $45, plus electricity at a flat starting rate of 8 cents/kWh, Octopus and Lunar said. The batteries will provide grid services as well as home backup during outages, they said.
- The plan is the latest battery-based retail electricity program in Texas to offer deeply discounted energy storage hardware and home backup power to customers who agree to allow their batteries to provide grid support. A few weeks ago, Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative said it would expand its battery partnership with Base Power from 2 MW to 50 MW.
Dive Insight:
Octopus Energy and Lunar Energy said they intend their PowerStore partnership to demonstrate “how smarter, more flexible energy solutions can work at home without adding complexity for customers.”
The plan will initially be available to “a limited number of homes across Texas” but could later support a “broader rollout” of battery-supported electricity tariffs there, they said.
“Home batteries were always going to become part of how the grid works. What’s new here is the accessibility,” Lunar Energy founder and CEO Kunal Girotra said in a statement hailing the plan’s fixed pricing, lack of up-front cost and utility for customers.
PowerStore can pair with home solar inverters from six manufacturers, including Tesla, SolarEdge and Enphase, plus “small, plug-in generator[s]” and some larger generators, Octopus Energy says. Octopus Energy discharges the battery to the home or grid during peak periods on normal days, but it will maintain a higher state of charge if storms are in the forecast, it says.
ERCOT’s competitive retail electricity market has become something of a proving ground in recent years for residential demand response and virtual power plant programs. Experts say the state’s aggregated distributed energy resource pilot program has been a significant tailwind, despite a slower-than-hoped-for rollout.
Base Power and GVEC announced the pilot phase of their partnership last summer. At the time, the program was limited to new homes built by Lennar in the cooperative’s 14-county territory east of San Antonio. Over the next two to three years, it will expand to 50 MW, putting Base Power on par with the other electricity suppliers GVEC works with, CEO Darren Schauer told Utility Dive earlier this month.
Like PowerStore, the GVEC-Base Power partnership involves deeply discounted batteries. GVEC members pay $295 for one 25-kWh battery or $445 for two batteries and nothing for an ongoing subscription that normally costs $19 to $29 per month.
Both programs promise reliable home backup and energy savings for customers while providing grid support that can indirectly reduce customers’ expenses by “avoiding future grid-related cost increases,” Octopus and Lunar said.
As a cooperative that buys electricity on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ sometimes-volatile wholesale market, GVEC can also use its batteries to reduce how much its member-owners pay for power.
For its part, Octopus Energy continues to offer Texas home energy plans based around resources other than stationary batteries, including managing customer thermostats and electric vehicles. It also offers a general time-of-use plan that encourages customers to use power during the overnight hours.
Thermostats also feature in the largest residential demand management program announced in the state to date, a tie-up between NRG and Renew Home that could deploy up to 1 GW of flexible capacity in ERCOT by the middle of next decade.
