What do US utility battery programs pay, and are they worth joining?

Three ways a utility pays for the same battery

Programs differ less in how much they pay than in what they pay for. Sorting them by payment shape explains most of the confusion in the numbers people quote.

The first shape is pay-for-performance. Massachusetts and Arizona pay once a season, on the average power the battery delivered across every event the utility called. Massachusetts defines performance for one event as the average discharge rate in kW-AC over the event, then averages across the season, and says that an event where the battery does not dispatch, whether from the customer's choice or a technical fault, is recorded as zero. Arizona's APS runs the same arithmetic in its own words: $110 for each average kW, and its illustration of a battery delivering 4.14 kW on the first day and skipping the second lands at a 2.07 kW season average. Nothing is paid for being enrolled; the payment follows what the battery did.

The second shape is an up-front payment for the right to dispatch. Green Mountain Power paid $850 per kW up front under a tariff that states availability until September 30, 2026, Hawaiian Electric's BYOD Plus pays $400 per committed kW, and Xcel's Colorado program pays $500 per installed kW plus $100 a year. The money arrives once, near enrollment, and the obligations run for the agreement term, with a prorated repayment if you leave early. What is being bought is access to the battery for years, not energy.

The third shape is wholesale capacity paid to an aggregator. California's Demand Side Grid Support program and the ERCOT pilot in Texas pay a company that controls a fleet of batteries. The household's share is whatever that company's contract says, and no regulator sets it.

One piece of vocabulary matters across all three. The kilowatt figure is power, how fast the battery can push energy out, not the kilowatt-hours of storage on the label. The battery decision guide explains why a quote's headline capacity is the least useful number on the page; for program income, the power rating and the share of it you actually let the utility use are what get multiplied. The one-time money for buying the battery, as opposed to the payments for dispatching it, is tabulated state by state in the battery incentives guide.

Seven programs, read from their own terms

The table gives the terms side by side. The sections after it carry the detail that did not fit in a cell, including what each source is and how old it is.

Two programs that readers ask about are not priced here, because their own pages could not be read this run. Rocky Mountain Power's Utah wattsmart Battery program: the utility's program page returned an error when fetched on October 23, 2026, and the secondary pages found disagree about the amount and a June 2026 change, so no Utah rate is printed. California's Emergency Load Reduction Program: the SDG&E program page that was readable describes only business customers, at $2 per kWh of verified load shed, and says nothing about residential batteries, so no household figure is printed. Check the utility's or program administrator's current page before relying on either.

Massachusetts: $275 per average kW, pay-for-performance

The rate and event limits come from the Program Details document for ConnectedSolutions for Small Scale Batteries dated March 13, 2026, and from the Cape Light Compact enrollment page. The incentive is $275 per average kW for Eversource, National Grid and Cape Light Compact customers. For a new installation the rate is set for the first five consecutive years of participation; after year five you receive whatever rate the administrator then offers. Customers on the Cape and Vineyard enroll through the Compact.

Events are timed to the regional grid peak and to the highest daily peaks in July and August. The document says events are called in June and September only if the annual peak is forecast for those months, and that the administrators will never call more than 60 in a summer. Events run 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., can last 2 or 3 hours, can fall on weekends, and are skipped on Juneteenth, Independence Day and Labor Day. Payments go out in October, November or December.

Two timing rules cost real money. An application must be received by 11:59 p.m. on May 31 for the full season; enrolling later is allowed, but the performance for every event already missed is set to zero. And once a season starts, the customer must stay enrolled to the end to be paid.

The same document says the battery must be behind the customer's meter, that inverter capacity of 50 kW or less qualifies, and that customers served by Unitil are not currently eligible. A customer who applies for the state's 0% HEAT Loan for a battery agrees to enroll once the system is online.

Arizona: APS Storage Rewards at $110 per average kW

APS describes Storage Rewards as a five-year pilot. From May 1 through October 31 it may schedule up to 60 conservation days a season; each can last one to four hours, on weekdays, weekends or holidays, between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. Notice arrives by email, text or the battery maker's app, so the battery can be charged beforehand. The credit is $110 per average kW across the season and appears on the bill, typically within one to two billing cycles after October 31, labeled BYOD Storage Rewards.

The page's own table runs 1 kW to $110, 2 kW to $220, 3 kW to $330 and 4 kW to $440, and its worked example, 2.11 kW across all conservation hours, comes to $232.10, which checks against $110 times 2.11. Eligibility needs an approved battery that is not enrolled in another battery management program, an APS residential rate plan, and permission to operate from APS.

