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6 ways batteries provide a lifeline for customers in an outage

More than 2.5 million Americans depend on durable medical equipment, such as oxygen delivery systems, ventilators, and dialysis machines. For these vulnerable customers, even brief power interruptions can cause their equipment to malfunction, and longer outages can be life-threatening, if power isn’t restored quickly. Yet the U.S. power grid is aging and under increasing pressure, […]

More than 2.5 million Americans depend on durable medical equipment, such as oxygen delivery systems, ventilators, and dialysis machines. For these vulnerable customers, even brief power interruptions can cause their equipment to malfunction, and longer outages can be life-threatening, if power isn’t restored quickly.

Yet the U.S. power grid is aging and under increasing pressure, struggling to keep up with rising electricity demand and extreme weather events. As a result, power outages are becoming more frequent and severe. The Department of Energy warns that blackouts could increase 100-fold by 2030 and recent studies show the severity of outages has grown 20% annually since 2019.

Battery storage systems give medically vulnerable customers reliable backup power when the grid fails, automatically activating within a few seconds to keep critical medical devices running. By providing this layer of energy resilience, batteries protect those most at risk while helping utilities enhance reliability and equity for medically dependent and underserved communities.

What are the challenges facing the grid?

Large portions of the U.S. grid were built decades ago and are now due for modernization, says Baalaji Dhanabalan, Vice President overseeing the Energy Resiliency Portfolio at Resource Innovations. Aging equipment from transformers to substations requires greater upkeep and investment to maintain reliability, he adds. This is compounded by the rise in extreme weather events and the growing demand for power driven by widespread electrification.

As a result, utilities are increasingly concerned about how to keep the grid reliable, affordable and resilient, notes Dhanabalan. To meet these challenges, many are investing in grid modernization and resiliency programs that include distributed energy resources, such as home batteries and solar panels, as well as demand response programs that encourage customers to reduce or shift their electricity use during times of peak demand.

These programs aim to lower electricity demand and ease pressure on the grid, creating a more flexible system that can respond to sudden spikes in demand or localized outages. This not only mitigates the risk of power failures and dependence on expensive, carbon-intensive peaking power plants, but also enables customers to actively manage their energy use, offering more flexibility, potential cost savings and a source of electricity during outages.

How do home battery programs help?

“Battery storage programs help to flatten peak loads, lowering the need to activate gas-fired peaking plants, which ultimately lowers operational costs, cuts emissions and improves grid efficiency,” explains Dhanabalan. “Distributed battery systems also strengthen grid resilience — they can isolate and power critical neighborhood loads during outages or extreme weather.”

The benefits grow as more home batteries are added to the network. When linked together, they can operate as a virtual power plant, communicating in real time to balance supply and demand across the grid and further enhance reliability. 

Batteries maximize the value of rooftop solar by storing surplus energy produced during the day. That stored power is available at night when solar production stops, and it also helps the grid manage peak demand more efficiently. For vulnerable customers, pairing solar panels with a battery provides an added layer of protection, enabling them to keep charging their battery in the daytime even if the grid is still down.

Many customers who participate in battery storage programs come from underserved or hard-to-reach communities, including seniors, medically vulnerable residents, and people with access or functional needs, Dhanabalan notes. “Providing them with batteries not only supports resilience but also builds trust between utilities and their customers.” 

How do battery programs work?

Medical baseline customers are an ideal starting point for introducing or expanding home battery programs. 

Customers participating in energy resiliency programs receive advance alerts from utilities about planned Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), Dhanabalan explains. Enrolled customers typically receive notifications by email or text two days before a shutoff, including details on the expected duration and guidance on preparing, such as charging portable batteries or ensuring permanent battery systems are ready.

“While not every customer reads every message, adoption and engagement in these programs has been very high,” says Dhanabalan. “Our data shows that the vast majority of customers open and read these notifications, and overall satisfaction with the program has been strong,” he notes. “This means most customers are aware of the program and the resources available to them during planned outages.”
 

6 ways batteries benefit vulnerable customers

For most people, power outages are an inconvenience but for some, they can be life-threatening. Here are some of the ways that batteries specifically support your most vulnerable customers during an outage.

#1 Keep medical equipment running when the grid fails

When the grid fails, critical medical devices such as CPAP and Oxygen concentrators can stop working, putting lives at risk. Portable and permanent batteries provide a reliable backup power source, ensuring these devices keep working when the grid fails.

“Power outages can become life-threatening, especially for seniors or people with chronic conditions,” says Dhanabalan. “During extreme heat waves or winter storms, losing access to heating, cooling, or medical equipment adds serious health risks.” 

#2 Enables smooth transition between power sources

Most home batteries are designed to provide a smooth, nearly seamless transition during a power outage. This means they automatically disconnect from the grid and turn on when there’s an outage. This switchover is typically so fast that most medical devices don’t even reset or power off.

