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Sunrun, a provider of home battery storage, solar and home-to-grid power plants, announced a new multi-year partnership with NRG Energy, which delivers natural gas, electricity and smart home solutions to homes and businesses across North America.
The collaboration is meant to accelerate the adoption of distributed energy, including home battery storage in Texas, delivering dispatchable capacity to meet the state’s “surging energy demand,” per Sunrun.
“This partnership is a major step in achieving our goal of creating a 1 GW virtual power plant by 2035,” said Brad Bentley, Executive Vice President, President of NRG Consumer. “Texas is growing fast, and our electricity supply must keep pace. By teaming up with Sunrun, we’re unlocking a new source of dispatchable, flexible energy while giving customers the opportunity to unlock value from their homes and contribute to a more resilient grid.”
Texas residents will be offered a complete home energy solution pairing Sunrun’s solar-plus-storage systems with optimized rate plans and smart battery programming through NRG Energy retail electricity provider, Reliant. As new and existing Sunrun customers enroll with Reliant, the cumulative capacity will be available to help meet increased demand in the ERCOT market.
“This partnership demonstrates the scale and strength of Sunrun’s storage and solar distributed power plant assets,” said Sunrun CEO Mary Powell. “We are delivering critical energy infrastructure that gives Texas families affordable, resilient power and builds a reliable, flexible power plant for the grid.”
Together, the companies will be developing offers to aggregate and dispatch these distributed power assets to provide electricity to Texas’s grid during periods of peak demand. Sunrun will be paid for aggregating the capacity and participating Reliant customers will be compensated by Sunrun for sharing their stored solar energy.
Sunrun, which is responsible for nearly half of all new home battery installations in the United States, operates more than a dozen virtual power plants, including the nation’s largest single-owner VPP, the aforementioned CalReady, consisting of more than 16,000 home solar and battery energy storage systems. The VPP supplied California’s Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) with up to 32 MW during peak times last summer and averaged 48 MW during a heatwave this July, topping out over 50 MW. The distributed energy aggregator is applying its CalReady findings to a pair of new-ish programs in Texas- one with Tesla Electric and another in partnership with Vistra/TXU Energy.
