Virgin Islands VPP discharges at 800 kW and 500 kW in two half-hour tests

The Virgin Islands Energy Office said on September 16, 2026 that its Virgin Islands Battery Energy Storage 2.0 Virtual Power Plant ran two half-hour tests, which the release dates to the Friday before, September 11, and put the combined total dispatched at 2.5 MWh without saying how it was measured. In the first, VIEO Director Kyle Fleming sent a command from the office's St. Croix control room and 190 residential batteries across 80 sites on St. Thomas and St. John discharged at approximately 800 kW; in the second, 108 batteries on St. Croix supplied approximately 500 kW. VIEO watched the output on a dashboard maintained by Tesla, the virtual power plant's operator. A postmortem found no enrollee opted out, the release says.

The release's power and energy figures do not reconcile: 800 kW and 500 kW sustained for half an hour each is about 0.65 MWh by our arithmetic.

VIEO has paid out over $176,000 in participation incentives with $68,000 more being processed, per the release. The program's Terms and Conditions, version 2.0, effective April 1, 2026, set a one-time enrollment incentive of $500 per battery, capped at $2,000 per participant for up to four batteries (the program page says "bank up to $2,000 just for signing up"), and an annual participation incentive of $500 per battery, also capped at $2,000 per participant and paid quarterly at $125 per battery. The September 16 and August 24 releases offer $1,000 for each eligible Tesla Powerwall enrolled, up to $4,000, during the 2026 launch year: the two components summed, per battery and per participant, if both are paid in the same year, by our arithmetic. Fleming said on May 11, 2026 that VIEO would be "front-loading quarterly participation incentives for customers who enroll during the 2026 launch year," the Virgin Islands Consortium reported.

Eligibility is initially limited to Tesla Powerwall 2.0 and 3.0, per the Terms and Conditions, which also cap events at 50 a year; per the release, VIEO is awaiting approval of a federal grant that would open the program to other manufacturers' batteries and other distributed energy resources, like the battery installations being collocated at new build public schools. The August 24 release on the inaugural test, dated there to the Monday before, August 17, reported approximately 1.5 MW from 120 sites across all three islands over 30 minutes, under a headline that said 1 MW. On May 11, Fleming put nearly 3,000 Tesla Powerwalls in the territory at up to 40 MWh of potential energy capacity, the Consortium reported. On September 9, 2026, Tesla said about 69,000 Powerwall owners across California were dispatching more than 500 MW to the grid (our coverage).