Sunrun built its business on the sale of solar panels that go on your roof. But in the last few years, the San Francisco-based solar giant has begun focusing on another product in its growth strategy: home batteries., Sunrun's battery sales aren't just bringing in revenue on the margins. They're also opening up a completely new stream of income — in this case, from electric utilities.
Sunrun now sells that aggregated energy — known in industry jargon as a virtual power plant — as a product of its own. And utilities are the customer. When demand for electricity is surging and expensive, such as in the evening when people return from work, Sunrun can inject energy from that virtual power plant onto the grid, and get paid for it by utilities that would otherwise have to meet that demand with expensive-to-run conventional plants.
"What we're doing is going across the country, trying to find the areas that would most benefit from these virtual power plants, and really helping change the rules and pilot programs that prove these assets work," Jurich said on the call. "The markets have not been necessarily designed to have a mechanism where they can pay for the value that the battery adds."
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