A California home battery program will pay residents to share stored power with the grid

How the California program pays you to share home battery power

A megawatt measures how fast electricity moves, not how much a battery stores. Central Coast Community Energy, called 3CE, is a public power agency serving 1.2 million people in 5 California counties, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. On June 24, 2026, 3CE announced a partnership with Lunar Energy to turn home batteries installed across those counties into a shared grid resource. The plan charges enrolled batteries when electricity is cheap and pulls stored power back out when demand and prices are highest, according to Monterey County Now. 3CE is targeting 5 megawatts of dispatchable power, meaning power the utility can call on when needed, by the end of 2026, rising to 30 megawatts by 2030. This site calculates that 30 megawatts is 6 times the 2026 target, both figures 3CE states about its own program.

Robert Shaw, chief executive of 3CE, explained why a public agency moved first.

As a locally controlled public agency, 3CE has the flexibility to move quickly and try new approaches when the opportunity is right.

Robert Shaw, chief executive of Central Coast Community Energy. Source 1.

Lunar Energy runs the software behind the program, called Gridshare, software that remotely coordinates devices across a network of participating customers. The first phase uses home batteries only. Later phases add heat pump water heaters, electric vehicle chargers and smart thermostats.

Kunal Girotra, founder and chief executive of Lunar Energy, made the case for the technology broadly.

Virtual power plants are one of the fastest, most cost effective ways to strengthen the grid using infrastructure that already exists.

Kunal Girotra, founder and chief executive of Lunar Energy. Source 1.

What the closed rebate program already paid

Many of the batteries now being enrolled were bought with help from the Residential Battery Rebate Program, a 3CE program that stopped taking new applications on March 19, 2026. It paid 300 dollars for every kilowatt hour of battery capacity installed. A kilowatt hour measures how much energy a battery can store, not how fast it delivers power. Households switching early to the newer Solar Billing Plan from Net Energy Metering, an older plan that credited solar owners for extra power sent to the grid, and households enrolled in state programs for lower income or medically dependent customers, qualified for an enhanced rate of 500 dollars per kilowatt hour. A battery had to discharge at least 50% of its stored capacity every day, between 4 in the afternoon and 9 at night, Pacific time, to qualify. In its final 6 months, the program paid out more than 3,000,000 dollars to more than 600 customers. The virtual power plant program that replaces it opens for customer enrollment in Fall 2026.

What Lunar Energy customers earn now

Lunar Energy, the company running the new 3CE program, raised 232,000,000 dollars in new funding on February 4, 2026, made up of a 102,000,000 dollar round and a previously unannounced 130,000,000 dollar round. Lunar reports that its average virtual power plant customer earned 464 dollars in the past year for letting the company manage their battery, plus 338 dollars in savings from smarter charging and discharging. Those figures describe customers already enrolled with Lunar Energy nationally, not yet the households 3CE plans to enroll on the Central Coast.

How fast this is growing nationally

Heatmap News reports Lunar Energy has deployed about 2,000 home battery systems so far and is targeting about 10,000 by the end of 2026. This site calculates that target is 5 times the current count. Gridshare, the same software, separately manages nearly 130,000 home batteries enrolled in Sunrun virtual power plants. In a 2025 test, more than 100,000 residential batteries dispatched more than 500 megawatts of power for 2 hours, cutting demand on the grid.