Sunrun customers with Brightbox battery systems located in East Bay Community Energy’s service territory are eligible to participate in the Resilient Home Program beginning December 31, 2022.

If your system is operational and you haven’t received your incentive as part of your system activation, you will receive an email in December 2022 with instructions to obtain your Visa gift card by mail or electronic activation.

Sunrun is working with your Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) - East Bay Community Energy (EBCE)- to use a fleet of Sunrun Brightbox systems to help create a more reliable, renewable and cost-effective energy system in Northern California.

At times when there is high demand on the local electric distribution system (i.e. the “grid”) or during other critical periods, your battery will respond by sending energy from your battery to the grid.

This coordinated discharge of your and your neighbors’ Brightboxes will occur in the afternoons during the Time of Use (TOU) hours when your energy prices are highest. This means that while there may be a slight change in your battery’s operation during a grid services event, you will retain the highest value from your system’s discharge.

Dispatch events may last from 2-4 hours between the hours of 5PM-9PM Pacific Time. Dispatches will occur every weekday of the year, including holidays. A portion of your battery will be reserved strictly for back-up power at all times.

By using the battery systems in this manner we will improve grid resilience, drive down costs for all customers by avoiding expensive infrastructure upgrades, and ultimately allow for deployment of more carbon-free solar energy and battery storage to the grid.

Your system will participate in this program for the next ten years, starting as early as December 31, 2022. This does not affect your existing service. After that there may be options to re-enroll in a renewed program or move to another Sunrun energy program for an additional incentive.

By participating in the Resilient Home Program, you will improve the resilience of your local utility grid by either using energy from your solar and battery system or sending energy from your battery to the grid when it's most needed. Every participant in the program has or will receive an incentive for participating in the program - a benefit that Sunrun is proud to share with its customers who use their batteries for Grid Services.

We hope you will also feel great about helping to reduce carbon emissions and paving the way for home solar and battery systems to contribute to the grid of the future!

The Resilient Home Program will never utilize the energy in your Brightbox system during an outage. If an outage occurs, all the available energy stored in your battery will be used to power your home until power is restored.

Additionally, a portion of your battery will be reserved strictly for back-up power at all times. This portion of the battery capacity will never be used for the Resilient Home program, and is held as a back-up reserve margin in case of outages.

If your home is affected by a grid outage and are unsure what to do with your PV and battery system, please contact Sunrun by phone at (855) 478-6786 or email at customercare@sunrun.com.

If you have a Tesla Powerwall, you may notice a banner appear in the app during a dispatch event. This banner signals that your battery is actively participating in an event for the Resilient Home Program. You will be unable to adjust your battery settings during an event.

Your selected battery settings may be overridden by Tesla at various times throughout the program to enable your system to perform optimally.

There has been a lot of communication around planned outages across California in 2020 and beyond, which could include your area. Whenever there is an outage—whether that outage is planned for maintenance, a shutdown for wildfire prevention, or an emergency on the grid—your system will react the same way.

Your Brightbox system will disconnect from the grid, and your solar system will continue working during the day. You will use available energy from your battery to support the circuits you’ve chosen to back up if there’s no solar energy available. Participation in the Resilient Home Program will not impact the backup capabilities of your system.

For the purposes of this Program, we may share the following information about your Brightbox system with your CCA: energy production, energy discharge data, the status of your battery and smart inverter for a period before, during and after energy discharge events, and overall battery performance data. This is all in addition to Sunrun’s privacy policy, which can be found at: https://www.sunrun.com/privacy-policy.

No, we do not expect your Sunrun or Utility monthly bill to change as a result of participating in this program.

If you do not wish to participate, please complete the Opt-Out Form.

It may take up to 30 days after your opt-out request is processed for your battery to be removed from program dispatching.