#3 Maintains communications

For medical baseline customers, having access to communication and information is essential. In addition to powering medical equipment, batteries can supply electricity to other critical devices, including smartphones, tablets and the internet, so that customers can stay connected to caregivers and emergency services as well as receive utility updates during outages. 

#4 Supports refrigeration of medications if needed

Medications, such as insulin, must be kept at a consistent and cool temperature to be effective. During prolonged outages — especially in rural or high-risk areas where power restoration can take longer — batteries play a vital role in keeping refrigerators running, Dhanabalan says. Providing backup power ensures that medically vulnerable customers can safely store their medications and other temperature-sensitive supplies. 

#5 Provides portable backup in case of relocation or emergency

Portable batteries are not fixed in place, which means medically vulnerable customers can take them along if they need to relocate during severe outages or extreme weather events. This ensures they can maintain power for essential medical devices, communications, and refrigerated medications even when away from home, offering reliability and peace-of-mind in emergency situations.

#6 Offers safety and security

“All the batteries we install come with a mobile app that shows how much power remains in a battery and the rate at which it is being used,” explains Dhanabalan. “This gives vulnerable customers a clear understanding of their available reserve and helps them manage their energy so that their stored power goes farther,” he adds. “For those with solar paired to their battery, excess solar energy during the day can recharge the battery, providing extra backup when it’s needed most.”

Portable and permanent batteries provide medically vulnerable customers safety, reliability and peace-of-mind while helping utilities to build trust and strengthen relationships with their communities. Resource Innovations supports utilities in implementing battery programs, by managing the entire process — from program design and customer outreach, to installation, permitting and reporting. By working closely with each customer to understand their unique needs, RI designs battery systems that are tailored to each household’s requirements while also delivering benefits to the grid. Customers who participate in the programs RI manages often describe a renewed sense of confidence and independence — knowing their homes and medical equipment will stay powered even during extended outages. They consistently highlight the care, communication, and responsiveness of program teams, which helps them feel supported and reinforces their trust in these resilience initiatives

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6 ways batteries provide a lifeline for customers in an outage

More than 2.5 million Americans depend on durable medical equipment, such as oxygen delivery systems, ventilators, and dialysis machines. For these vulnerable customers, even brief power interruptions can cause their equipment to malfunction, and longer outages can be life-threatening, if power isn’t restored quickly. Yet the U.S. power grid is aging and under increasing pressure, struggling to keep up with rising electricity demand and extreme weather events. As a result, power outages are becoming more frequent and severe. The Department of Energy warns that blackouts could increase 100-fold by 2030 and recent studies show the severity of outages has grown 20% annually since 2019. Battery storage systems give medically vulnerable customers reliable backup power when the grid fails, automatically activating within a few seconds to keep critical medical devices running. By providing this layer of energy resilience, batteries protect those most at risk while helping utilities enhance reliability and equity for medically dependent and underserved communities. What are the challenges facing the grid? Large portions of the U.S. grid were built decades ago and are now due for modernization, says Baalaji Dhanabalan, Vice President overseeing the Energy Resiliency Portfolio at Resource Innovations. Aging equipment from transformers to substations requires greater upkeep and investment to maintain reliability, he adds. This is compounded by the rise in extreme weather events and the growing demand for power driven by widespread electrification. As a result, utilities are increasingly concerned about how to keep the grid reliable, affordable and resilient, notes Dhanabalan. To meet these challenges, many are investing in grid modernization and resiliency programs that include distributed energy resources, such as home batteries and solar panels, as well as demand response programs that encourage customers to reduce or shift their electricity use during times of peak demand. These programs aim to lower electricity demand

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How to set up an AI data center in 90 days

“Personally, I think that a brownfield is very creative way to deal with what I think is the biggest problem that we’ve got right now, which is time and speed to market,” he said. “On a brownfield, I can go into a building that’s already got power coming into the building. Sometimes they’ve already got chiller plants, like what we’ve got with the building I’m in right now.” Patmos certainly made the most of the liquid facilities in the old printing press building. The facility is built to handle anywhere from 50 to over 140 kilowatts per cabinet, a leap far beyond the 1–2 kW densities typical of legacy data centers. The chips used in the servers are Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell processors, which run extraordinarily hot. To manage this heat load, Patmos employs a multi-loop liquid cooling system. The design separates water sources into distinct, closed loops, each serving a specific function and ensuring that municipal water never directly contacts sensitive IT equipment. “We have five different, completely separated water loops in this building,” said Morgan. “The cooling tower uses city water for evaporation, but that water never mixes with the closed loops serving the data hall. Everything is designed to maximize efficiency and protect the hardware.” The building taps into Kansas City’s district chilled water supply, which is sourced from a nearby utility plant. This provides the primary cooling resource for the facility. Inside the data center, a dedicated loop circulates a specialized glycol-based fluid, filtered to extremely low micron levels and formulated to be electronically safe. Heat exchangers transfer heat from the data hall fluid to the district chilled water, keeping the two fluids separate and preventing corrosion or contamination. Liquid-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers are used for immediate heat removal.

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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