KEY TAKEAWAYS: $28M Entergy-funded battery program to support homes, businesses, nonprofits Program aims to enhance grid resilience and storm preparedness Virtual power plant model will aggregate distributed batteries for community use 40% of residential funds reserved for low- to moderate-inc ome households   This report was originally published by Canary Media, an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering the transition to clean energy and solutions to the climate crisis. Sitting below sea level along the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is particularly vulnerable to losing power during extreme weather. But the city plans to tackle that problem by helping residents buy backup batteries, which will make the grid more resilient. In December, the New Orleans City Council ordered local utility Entergy New Orleans to design a $28 million battery incentive program for homes, businesses, and nonprofits (plus $2 million for administration and implementation). Crucially, the scheme won’t cost New Orleanians a dime: It will be paid for by a settlement Entergy reached with the city over problems at one of the utility’s nuclear power plants. Entergy has until March 1 to file an implementation plan for the program, which is expected to launch later this year. Once the plan is up and running, the incentives could support batteries at around 1,500 homes and 150 community institutions. Those systems would provide backup power for the properties they’re sited on, but also inject power onto the grid when it’s strained. This would propel New Orleans to the forefront of localities adopting virtual power plants, the concept of aggregating energy devices in homes and businesses and wielding them like a traditional power plant for the good of the broader community. Vermont’s biggest utility has used home batteries to lower costs during heat waves; California tapped home batteriesto meet demand in extreme moments; Texas has opened up a market-based version of the concept. But New Orleans would become a pioneer of virtual power plants in the Deep South, and would stand out for the scale of the program relative to the size of the territory. “We hope if you were already on the fence about getting a battery, here’s a chance to participate in a utility program,” said Ross Thevenot, senior project manager at Entergy New Orleans, who oversees the customer-facing battery effort. ​“We’re the Crescent City — we’ve got water on all sides of us. Customer resilience is obviously important.” The new investment builds on Entergy’s pilot virtual power plant, which enrolled nearly 140 customer-owned battery systems across the city last year. EnergyHub, a cleantech startup acquired by smart-home company Alarm.com in 2013, manages the distributed controls for the pilot and will run the expanded program. The initiative also builds on a grassroots effort called Community Lighthouse, which formed after 2021’s Hurricane Ida and has installed backup-battery systems at nearly 20churches so that they can offer shelter and light to neighbors during grid failures. “We’ve seen how useful those can be when there’s a power outage,” said Nathalie Jordi, who works with Together New Orleans, the nonprofit that spearheaded Community Lighthouse, and who advocated for the new virtual power plant. ​“But how great would it be if, when the power goes out long-term after a hurricane, we have nursing homes that don’t lose their power, we have hardware stores, we have bodegas, we have firehouses?” If the emerging plan succeeds, New Orleans could teach other parts of the U.S. how to build a cleaner, more responsive grid in a way that brings the whole community along. Democratize battery access Arushi Sharma Frank, a D.C.-based distributed energy expert, got an urgent message from Jordi in September 2024. The New Orleans City Council, which, unusually, serves as the city’s utility regulator, wanted to hear how the Community Lighthouse locations had performed during outages from Hurricane Francine earlier that month. Together New Orleans knew there was settlement money available, and it wanted to bring the council a fully-fledged virtual power plant proposal that could put those funds to work. Jordi wondered if Frank could propose a turbocharged virtual power plant like she’d helped design in Texas and Puerto Rico. For Frank, this offered a chance to harness existing grid technologies to save lives in the aftermath of a hurricane or other disaster. “There are life-threatening conditions that can be averted if people can get to shelter with power and cooling quickly,” Frank said. Small-scale batteries could ensure that ​“we have a place that any human in New Orleans can walk to in 15 minutes that has power after a storm.” She got to work, compiling a proposal in 72 hours and arranging for people to testify from 12 other states with operating virtual power plants. The last-minute blitz worked: The City Council green-lit an effort to explore the concept, culminating in the December order. Often, the companies selling energy devices to regular people cast themselves as electric Davids taking on the utility Goliath — as disrupters of a failing status quo. In New Orleans, Frank said, the community groups were able to ​“remove this tone of adversarialism” that frequently crops up in virtual power plant proceedings around the country, and instead design something ​“generative, as exposed to extractive.” The program creates a new market opportunity for solar-battery installers, with upfront incentives that can shave up to $10,000off the cost of batteries for homes or $100,000 for businesses. It will still be up to cleantech companies — local ones or national brands like Sunrun or Tesla — to compete for customers’ business and guide them through the sales process. Those companies will be the ones designing the systems to provide backup power in the event of outages. And the order earmarks 40% of the residential funds for households with low to moderate income, ensuring installers don’t just pitch to more-affluent customers. Once the batteries are installed and hooked up to EnergyHub’s control software, it becomes Entergy’s job to decide how and when to use them to benefit the power system more broadly. The regulated monopoly utility has knowledge that battery vendors don’t: which parts of the grid need more capacity or struggle to manage voltage when clouds interrupt rooftop solar production, for example, and other such nuances of a complex interconnected network. ...read more read less