When Winter storm Fern tore across the country in late January, more than a million Americans lost power. In Nashville, the utility recorded its highest outage total in history. In Louisiana, some families waited nearly two weeks for the lights to come back on. Officials issued emergency orders in several states as the storm exposed the fragility of our centralized energy system.
And yet, during that same storm, a different story was quietly playing out. Households with the ability to generate and store their own power with home solar and storage kept the lights on, ran their heat, and charged their devices. They were independent of a grid that was buckling under the cold. That contrast is what should be driving the national conversation about how we build our energy future.
America’s grid is under more stress than at any point in its history. AI data centers, EV charging, a manufacturing renaissance, and rapid home electrification are all arriving at once.
PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, is struggling to keep up with an onslaught of new large load requests. Meeting this surge requires an estimated $720 billion in infrastructure investment, with traditional build timelines stretching into the 2030s. Meanwhile, residential electricity bills have already risen 33% since 2020, placing a heavy financial burden on many American families. And Winter Storm Fern is not an anomaly as the number of severe storms is increasing.
But part of the solution is already scaling fast, and it’s sitting on and in American homes across the country.
PROVEN AT SCALE, NOT JUST IN THEORY
Last July, while U.S. electricity demand shattered records at more than 759,000 megawatts, more than 100,000 residential batteries aggregated as a distributed power plant, and delivered power to California’s grid during peak demand hours—the largest residential battery dispatch event in U.S. history. An independent analysis by The Brattle Group confirmed what grid operators observed: the distributed batteries performed like a traditional power plant, delivering consistent, large-scale output.
Three thousand miles away in Puerto Rico, where the power goes out nearly 100 times a summer, roughly one in 10 homes now have a battery and solar array. A network of approximately 80,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas power plant during an emergency. LUMA, the island’s grid operator, called on those batteries 80 times last year to ease energy supply shortages.
These aren’t demonstrations. They’re proof points. And the numbers behind them are growing fast.
BUILT ON CUSTOMER ECONOMICS
Homeowners don’t install batteries to help the grid—they install them for backup power and energy independence. But when those individual decisions are aggregated at scale, something remarkable happens: hundreds of thousands of households become a flexible, distributed power plant that can respond to grid stress in minutes.
Interest in pairing new home solar with storage is growing across the country. We have seen this internally, with more than 70% of our new customers choosing to add storage systems. Grid support is growing with it: customer enrollment in distributed power plant programs increased by fivefold in a single year. Last year, our distributed power plants dispatched more than 1,300 times to support the grid during critical hours.
The economics are increasingly compelling for families. A Stanford University study published last year found that solar panels and batteries make financial sense for most American homes, providing backup power during outages while helping save money on rising electricity costs. In addition, customers receive compensation for participating in distributed power plant programs. It’s a rare energy solution that benefits the homeowner, the grid, and the community.
THE POLICY UNLOCK
States are beginning to realize that the full potential of distributed storage requires deliberate policy design. In Texas, the ADER Project is aggregating distributed energy resources to help meet the state’s surging electricity demand, driven in part by new data centers. In Kansas, regulators signed a settlement enabling customers to directly support a data center’s procurement of distributed assets, including customer-sited batteries. In New York, the proposed Homegrown Energy Act would require data center developers to contribute to a fund that helps bring distributed assets—including home storage—online quickly. And in Illinois, the POWER Act establishes requirements for data center-funded distributed power plants to help data centers meet their clean energy capacity needs.
The principle underlying all these approaches is one I believe in deeply: the rising cost of new demand should not be pushed onto American families. People who are already paying their bills shouldn’t subsidize the electricity needs of future data centers. They should be partners in solving the problem.
The distributed power plant market, currently valued at $6.3 billion, is projected to reach over $39 billion by 2034. This isn’t a niche technology on the horizon—it’s a critical piece of energy infrastructure that is already working, already scaling, and already keeping families from suffering through the next major outage.
America’s grid was designed for the last century. Meeting the demands of this one—AI, electrification, and extreme weather—requires rethinking our energy system. The answer isn’t only more poles and wires. It’s millions of homes generating, storing, and sharing energy.
The capacity is scaling, the technology works, and the economics increasingly favor it. What’s needed now are policy and utility frameworks that fully integrate distributed power plants into grid planning at every level.
There is no time to waste.
Mary Powell is CEO of Sunrun.
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