California senate bill 913 would allow utilities and grid operators to treat home backup batteries like real power plants, opening the door for programs that can pay homeowners to share excess energy capacity during peak demand.
State senator Josh Becker (D), SB 913’s lead sponsor, reported that California utility customers add around 8,000 new home batteries to the grid each month – about 100 MW of new storage capacity according to data from the California Public Utilities Commission. That’s capacity that could go a long way towards reducing the strain on the state’s grid during its hottest summer days.
“California has spent years incentivizing and encouraging consumers to invest in distributed energy resources such as EV chargers, smart thermostats, rooftop solar and batteries to reduce their energy demand across the state,” explains Brandon García, California director for Advanced Energy United. “(But) our policies still undervalue how these resources can be part of the solution to the energy affordability crisis.”
By allowing energy aggregators to bundle the energy stored in thousands of home batteries into a virtual power plant and bid that capacity into California’s resource adequacy and utility markets, SB 913 could give residential storage real representation at the state level — and maybe even a fat paycheck, too.
Follow the money
In practice, that paycheck would come from the state’s utilities. That’s because power companies are required to buy enough capacity to meet peak demand under California’s resource adequacy rules. Instead of paying for new gas peaker plants or large-scale storage, they could contract with aggregators tapping into residential batteries — and pass a portion of those payments back to homeowners.
If it passes, SB 913 would allow customer-owned clean energy resources like home batteries, electric vehicles, and smart thermostats to compete with traditional power sources, providing real grid reliability at a low cost that dirtier fuels can’t match.
“California has a choice,” says senator Becker. “We can continue to build our way out of the problem at great cost, or we can use the capacity we already have more efficiently.”
To the credit of other policy stakeholders, they seem to understand Becker’s vision with the new bill. “California cannot afford to keep treating customer-owned or third party-contracted distributed energy resources as a side program when they can be part of the affordability solution,” says Arnab Pal, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Deploy Action. “SB 913 is about updating the rules so lower-cost distributed resources can compete fairly, deliver reliability, and help California get more value out of the grid infrastructure ratepayers have already funded.”
SB 913 was amended and re-referred to the Senate Committee on Appropriations after its April 7, 2026 Energy Committee vote. The bill is currently in committee process, with a vote not yet scheduled. You can follow its progress through the senate here.
Electrek’s Take
PG&E and Tesla have already announced an agreement that allows Cybertruck owners to sell power back to California’s grid through that utility’s residential Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) pilot program. The approval comes with up to $4,500 in incentives toward equipment and installation costs, and is one of several new pro-battery utility incentive programs that have been popping up across the US.
That said, you don’t have to wait for a hot incentive deal to show up in your state to make a home battery or home solar panel system pay off. Find out more about how you can make those pay here – especially if you have an EV!
SOURCES: Sen. Josh Becker; Utility Dive.
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