How to get paid for a home battery in Texas
A Texas homeowner who already owns a solar connected home battery can get paid for it under Battery Rewards, a program TXU Energy, the Vistra owned retail brand, runs across the state. The terms and conditions document a customer signs to join, dated May 2025, states TXU Energy pays 100 dollars in a prepaid card every 6 months to an enrolled homeowner, 200 dollars a year, for as long as the incentive stays unchanged. Vistra expanded eligibility on March 5, 2026, to homeowners with an Enphase IQ Battery, adding to a partnership with Sunrun that began September 11, 2024. Neither announcement names a payment figure for an Enphase enrollee specifically, so the 200 dollars a year number comes from the general terms, not a confirmed 2026 rate.
We are excited to partner with Vistra to bring Sunrun's virtual power plant expertise to Texas.
Mary Powell, chief executive officer of Sunrun. Source 3.
What a homeowner gives up to get paid
In exchange, TXU Energy can dispatch, meaning remotely turn on and draw power from, the battery for up to 2 hours a day, the terms state. A participant who misses 90% of called events can be dropped from the program. The battery still keeps 20% of its capacity in reserve at all times and will not send power to the grid during an outage, so a homeowner still has backup power when the grid goes down. TXU Energy can also change the incentive with 14 days notice, so the rate on offer today is not fixed for good.
By bringing additional flexible resources like batteries online during critical periods, we can strengthen grid reliability and serve more load using the infrastructure already in place.
Sam Sen, vice president of energy transition solutions at Vistra. Source 1.
How long the first payment takes
TXU Energy states it takes about 1 week to check that a new enrollee is eligible. The first reward card takes 4 weeks to be issued after that, then 6 weeks more to be delivered once issued, so a new participant can wait around 11 weeks, close to 3 months, before the first payment arrives.
Stages run one after another, so the 3 numbers add up to about 11 weeks total before a new participant sees a payment, according to the terms and conditions document.
Show the numbers
| Eligibility check | 1 |
| Card issued | 4 |
| Card delivered | 6 |
How big Battery Rewards actually is
Neither the 2024 nor the 2026 announcement from Vistra states how many homes have enrolled in Battery Rewards or how many megawatts it can move, a gap none of the 5 sources closed. Reading a board filing from the Texas grid operator, ERCOT, directly shows how small this category still is statewide. As of May 2025, only 3 aggregated distributed energy resources, groups of home batteries and other small devices combined to act like one power plant on the wholesale market, were qualified to take part in the ERCOT pilot at all, with a combined 38.3 megawatts of approved capacity, 48% of the 80 megawatt limit the pilot had at the time. That is smaller than the 51 megawatt peak the California program Sunrun runs, CalReady, hit while dispatching more than 16,000 customer batteries in a single July heat wave, Renewable Energy World reports. The ERCOT board voted at the same meeting to roughly double that ceiling, to 160 megawatts, a sign regulators expect the category to grow, not proof it already has.
Figures describe the whole ERCOT aggregated distributed energy resource pilot statewide, not Battery Rewards by itself, since no source states a megawatt figure for Battery Rewards alone.
Show the numbers
| Currently qualified capacity | 38.3 |
| Pilot limit before the increase | 80 |
| New pilot limit approved | 160 |
The terms and conditions document ties eligibility to living in a zone where ERCOT has approved the program, or is still reviewing it, to take part as an aggregated distributed energy resource, the mechanism the board filing describes. The filing itself never names Vistra, TXU Energy, or any other company among the 3 currently qualified resources, since it tracks capacity by grid zone rather than by brand, so the honest statement is that this reward scheme is built to feed into that pilot, not that it is confirmed as 1 of the 3 already inside it.