Californians face steep up-front costs if they want to install solar panels to produce clean power and batteries to back up their homes in outages. Anew state program will cover those costs for low-income homeowners, but they still have to pay up to tens of thousands of dollars initially and then wait months for the rebate to come through.
Now astartup called Haven Energy is going to take on the task of filing that paperwork, giving homeowners something that sounds too good to be true: asolar and battery system with no out-of-pocket cost.
It’s the latest riff on the evolving market for virtual power plants, which aggregate thousands of small energy systems into ameaningful tool to meet the energy needs of utilities or competitive electricity markets. The grid needs more energy just about everywhere in the U.S., but large-scale infrastructure construction runs into persistent delays and challenges. Adding generation and storage capacity in homes is relatively quick, and with the right incentives, can add up to asubstantial tool to meet the grid’s needs.
If Haven successfully implements those incentives, it thinks it will be able to install 10megawatts of dispatchable battery capacity across thousands of homes in the next two years. The (non-paying) customers will benefit from bill savings and backup power; to qualify for the state-funded rebate, they just need to make their batteries discharge regularly when the grid is stressed, namely in the evening hours when solar production dips and demand surges.
Haven’s home-battery strategy
Haven launched in 2023 to streamline the home battery purchase experience and has overseen installations at hundreds of homes in California. But after acouple of years, cofounder and CEO Vinnie Campo determined the company needed anew strategic approach.
“We thought if you were able to remove all the friction from the process, that you could dramatically increase the adoption,” he explained. “That’s only fractionally true. The reason most people don’t get abattery is that they’re incredibly expensive.”
At the same time, utilities have begun grappling with asudden uptick in electricity demand to supply AI computing, industry, and electrification. Utilities increasingly recognize the value of fleets of aggregated batteries to help meet peak demand, Campo said, but they’re much more comfortable contracting for large assets than thousands of smallones.
Putting these threads together, Campo decided Haven should own the batteries it installs at customer homes, so it can control them to serve utilities’ grid needs, and pull together different revenue streams to lower the cost for consumers.
“We’re seeing from the utilities and the retail companies, they just want that fixed, firm capacity every day,” Campo said. “That’s part of the gap that we’re trying to playinto.”
Now Haven can tap into anew tranche of state funds to make this areality.
California earmarks $280 million for low-income solar-storage
Batteries don’t generate power, but for arcane bureaucratic reasons California has long funded its desired battery expansion with the Self-Generation Incentive Program. This legacy program has shifted with the times, and its newest evolution opened up $280 million to pay for batteries (and optional paired solar panels) for low-income households.
Technically, those homeowners can apply for the funds themselves. But this is arebate program, so they would have to front the cost — which can easily tally up to $30,000 or $40,000 — then wait to get paid back by SGIP, which can take three or four months, Campo said. That’s an obvious nonstarter for many households.
Haven, though, has raised adebt facility and studied up on the necessary details. It can fund the cost of installation and wait for the rebate without sweating. Then it’s on the hook to make sure the installed battery system meets the program requirements for lowering demand in the evenings over 10years. (Haven routes the installations to local installers and partnered with an undisclosed software company to handle the distributed energy management system)
The customer, meanwhile, doesn’t have to pay Haven any money, but benefits from the backup power and from lowering their electricity demand during peak pricing hours. Customers who use the SGIP funds to pair solar with their batteries will further lower their energy bills by producing their own clean power. And after adecade, Haven will transfer ownership to the homeowners.
Haven has already signed up afew hundred households for this program; the new rebates for solar-battery systems will open up on May 20, when the state rolls out updates to its online system for processing them.
