Buffalo apartment battery, CEC's $6.8M for VPPs, Budderfly's $500M

A 3.75 MWh battery moves into a Buffalo apartment building

Peace Bridge Place, a 105-unit affordable housing building in Buffalo, New York, now has a 3.75 MWh lithium-ion battery spread across seven battery rooms, battery maker Viridi and developer Good Carbon Co. said on October 20, 2026. The companies call it one of the largest indoor lithium-ion battery systems in an occupied US residential building. It is designed to back up the fully electrified building during outages and to trim its draw from the grid at peak. The project is a National Grid pilot, and NYSERDA is supporting it through its Future Grid Challenge.

What makes the installation notable is where it sits: indoors, in a building people live in. Viridi says that in UL 9540A testing a cell intentionally driven into thermal failure did not spread to surrounding cells, "with no detectable release of heat, sparks, smoke, gas or flames," and that the system holds a UL 9540 listing from TÜV Rheinland. The Associated Press reported that Viridi announced in April it met UL safety standards allowing indoor installation without added fire suppression, and quoted Viridi CEO Jon M. Williams: "The only thing that has been holding up installations at scale is safety; a lot of the products on the market over the last 10 years have burned things down."

The battery is not the only thing in the building that answers the utility. During National Grid peak events, dispatch signals pass through EnergyHub's platform to Viridi's energy management system, and participating residents' smart thermostats can pre-cool or pre-heat their apartments ahead of the event; residents can opt out of any individual event. Viridi builds the systems in Buffalo, at a plant it says can produce about 400 MWh of battery systems a year.

California approves $6.84 million for two VPP field tests

The California Energy Commission approved two Electric Program Investment Charge grants for virtual power plant demonstrations at its October 19, 2026 business meeting, per the meeting's orders and resolutions: $3,360,000 to DER Security Corp. and $3,483,212 to the University of California, Riverside. Each resolution passed with Commissioners Gunda, McAllister and Gallardo voting aye and Commissioners Hochschild and Skinner absent. The two awards, $6,843,212 together, came out of a solicitation for coordinating high concentrations of inverter-based distributed energy resources, according to the agenda.

The two projects test different ends of the same idea. DER Security's, titled SYMPHONY in its grant request, aims to advance a "cyber-resilient VPP capable of securely coordinating high concentrations of residential and commercial/industrial inverter-based distributed energy resources in the City of San Leandro," with PG&E as a subcontractor and key partner; its scope of work targets sub-2-second response over IEEE 2030.5 and five 24-hour capacity management blocks without violating PG&E Dynamic Operating Envelopes. UC Riverside's project will run a utility-integrated VPP across multiple PG&E substations and feeders serving disadvantaged communities. Its largest listed subcontractor, Olivine, Inc., is budgeted $1,280,823 of CEC funds, about 37% of the grant by our arithmetic. The UC Riverside agreement runs from November 2, 2026 to November 1, 2030 and DER Security's from November 19, 2026 to March 31, 2031.

These are research grants for demonstrations. The CEC's operating VPP, the Demand Side Grid Support program, got no appropriation in AB 113, California's end-of-session budget bill, and per Advanced Energy United, is funded only through the end of 2026, as The Duck Curve reported in September.

Budderfly offers cities $500 million with no money down

Budderfly, an energy-as-a-service company based in Shelton, Connecticut, said on October 20, 2026 it will make $500 million in project capital available to small and medium-sized US municipalities through its Modernizing American Cities program, delivered with Schneider Electric. Budderfly would finance, deploy, own, operate and maintain the systems, and cities would pay over time through energy savings. Depending on local needs, projects could include solar, battery storage, EV charging, HVAC and lighting, and technology to monitor and optimize energy performance, with Schneider's energy management and automation technologies integrating them.

For scale, Budderfly says it has invested more than $378 million in facility upgrades to date, in a 10-year track record serving more than 9,000 commercial customer locations. The program builds on work in Cadillac, Michigan, where Budderfly is investing approximately $4.4 million across seven municipal facilities, including city hall and the wastewater treatment plant, for solar, battery storage, upgraded HVAC and lighting, EV charging and microgrid capabilities. ESS News reported that Budderfly plans to combine the municipal sites into a 150 MW virtual power plant; the Business Wire release gives no megawatt figure.