Would you be more likely to buy a home if it came with backup power? A homebuilding company and a virtual power plant provider are teaming up for a test run.
Lennar has announced plans to equip select communities in the Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth area with home backup battery systems provided by Base Power, a Texas-based distributed battery storage company that launched last year.
Through this collaboration, Lennar homeowners will have the opportunity to register for Base’s monthly electricity service and receive a complimentary Base backup battery, in an effort to provide outage protection and energy bill savings for the homeowners. Base operates as a virtual power plant (VPP), and claims it removes the traditionally high upfront costs of home batteries or generators. Homeowners can also use residential solar panels to charge their Base batteries.
“Over the past summer, more than 3.5 million Texans lost power due to extreme weather and other factors,” said Eric Feder, president of LENx, which manages Lennar’s innovation and venture capital investing. “Our investment in Base helps Lennar homeowners avoid this increasingly common occurrence with a worry-free solution. Lennar is always innovating and the inclusion of Base in select markets gives buyers peace of mind that their new home can weather almost any storm – literally and figuratively.”
Lennar’s collaboration with Base will pilot in multiple communities across North Austin and DFW, beginning with Firefly Pointe (Hutto), Rancho del Cielo (Jarrell), and Rancho Canyon (Haslet). When homeowners enroll with Base, their Lennar home will come outfitted with a Base battery. The program is expected to expand across Lennar communities in Texas.
Base claims its batteries are designed to last 15 years and withstand “extreme” temperatures and weather, and Base owns the battery and handles maintenance on the systems.
Another VPP program recently emerged in Texas. In September, Vistra announced a new program for homeowners in partnership with Sunrun to aggregate power stored in residential, solar-connected batteries, forming a VPP to dispatch energy back to the grid. The TXU Energy & Sunrun Battery Rewards program will be facilitated through Vistra’s flagship retail electricity brand, TXU Energy.
TXU Energy customers who opt into the program and have installed Sunrun home solar panels and batteries will receive financial incentives for their participation while retaining control of their systems during power outages or severe weather conditions, the companies said. These customers can also continue to utilize TXU Energy’s solar buyback plans, which credit solar energy system owners for the electricity they add to the grid.
In 2023, ERCOT began the first phase of the Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) pilot project by launching two virtual power plants (VPP). To qualify for the pilot project, an ADER had to be able to produce at least 100 kW, and each individual device in the ADER had to be less than 1 MW. The average residential battery is about 5 kW.
In February 2024, ERCOT launched the second phase of the pilot project. As of the start of the project, two ADERs were qualified to participate, with seven more awaiting registration and qualification. The second phase is expected to last at least 6 months, and ERCOT said the overall pilot project will likely extend for at least another two years.
Phase 2 of the ADER pilot project is meant to make incremental improvements and account for lessons learned during Phase 1, ERCOT said. Thus, the goals of the second phase include:
- Assess benefits and challenges of DER aggregations that are not net generation or net load;
- Understand the impact of having ancillary services and energy delivered by ADERs and assess how ADERs can best be used to support reliability;
- Assess challenges to incentivizing competition and attract broad DER participation through load serving entities (LSEs), while ensuring adequate customer protections are in place;
- Evaluate the impacts on transmission system congestion management associated with the dispatch and settlement of ADERs at a zonal level; and
- Identify potential Pilot Project enhancements and study the need for and benefit of transitioning distribution-level aggregations to different levels of more granular dispatch and settlement and evaluate more complex use cases and business models.
Texas’ energy demand is anticipated to keep growing, and if generation and transmission buildout don’t keep up, the state could face a capacity shortfall that threatens system reliability. A recent study released by the Texans for Local Energy Freedom Coalition, The Value of Residential Solar in Texas, argues the state is not fully taking advantage of its rooftop solar potential, and changing course could mitigate some of the capacity shortfalls.