What sets APS apart is how forgiving it is about participation: you can opt out of conservation hours at any time without leaving the program, and you can leave by email whenever you like. The cost of opting out is arithmetic, not a penalty, because a skipped event pulls the season average down. The page also warns that some manufacturers hold back stored energy until conservation hours begin, so the battery may be unavailable for your own use in the on-peak hours before an event.

Vermont: Green Mountain Power's BYOD tariff

Green Mountain Power's Bring Your Own Device tariff, version 10, effective with bills rendered on or after August 17, 2023, is the most explicit legal text of the group. Equipment incentives are $850 per kW, up to 10 kW, for a resource that holds its full chosen capacity for 3 hours, or $950 per kW for 4 hours, with $100 more per kW in a GMP-constrained area. A second option pays a flat $850, with no kW multiplier, for equipment paired with self-consumption, where the household supplies itself during events and GMP does not control the battery.

The tariff attaches costs to that income. A monthly software integration fee of $3.97 applies to everyone enrolled; if the equipment cannot be reached and access is not restored within 30 days, the charge is $12.70 per kW per month; and a list of equipment manufacturer fees passed through to the customer is kept on GMP's website. Either side may end the agreement on 30 days' written notice, and a customer who leaves owes a prorated share of the incentive. The tariff's own example uses a 120-month initial term: with 48 months remaining, a customer owes 48 over 120 of $850, or $340 per kW.

Two caveats come from dates. The tariff says the program is available until September 30, 2026, unless otherwise ordered, which is before the date of this check, and the fetched GMP program page does not say what replaced it, so confirm that enrollment is open before counting on this payment. And the customer agreement text read here is the November 2, 2020 version, which says peak events are expected about 5 to 8 times a month for 3 to 6 hours at a time, with notice at least 4 hours ahead; the 2023 tariff does not restate those figures. A GMP news release of August 18, 2023 says the Public Utility Commission lifted the enrollment cap and that incentives reach up to $10,500, which is 10 kW at $1,050.

Hawaii: BYOD Plus, and the program it replaced

Hawaiian Electric's Bring Your Own Device Plus pays $400 per committed kW with no cap, plus a $400 per kW adder for low-moderate income households, defined by the Public Utilities Commission as household income below 140% of the area median, with a one-year validity on the confirmation. The battery must be new, paired with renewable generation, and committed at no less than 1 kW. The customer picks a two-hour window that applies every day; the house is served first and only the remainder is exported. The agreement lasts five years, and ending early means repaying the upfront incentive at a prorated amount.

Monthly export credits are the other half. Customers on Net Energy Metering or NEM Plus do not receive them; customers on tariffs such as Customer Grid-Supply do, calculated by a formula in Rule 33. Hawaiian Electric's page works an example of a 15 kWh battery committing 5 kW: $2,000 up front and an average of about $52 a month in export credits.

The predecessor is a useful warning. Battery Bonus paid $850 per kW and $5 per kW a month for ten years, and it closed to new participants on July 1, 2024, after Oahu enrollment reached 46.8 MW against a 40 MW cap. Customers already in Battery Bonus cannot move to BYOD Plus. Programs with a megawatt cap can close without notice to a household that was still shopping.

Colorado: Xcel's Renewable Battery Connect

Xcel's Colorado program pays $500 per kW of installed storage, capped at 50% of the retail battery cost excluding tax and installation, plus $100 a year for the five-year term. Income-qualified and disproportionately impacted households receive $800 per kW, capped at 75%. The sample agreement says Xcel may use up to 60% of the nameplate storage for each event and up to 60 events a year, never more than one event per calendar day. Each event is a 24-hour charging period followed by a discharge of up to three hours, and the battery is charged only from on-site solar except where Xcel itself schedules grid charging in a storm-watch mode.

Enrollment runs through an interconnection application for the program, filed by the installer before the battery is installed. The March 2024 installer Q and A says the battery must be new equipment paired with a new or existing solar system, that applications cannot be switched to this program after submission, and lists an application deposit of $50 per kW of charge rate for battery-only applications plus a $100 engineering fee. It does not say in the passage read here whether the deposit comes back.

The dates are the weak point. The documents fetched are a 2023 information sheet, the March 2024 Q and A and an undated sample agreement. The information sheet says Xcel will offer the program through 2025 or until incentive funds are exhausted. Xcel's own enrollment web page would not load in this check, so whether new applications are accepted in late 2026 is unconfirmed. An older Xcel pilot with a $1,250 incentive, whose terms ran through September 30, 2022, is a different and closed program that some websites still describe.

