Your Tesla Called. It Wants a Paycheck.

SB 913 would require California regulators to let aggregated home batteries and EVs compete for grid reliability payments alongside power plants

30 Mar 2026

California just gave home batteries and electric vehicles a shot at the grid's most important revenue stream. State Senator Josh Becker introduced SB 913 on March 24, requiring the California Public Utilities Commission to open its Resource Adequacy market to aggregated distributed energy resources, including residential batteries, smart thermostats, and bidirectional EVs. If it passes, the bill could reshape both who gets paid for grid reliability and how California keeps the lights on.

The state's Resource Adequacy program has always been built around conventional power plants. Utilities pay generators to hold capacity in reserve during peak demand, and those payments form the financial backbone of California's reliability framework. Home batteries and EVs have been largely shut out, tangled in enrollment complexity and rules designed for a different era.

SB 913 targets that gap directly. Aggregated customer-owned assets would be eligible to compete for the same reliability payments currently reserved for centralized generation. The bill also requires explicit compensation when batteries or EVs push power back to the grid during peak stress events, going further than existing demand response programs, which reward customers for cutting consumption rather than actively supplying power.

The financial logic is hard to argue with. California electricity bills have climbed sharply in recent years, driven by utility spending on transmission infrastructure and wildfire mitigation. Analysts point out that peak demand hits for only a few hundred hours annually. Tapping distributed storage during those windows could defer expensive grid upgrades and reduce reliance on gas peaker plants that run rarely but cost plenty to maintain.

Becker put the choice bluntly: keep building costly new infrastructure, or put the capacity residents have already paid for to better use. For the solar and storage industry, a win here would open new revenue streams for installers and aggregators and shore up the long-term economics of residential electrification statewide.

The bill has been referred to the Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee. If enacted, it would mark California's most decisive step yet toward treating distributed energy as a real, compensated grid resource rather than a footnote in utility planning documents.