The people’s power plant: How Puerto Rico turned home batteries into a reliable grid asset

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The people’s power plant: How Puerto Rico turned home batteries into a reliable grid asset

In 2017, Puerto Rico was plunged into darkness. Hurricane Maria devastated the island, collapsing the power grid and triggering the longest blackout in American history. Millions were left without electricity. This event exposed the deep vulnerabilities of an electrical system strained by decades of underinvestment, aging infrastructure and increased exposure to extreme weather. Rather than […]

Rather than rebuild what was lost, Puerto Ricans turned the devastation into an opportunity for growth and innovation. In 2019, it enacted Act 17, restructuring the island’s energy system and setting an ambitious target of 100% renewable energy by 2050. This shift spurred a rapid surge in home solar panel and battery installations, as the population sought greater energy resilience and independence. Act 17 also paved the way for grid modernization by separating the island’s power generation assets from its transmission and distribution system (T&D), a move that allowed LUMA Energy, the island’s grid operator, to assume control of the T&D system in 2021, under a 15-year public-private partnership. This brought the private expertise and resources needed to upgrade the island’s grid.

As more homes became “mini power plants”, generating electricity from rooftop solar and storing it in batteries, the island’s grid faced a new challenge: modernizing to manage a decentralized, variable system. The energy landscape was rapidly shifting away from the traditional model – dominated by a few large power plants – toward thousands of smaller, distributed generation sources.

From crisis to opportunity: The challenges of grid modernization

The challenges faced by Puerto Rico are not unique. Across the U.S., much of the power grid was built for a different era. One defined by a few large fossil-fuel power plants, predictable energy demand and a more stable climate. Today, the grid is under severe pressure from rising electricity consumption, volatile weather and the rapid integration of variable renewable energy sources.

To meet this challenge, utilities are starting to adopt innovative schemes like demand response programs, to better manage fluctuations in supply and demand. California, for instance, incentivizes households to install batteries in return for rebates and Hawaii offers performance-based cash payments or monthly bill credits to customers, in return for using their stored energy to support the grid.

The rise of the ‘mini power plant’: Managing distributed energy

Before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s solar industry was small, with a few households mainly installing rooftop panels to lower energy bills. Fast forward to today, Puerto Rico leads the U.S. in per capita adoption of rooftop solar and residential battery storage, with more than 10% of electricity consumption on the island now coming from rooftop solar. LUMA estimates this will increase as much as 60% by 2028 (Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis).

As solar and battery adoption swelled, LUMA saw an opportunity to leverage this distributed network of energy resources to support the grid during generation shortfall and grid emergencies, using residential batteries to balance supply and demand, improve resilience and reduce reliance on costly peaker power plants. This vision became the foundation for the utility’s energy efficiency and demand response plan in 2023, with its Customer Battery Energy Sharing (CBES) pilot at its core.

Building a virtual power plant: The CBES solution

LUMA’s CBES pilot program launched in 2023, with the goal of increasing the amount of energy available to the grid during times of peak demand or low power generation, known as demand response events. During these times, LUMA can draw power from participating customers’ batteries to support the grid. In return, participating households earn money for the energy their batteries provide.

The program is built around equity, aiming to make the benefits of clean energy accessible to all. Administered by Resource Innovations and ScottMadden, the pilot is open even to households without their own batteries. This has been made possible through collaborations with third-party aggregators, which allow customers to join the CBES program via financing or lease options while still benefiting from performance-based incentives.

“The CBES program is a powerful example of what’s possible when utilities, technology partners, and communities work together. Working with Resource Innovations was instrumental in bringing the CBES program to life. Their expertise in battery storage and demand response enabled us to design and scale the Virtual Power Plant program that’s now helping stabilize Puerto Rico’s grid during critical moments.”

-Graziella Siciliano
Director of Energy Transformation, LUMA Energy

The amount of money a customer earns for participating in the program can be as high as $600 per battery, Sunrun says on its website. The exact amount depends on how much energy they choose to send back to the grid – sending more energy increases potential earnings, while keeping more energy for personal backup reduces them. This flexibility allows customers to balance financial rewards with energy security, giving them control over how their batteries are used. “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how customers engage with the grid. They are no longer passive consumers, they are active partners in building energy resilience and grid stability. Programs like CBES empower them to shape a more flexible, responsive grid, and that collaboration is central to the future of utility innovation.” says Vrinda Gaba, Head of Load Flexibility at Resource Innovations.

As more homes and businesses across Puerto Rico join the program, thousands of batteries across the island have been aggregated into a single, coordinated energy resource that functions much like a large, centralized power plant. Known as a ‘virtual power plant’ this network of connected batteries and other distributed energy resources (DERs) powered by customers can enable utilities to tap into these assets as an aggregated flexible resource to stabilize the grid and ensure a reliable supply of power during periods of high demand.

Powering a cleaner, resilient future

LUMA’S CBES program has grown into the nation’s largest behind-the-meter virtual power plant, with more than 81,000 customers enrolled. Participation rates are as high as 82% during demand response events, reflecting strong community engagement in the scheme. Thanks to this high participation rate, LUMA recently used about 70,000 home batteries to send 48MW of electricity to the grid. This helped cover a gap of nearly 50MW in power supply in the Summer, preventing grid overloads and keeping the lights on longer in communities across Puerto Rico.

Building on this success, LUMA has secured regulatory approval to scale the pilot into a three-year permanent program. Resource Innovations is continuing to play a strategic role with the utility in advancing the program. Their guidance spans program design, scalability, incentive structures, and use cases like time-of-use optimization and backup power. They’ve developed real-time dashboards to track solar generation, battery usage, and grid interaction, enabling smarter dispatch strategies. Additionally, Resource Innovations is supporting the grid-edge DERMS strategy and enablement to automate dispatch and test advanced use cases, laying the foundation for Puerto Rico’s future distributed energy roadmap.

Gaba states, “With CBES, we’re not just building a program, we’re building a scalable model for the future of grid resilience. Designing the right program is critical, not just for technical success, but for long-term scalability and continued customer engagement. What’s worked in Puerto Rico through CBES offers a strong blueprint for other utilities, though regulatory frameworks, incentive structures, rate design, and customer motivations all need to be carefully aligned. Our work with LUMA has focused on building a demand response strategy that’s not only resilient and data-driven, but also adaptable. It is grounded in performance tracking, customer feedback, and dispatch testing to ensure it delivers value to both the grid and the people it serves.”

The CBES program shows how a collaborative approach between customers, technology providers and utilities can turn distributed energy into a powerful, flexible resource. By leveraging thousands of home batteries as a single VPP, Puerto Rico is not only improving grid reliability and resilience but also advancing a cleaner, more sustainable energy future that empowers its residents to take an active role in shaping the island’s energy system.

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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

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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