Small Vermont utility quietly builds fleet of 4,000 Tesla Powerwalls

Green Mountain Power (GMP), a Vermont electric utility, has quietly built a fleet of 4,000 Tesla Powerwalls, and it is saving them a lot of money.

GMP has been one of Tesla’s best partners when it comes to deploying Powerwalls, Tesla’s home battery pack, in a decentralized way with electric utilities. The relatively small electric utility operating in Vermont was one of the earliest adopters of Tesla Powerwall.

It has been leading the deployment of Tesla Powerwalls with 2,000 units as of 2018, and in 2020, it signed a deal to get up to 1,000 more Powerwalls from Tesla per year. As of last year, GMP said that it had more than 3,000 Powerwalls installed in homes on its network.

The electric utility offers strong incentives to either deploy Powewalls at customer’s homes or onboard existing Powerwalls in its grid program where GMP is allowed to use some power capacity of a customer’s batteries in exchange for credits on their electricity bill.

In 2020 alone, GMP disclosed that it saved over $3 million from its use of Tesla Powerwalls.

Now the company confirmed that it has deployed over 4,000 Tesla Powerwalls at customers’ homes across the state. GMP CECO Mari McClure said to local news WCAX:

The program has been running for a few years and McClure says they’re finding success. There are more than 4,000 Powerwalls in Vermont homes.

McClure also said that the fleet of home batteries saved more than $3 million again in 2021 and it is likely to be much more than that this year since it saved them nearly $1.5 million in one week this summer during a heat wave.

This is significant for a relatively small electric utility that serves approximately 270,000 residential and business customers in Vermont.

Tesla has recently been building its own virtual power plant (VPP) with Powerwall owners in California in partnership with much larger electric utilities, like PG&E and SCE, which both have millions of customers. Yet, during the VPP’s first discharge event last week, they had less than 3,000 Powerwall owners participating.

Therefore, Green Mountain Power’s Tesla Powerwall fleet is extremely impressive for its size.

But McClure said that they need to go faster, and more people have to get onboard. They are working with other electric utilities to deploy similar technology; GMP is also deploying new microgrids.

You can inquire about how to enroll in GMP’s Tesla Powerwall program here.

Last year, GMP also disclosed that it will be using Tesla’s Autobidder software to better take advantage of its increasing energy storage capacity. Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform for energy assets, like Tesla’s Powerpacks, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, optimized through machine learning to better use and more directly monetize the assets.