GMP, Power Guru team up to introduce Enphase Energy to Vermont

Green Mountain Power, in partnership with Bennington’s Power Guru, is introducing Enphase Energy Inc., a California based global energy technology company, to Vermont homeowners and businesses.

The fourth-generation Enphase 10C battery – a backup battery that can store 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity – is now available for lease through GMP’s Energy Storage Solutions Program.

Alexander Mintz, owner and operator of Power Guru, a GMP certified backup battery installer, expressed his support for Enphase.

“Enphase is a great company,” Mintz said, adding they are publicly traded and have been in business for over 20 years. “They partnered with GMP to make it affordable for folks to install batteries for backup power in their homes.”

GMP customers who sign up for the Energy Storage Solutions Program can buy their own backup batteries or lease Enphase or Tesla backup batteries for $55 a month for 10 years (amount added to monthly GMP bill) or make a single payment of $5,500 (amount added to GMP bill as a one-time charge).

The Enphase 10C battery lease comes with a 10-year warranty with the option to extend an additional five years at no cost. At the end of the lease, the batteries are removed from the home, allowing the lessee to upgrade to new technology.

Customers who lease the batteries – a significant savings from purchasing – agree to share stored energy (through discharge) with GMP during peak energy use times when utility companies typically have to purchase energy from expensive and carbon intensive peaker plants.

By sharing energy during these peak times and putting it back on the grid, carbon emissions and costs for all GMP customers are reduced.

According to Mintz, GMP discharges from in-home batteries five to seven times a month. After discharge, the batteries are refilled from the grid or from the homeowners solar panels. The entire process takes about six hours.

Mintz explained that utility companies and manufacturers have put measures in place to model weather forecasts, ensuring utilities don’t discharge in-home batteries before a forecasted extreme weather event, ensuring stored energy is in homes when needed.

Two fourth-generation Enphase 10C batteries, which combined are about the size of a minifridge, provide 20 kilowatt-hours of stored energy – an amount of electricity Mintz said is equal to a full home backup for one to three days.

To qualify for GMP’s program, installation needs to be done by a certified installer, like Power Guru (for a complete list of certified installers, go to Green Mountain Power).

Power Guru’s installation process begins with a site visit to ensure the property’s electrical system is compatible with the backup batteries. Then they create a design, mount the batteries – either stacked or side-by-side in a basement (generally near the electrical panel) or on the outside of the property – and hold a Q&A session explaining how the backup batteries software application monitors the system.

The App shows how much energy – either stored or from the grid – a customer is using over a 24-hour period, and, if the home has solar panels, how much solar energy is coming into the system. This information can help customers conserve power, especially during an outage.

If the home has solar panels, which are not needed to participate in GMP’s Energy Storage Solutions Program, customer’s energy resiliency during a power outage can increase dramatically.

“The [energy storage] system goes to solar energy first before using stored energy from the backup batteries,” explained Mintz. “Solar stays on, helps feed the home, helps charge the batteries, and if you’re really smart about it, you can go indefinitely off grid when the powers out.”

Without solar panels, the batteries fill up on power from the grid and store the energy.

While having backup batteries ensure homeowners and businesses have electricity during power outages, they also provide benefits to GMP and to their customers.

“If you have smaller sources of power peppered throughout the region, it doesn’t create the amount of strain on the transmission lines and the distribution lines, so it saves rate payers, making the whole grid more resilient,” Mintz said, explaining this method of collecting energy from a distributed network is known as a “virtual power plant.”

Aesthetics is another benefit of in-home backup batteries.

“For folks that don’t like to see solar farms or solar in general, these batteries do conserve Vermont’s natural resources by storing power in a much denser way than having solar panels on a field,” Mintz said. “They’re just in people’s basements all across the state and they are the equivalent, right now, of having 500 acres of solar panels that can be discharged at any time.”

Mintz is optimistic about the future and growth for battery storage, particularly with Enphase’s infrastructure capabilities, saying the company will bring affordability and power resiliency for homeowners and businesses.

“Enphase infrastructure is future proofing your home,” Mintz said. “They are launching a bi-directional EV charger which might eventually add your vehicles batteries as an additional storage of energy for your home, meaning you can charge your home from your vehicle, and your home can charge your vehicle.”

GMP’s Energy Storage Solutions Program is only available to GMP customers. Power Guru services this program for GMP customers located roughly within a 90-minute radius of Bennington.

To sign up for or to learn more about GMP’s Energy Storage Solutions Program, visit greenmountainpower.com.