Sun run has formed a distributed power plant partnership with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), leveraging more than 1,000 customers’ solar and storage systems to export energy to reduce grid constraints.
Sun run
“Sunrun’s groundbreaking program with PG&E shows that distributed power plants can help communities avoid the high costs of adding more poles and wires to accommodate load growth,” said Sunrun CEO Mary Powell. “We saw time and time again that our customers’ batteries delivered location-specific load lighting with high precision and consistent performance.”
Sunrun’s Local PeakShift Power distributed power plant is part of PG&E’s Seasonal Aggregation of Versatile Energy (SAVE) program. The distributed power plant reportedly transmitted more than 50 times between July and October 2025 as local demand approached system capacity, totaling more than 1,200 transmission hours. Sunrun customers with solar and systems located near restricted power lines and substations in PG&E’s service territory were enrolled in the program.
“It makes perfect sense to be able to power my local neighborhood,” said Sunrun customer Tom Weldon, whose San Jose home is near a tight power line. “If heat waves are coming, we know that our batteries will help when the electricity grid is under pressure. I feel very good about that.”
A post-season program evaluation report from Demand Side Analytics found that Sunrun’s battery groups closely followed PG&E’s dispatch instructions and kept electrical loads on all power lines and substations below operating limits. Each location received different instructions based on machine learning, forecast weather conditions and daily load forecasts for the distribution system.
PG&E expanded the Sunrun program from 600 customers to more than 1,000 during the enrollment period. Sunrun customers participating in Local PeakShift Power received $150 per battery for sharing their stored solar energy with their communities, while Sunrun was reimbursed for coordinating the shipping of the batteries. Sunrun has more than 217,000 residential battery systems nationwide.
News item from Sunrun
