Illinois requires a ComEd battery program paying 300 dollars per kilowatt hour, but the interim tariff approved in July 2026 lets only outside companies enroll customers before the full program arrives by the end of 2027

The ComEd battery program Illinois residents want is not open yet

Illinois passed the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act in 2026, a law that requires ComEd, the electric utility serving Chicago and its suburbs, to build a virtual power plant, the industry term for a program that pays customers for sending stored battery power back to the grid when demand is high. The law gives ComEd until the end of 2027 to file its full, publicly marketed battery program with state regulators. A search for a ComEd battery program Illinois residents can join today turns up nothing on the ComEd website itself, because that wider program has not opened.

The interim tariff pays through outside companies, not ComEd directly

What already exists is narrower. The Illinois Commerce Commission approved an interim tariff called Rider SDVPP on July 16, 2026, letting approved third party companies dispatch a customer battery for pay, not ComEd enrolling the customer directly. A homeowner enrolls through one of those companies today, not through ComEd. Solrite Energy entered the Illinois market on August 20, 2026, installing a 60 kilowatt hour home battery for 20 dollars a month with no upfront installation cost. A typical ComEd household uses about 20 kilowatt hours of electricity a day, so that battery holds about 3 times a typical day of ComEd household use, a comparison calculated here from the 2 sourced figures rather than stated by either source.

There's great untapped potential in demand response and VPP type products. It's disappointing we haven't seen more opportunities of this sort take root here.

Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. Source 4.

The ComEd filing timeline has already slipped

Illinois Commerce Commission staff originally targeted June 17, 2025 for ComEd to file this tariff, after workshops the commission ran through 2025 on eligibility and compensation rules. The tariff the commission actually approved landed 13 months later, on July 16, 2026, a gap this article calculates by comparing the internal target named in one source against the approval date named in another, since neither source states the delay as a figure itself. The bill that became law also tightened its own filing deadline while moving through the legislature, requiring the full program by the end of 2027 rather than the end of 2028 first proposed, even though the payment terms, the 300 dollar rebate and the 10 dollar dispatch minimum, stayed the same.

What the law pays, and how long a customer must stay enrolled

The law sets a 300 dollar per kilowatt hour rebate for a home battery installed before the end of 2029, dropping to 250 dollars per kilowatt hour after that date. A battery taking part in dispatch earns at least 10 dollars for every kilowatt of power it delivers on average when called. A customer who takes either payment has to keep the battery enrolled for at least 5 years. The law also sets higher upfront payments for low and moderate income customers and for what it calls equity investment eligible communities, a term the law uses for areas the state has identified as historically underserved by energy investment.

The stakes for the wider Illinois grid

RMI, an energy research nonprofit, estimates that virtual power plants like the one Illinois law requires could meet about 75% of the 3.9 gigawatts of new electricity capacity the state is projected to need by 2029, dispatched home batteries doing work that would otherwise call for new power plants. RMI also estimates the average customer could save 34 dollars a year once programs like this run at scale. Whether ComEd reaches that scale depends on the full program the law still requires by the end of 2027, more than a year after the internal target the utility already missed once.