Puerto Rico tapped Sunrun’s home batteries for 18 straight days

Photo: Sunrun

Sunrun has doubled participation in its Puerto Rico virtual power plant to more than 60,000 customers, and the grid is putting those home batteries to work: It tapped into them for 18 straight days in October.

A virtual power plant (VPP) connects batteries across thousands of properties and coordinates them to supply power together.

Sunrun says its VPP network in Puerto Rico now includes nearly 70,000 batteries, frequently delivering 45 megawatts (MW) for four hours at a time. It has dispatched them more than 60 times since April, including daily deployments beginning October 13 during unusually hot weather.

For Puerto Ricans, who pay some of the highest electricity prices in the US, getting reliable power for all that money remains a problem. Residential electricity averaged 26.36 cents per kilowatt-hour in August, compared with a US average of 18.16 cents, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

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That makes the batteries already installed at homes pretty useful. The grid can pay to tap their stored energy when supplies get tight, putting existing equipment to work without waiting for a new power plant to be built.

Sunrun’s batteries get a second job

Sunrun’s network grew from around 4,000 customers in 2024 to more than 30,000 in 2025. It says it’s the largest aggregator in Puerto Rico’s Customer Battery Energy Sharing (CBES) program.

LUMA, the island’s grid operator, calls on CBES when it expects electricity demand or reserve needs to exceed available generation. Companies such as Sunrun then manage the battery response automatically.

Homeowners get paid for sharing energy and choose how much to keep for backup. Sunrun says most share a small portion of their total battery capacity; the company earns recurring revenue for operating the network.

Across the wider CBES program, LUMA reported in July that more than 90,000 participating customers had helped provide an average of 75 MW during generation shortfalls.

A larger VPP is needed

Puerto Rico’s reliability problem goes well beyond hurricanes.

Customers averaged 36 hours without power in 2025, even excluding major events, according to the US EIA. That’s up 19% from 2024. Mainland US customers generally experience about two hours a year under the same measure. Major events added another 23 hours of outages on the island.

More batteries can help, but the size of the shortfall still matters. In an April regulatory filing, participating aggregators said the program couldn’t prevent every rolling blackout in 2025 because some supply gaps exceeded its roughly 50 MW of four-hour capacity. They’re looking to enroll more batteries so the program can cover larger shortfalls.

Read more: Sunrun wants to pay you to turn your home into an AI data center

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Source: electrek.co — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.