California: DSGS Option 3 pays aggregators, not households

The California Energy Commission's Demand Side Grid Support Program Guidelines, Fifth Edition, approved April 27, 2026, set up Option 3, a market-aware storage virtual power plant pilot. Payments go to aggregators, by month, per kW of demonstrated capacity: for a three-hour resource the rates run from $8.10 per kW in May to $17.28 in September, adding to $74.52 per kW-year, and a 30 percent bonus applies in program years 2025 and 2026, which lifts the three-hour total to about $96.88. The guidelines say aggregators allocate the payments between themselves and their customers under whatever terms they agreed.

Events run between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., up to 60 day-ahead event hours a season, triggered when the day-ahead price reaches $200 per megawatt-hour or an emergency alert is called. For 2026 the Commission made $19.5 million available, and participation is limited to aggregators that took part in October 2025. A site must have a battery or bidirectional charger able to discharge at least 1 kW for two hours, utility permission to operate, and must not be in a conflicting California ISO demand response program; a participant found in one is suspended.

For a homeowner, the practical reading is that you cannot sign up with the Commission. You can only join through a company that is already enrolled, and what you are paid is a private term between you and that company. The $96.88 figure is a ceiling on the aggregator's revenue per kW, not an offer to you. The California net billing guide covers the export tariff that sits beside this program.

Texas: the ERCOT aggregation pilot

ERCOT's Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource pilot lets a registered aggregation of at least 100 kW, with no single premises above 1 MW, sell energy and ancillary services into the wholesale market. A March 2, 2026 ERCOT market notice raised the registered capacity limit from 200 MW to 500 MW. An April 2026 consultant report prepared for ERCOT's board says that as of February 2026, 13 ADERs were registered but seven were qualified, with 107.7 MW of qualified capacity, and that Phase 3 was expected to run through at least June 2026.

No household rate exists to quote, because the revenue is wholesale market revenue shared by the aggregator on its own terms, and the pilot's continuation past mid-2026 was not confirmed in the documents read. It belongs in this guide as a category, so you recognize it when a retail provider offers a battery plan, but not as a number.

What is left in the battery when an event ends

A program that drains the battery on the day the grid fails defeats the reason most people buy one. Each program handles that differently, and the difference is written into the documents, not the marketing.

In Massachusetts, the administrators say they will not call events during Type 1 and Type 2 events as defined in National Grid's Emergency Response Plan and will make reasonable attempts to avoid calling events when large storms are forecast, but they cannot account for isolated or localized storms, and customers are told to discuss opting out of an event with their manufacturer. The Cape Light Compact page adds that you can work with your installer or manufacturer to set the maximum amount of energy you are willing to contribute. In Arizona, many manufacturers let you choose how much stays in the battery, and the page warns that reserving more may reduce your bill credits; you can also opt out of events at any time.

Xcel's sample agreement gives the clearest floor in legal text. In a grid outage at the address, all energy in the battery is available to the household without limitation and free from Xcel's use, and the 60% cap leaves at least 40% of nameplate energy untouched in a normal event. It also says Xcel is under no obligation to maintain any minimum level of energy in the battery, and that the host should not rely on the battery for life-supporting equipment. Green Mountain Power's tariff carries the same warning in capitals. Hawaiian Electric's design is different: the house is served first, and only surplus goes to the window.

The 60% cap produces a useful calculation. A 13.5 kWh battery, the size the Department of Energy uses in its residential benchmark, can give up at most 8.1 kWh in a Colorado event. Spread over a 3-hour discharge, that is 2.7 kW, so a household that wanted to commit 3 kW for 3 hours (9 kWh) would hit the cap and be limited to 2.7 kW. What remains, 5.4 kWh, is the backup reserve on an event day. If the essential loads in your house average 0.5 kW, an illustration you should replace with your own, that is just under 11 hours. The outage guide shows how to size those loads, and the EnergyBS critical-load sizing guide goes deeper on runtime.

What it costs to join and to leave

The published rates are gross figures. Four kinds of cost come out of them, and they are easy to miss because they live in tariffs and agreements rather than on the enrollment page.

The first is fixed fees. Green Mountain Power's monthly software integration fee, over the 120-month term in its own repayment example, comes to roughly a fifth of the incentive on a 3 kW commitment. Its offline charge applies only if the battery cannot be reached for more than 30 days, and because the household maintains the internet connection, a lapse there can trigger it.

The second is the share a middle party keeps. The Massachusetts program documents say incentive payments go to the customer or to another party chosen on the application, and that some installers offer an up-front discount on the battery in exchange for receiving the performance incentive. The Cape Light Compact page says some battery manufacturers retain a portion of the annual payment and that the amount varies; one pays a flat annual sum that is not performance based. Ask for the retention formula in writing before you sign.

