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Californians face steep up-front costs if they want to install solar panels to produce clean power and batteries to back up their homes in outages. A new state program will cover those costs for low-income homeowners, but they still have to pay up to tens of thousands of dollars initially and then wait months for the rebate to come through.
Now a startup called Haven Energy is going to take on the task of filing that paperwork, giving homeowners something that sounds too good to be true: a solar and battery system with no out-of-pocket cost.
It’s the latest riff on the evolving market for virtual power plants, which aggregate thousands of small energy systems into a meaningful tool to meet the energy needs of utilities or competitive electricity markets. The grid needs more energy just about everywhere in the U.S., but large-scale infrastructure construction runs into persistent delays and challenges. Adding generation and storage capacity in homes is relatively quick, and with the right incentives, can add up to a substantial tool to meet the grid’s needs.
If Haven successfully implements those incentives, it thinks it will be able to install 10 megawatts of dispatchable battery capacity across thousands of homes in the next two years. The (non-paying) customers will benefit from bill savings and backup power; to qualify for the state-funded rebate, they just need to make their batteries discharge regularly when the grid is stressed, namely in the evening hours when solar production dips and demand surges.
Haven launched in 2023 to streamline the home battery purchase experience and has overseen installations at hundreds of homes in California. But after a couple of years, cofounder and CEO Vinnie Campo determined the company needed a new strategic approach.
“We thought if you were able to remove all the friction from the process, that you could dramatically increase the adoption,” he explained. “That’s only fractionally true. The reason most people don’t get a battery is that they’re incredibly expensive.”
At the same time, utilities have begun grappling with a sudden uptick in electricity demand to supply AI computing, industry, and electrification. Utilities increasingly recognize the value of fleets of aggregated batteries to help meet peak demand, Campo said, but they’re much more comfortable contracting for large assets than thousands of small ones.
Putting these threads together, Campo decided Haven should own the batteries it installs at customer homes, so it can control them to serve utilities’ grid needs, and pull together different revenue streams to lower the cost for consumers.
“We’re seeing from the utilities and the retail companies, they just want that fixed, firm capacity every day,” Campo said. “That’s part of the gap that we’re trying to play into.”
Now Haven can tap into a new tranche of state funds to make this a reality.
Batteries don’t generate power, but for arcane bureaucratic reasons California has long funded its desired battery expansion with the Self-Generation Incentive Program. This legacy program has shifted with the times, and its newest evolution opened up $280 million to pay for batteries (and optional paired solar panels) for low-income households.
Technically, those homeowners can apply for the funds themselves. But this is a rebate program, so they would have to front the cost — which can easily tally up to $30,000 or $40,000 — then wait to get paid back by SGIP, which can take three or four months, Campo said. That’s an obvious nonstarter for many households.
Haven, though, has raised a debt facility and studied up on the necessary details. It can fund the cost of installation and wait for the rebate without sweating. Then it’s on the hook to make sure the installed battery system meets the program requirements for lowering demand in the evenings over 10 years. (Haven routes the installations to local installers and partnered with an undisclosed software company to handle the distributed energy management system)
The customer, meanwhile, doesn’t have to pay Haven any money, but benefits from the backup power and from lowering their electricity demand during peak pricing hours. Customers who use the SGIP funds to pair solar with their batteries will further lower their energy bills by producing their own clean power. And after a decade, Haven will transfer ownership to the homeowners.
Haven has already signed up a few hundred households for this program; the new rebates for solar-battery systems will open up on May 20, when the state rolls out updates to its online system for processing them.
“The biggest objection we get is, people don’t think it’s real,” Campo said. “They’ve always been sold ‘free solar,’ right? And this is the first time it actually is free solar — it’s not ‘no money down,’ it’s no money ever.”
Customers could be forgiven for not believing this program is real, because up until now, it hasn’t been.
State legislators originally allocated $900 million for a new branch of the long-running SGIP bureaucracy back in the Budget Act of 2022. At that time, the state was revising its policies for rooftop solar compensation to encourage more battery adoption; a flagship, broadly accessible home battery rebate could bolster that market in its time of transition. Originally, 70% of that funding was for low-income households, and the rest was open to the general populace. Rather than raising the money by charging people’s utility bills, as SGIP had previously, the Legislature pulled the new funds from the state’s cap-and-trade revenue.
But instead of quickly establishing the rules and moving the money out the door, the California Public Utilities Commission oversaw a yearslong process of laborious updates to the SGIP handbook and the backend database.
“It’s taken forever to go live,” said Joshua Buswell-Charkow, deputy director at the California Solar and Storage Association, a trade group.
While that cumbersome process was underway, the Legislature pared down most of the allocation, leaving just $280 million for low-income households. Updating the necessary web infrastructure has proven time-consuming. The commission also allowed the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the state’s largest municipal utility, to delay launching the solar-battery rebate program for Angelenos until late December, because the utility wasn’t ready to administer it on time.
The funds still need to be claimed by June 30, 2026. As the money finally starts to flow, Buswell-Charkow is most concerned about the practicality of meeting the new requirement that state-funded batteries enroll in demand response.
SGIP-funded batteries already had cycling requirements, meaning they couldn’t just sit in backup mode and not provide more value to the grid, he noted.
Going forward, the batteries have to be enrolled in a “qualified demand response program.” But, so far, the commission has only qualified two types of programs: critical peak pricing rates, which are only available to Californians who buy power from the three big investor-owned utilities, and the capacity bidding program, which currently only serves commercial customers, according to the California Solar and Storage Association’s survey of the market.
Other demand response programs include home batteries, like the Demand-Side Grid Support and Emergency Load Reduction programs, but the commission hasn’t approved them for the SGIP requirement.
The commission did grant an exemption for customers of municipal utilities who don’t have access to any qualified demand response programs, Buswell-Charkow said. But the regulators denied an exemption to the millions of customers of community choice aggregators, locally organized power-purchasing organizations that similarly lack access to the small number of approved demand response programs. Haven has encouraged utility regulators to approve demand response programs for customers of community choice aggregators, so those millions of Californians can access the SGIP funds, too.
The demand response requirement “makes the program needlessly more complicated than it needs to be,” Buswell-Charkow said.
Given those layers of complexity, it’s hard to imagine homeowners wading into the morass themselves. Even local solar installers struggle with the administrative burden of meeting SGIP’s bureaucratic requirements, Buswell-Charkow noted. This could give companies like Haven an opening: If they get good at filing the necessary paperwork and executing on the dense program requirements, they can make money and give households free clean energy at the same time.
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