PSE&G pays $5,000 toward home batteries in new VPP pilot

PSE&G will pay New Jersey homeowners a $5,000 incentive toward the purchase and installation of a qualifying home battery, with the option of up to $25,000 in interest-free on-bill repayment for remaining costs, under the GridSmart Battery Program announced August 26, 2026. The pilot is part of the utility's residential virtual power plant strategy: enrolled batteries can be called on during scheduled GridSmart Battery Events to power the home and cut its draw from the grid during peak demand.

Customers are notified before any scheduled event, according to the release, and the program page adds that participants can opt out at any time. PSE&G says the pilot will let it evaluate the reliability, peak-demand-reduction, and resiliency benefits of residential storage, including whether aggregated home batteries can defer or avoid transmission and distribution upgrades. What the release does not contain is any figure for the program's size: no megawatt target, no enrollment cap, no end date.

The pilot lands in the middle of New Jersey's larger home-storage push toward the state's statutory goal of 2,000 MW of energy storage by 2030, as pv magazine USA notes in its coverage of the launch. The state's Garden State Energy Storage Program straw proposal, released August 19, 2026, would have PSE&G administer 73 MW of a proposed up-to-150 MW behind-the-meter program that pays homeowners for measured event performance, targeted to open by July 2027. The GridSmart release also notes the state Board of Public Utilities began a stakeholder process in July to design a statewide VPP framework, and says data from the pilot will help evaluate how customer-owned storage supports those next-generation programs. GridSmart arrives ahead of both, with a flat upfront rebate now while the state's performance-paid program remains at least a proposal cycle away.