The third is the cost of exiting. In Massachusetts you cannot leave partway through a season and keep the incentive, and the enrollment does not transfer to the next owner of the house, who must apply at whatever rate is offered then. In Vermont the tariff's prorated repayment on a 3 kW commitment would be $1,020 at the same point in its example. Hawaii prorates the same way over five years.

The fourth is a duty to keep the equipment working. Xcel's sample agreement requires the owner to keep the battery and solar system in good working order at the owner's expense and lets Xcel end the agreement if the battery is out of operation for more than 60 days in the first five years. Massachusetts says degradation lowers the average kilowatts the battery can deliver and therefore the incentive, so a battery aging over a five-year lock earns a little less each year at a fixed rate; the event discharges also count against the manufacturer's cap, and the battery warranty throughput guide works out how many warranted years a program can use up. If you are weighing a program for a battery you already own, the retrofit guide covers the interconnection paperwork that enrollment sits on top of.

Who actually receives the payment

Read the line on the application that says who the payee is. Several programs let someone other than the homeowner collect, and the rules for leased systems differ.

Xcel's agreement defines an Incentive Recipient, the person the owner directs Xcel to pay, and says that where the household is income-qualified but the system is leased, the owner must pass substantially all of the benefit to the household, for example as a credit against lease payments, or refund Xcel. Hawaiian Electric says that if a lease is signed to install the battery, the leasing company is the system owner and is eligible for the upfront incentive; the household benefits only if the lease price reflects it. In California, the aggregator is the payee by design.

That gives you three questions for any installer or aggregator pitching a program. Who is the payee? If it is not you, what do you receive in exchange, and in what form: a lower battery price, a bill credit, a monthly payment? And what happens to that arrangement if the installer closes? The guide on a solar company that closes covers who services the contract next.

The ask is simple and most sellers can answer it: last season's actual payout per average kW, for a battery like yours, after any retained share. A program with a $275 headline and a 20 percent retention is a $220 program, and a seller who cannot produce last season's figure has not measured it.

How a program sits beside your solar billing

A battery program does not replace your export tariff; it overlays it, and some overlaps change money. Massachusetts says customers may take part in net metering and ConnectedSolutions at once, and may co-participate in the state's SMART solar program, where the storage adder requires either 52 complete cycle equivalents a year or participation in a demand response program, which ConnectedSolutions satisfies. It does not allow co-participation in an ISO-NE program that would cancel the benefit of the curtailment.

Hawaii shows the opposite effect. Customers on Net Energy Metering get no monthly export credit from BYOD Plus, so the same battery earns less on that tariff than on a grid-supply tariff. Xcel's agreement says the excess solar energy not used or stored on site continues to be compensated by net metering under the applicable tariff. APS requires that the battery not be in any other battery management program, and California's program suspends a participant who is in a conflicting wholesale demand response program.

The larger risk is for households on a grandfathered export tariff. Adding a battery and enrolling it can be a modification in some utilities' rules, and the grandfathering guide lists what PG&E, Idaho Power and Illinois say about changes to a legacy system. The net metering explainer shows the four rule families that your own tariff falls into. Read those before you accept a program payment that is smaller than the value of the status you might lose. The rest of the export picture is on the export compensation hub.

One battery run through each program

To compare the programs on one footing, take a single illustrative battery: 13.5 kWh of storage, which is the size the Department of Energy uses in its residential benchmark, with a 5 kW continuous power rating. A household shares 3 kW at each event, which is 9 kWh over a 3-hour event, and leaves 4.5 kWh in the battery. These are stated assumptions, not a prediction for your battery, and the 5 kW rating matters only where a program counts installed kilowatts.

Each row applies the program's own rule to those inputs. No federal tax credit is deducted anywhere, because the IRS says the residential clean energy credit is not available for property placed in service after December 31, 2025.

Per year, the pay-for-performance programs pay the least and keep paying; the up-front programs pay more in the first year and then oblige you for years. Hawaii's $1,200 spread across a five-year agreement is $240 a year, and Green Mountain Power's $2,550 across the 120-month term in its own example is $255 a year before fees. Massachusetts at $825 is the strongest recurring figure here, and it is also the one where missed events cost the most, because every skipped event drags the average.

Notice what is not on the list: a program that pays for the energy you export. These programs pay for availability and performance in a short window, which is why the figures sit in the hundreds of dollars a year, not thousands, for a household battery.