When Home Batteries are as Common as TV Streaming Devices, How Will Retailers Adapt?
In the late 90s, DVR pioneers ReplayTV and TiVo introduced a radical idea: Why organize your life around television when television could fit your life?
Whole-home batteries offer that same freedom for residential energy. Now, with low-cost leases and bundled energy plans, they’re poised to bring it to the masses, and fundamentally disrupt consumer expectations and retail energy strategies in the process.
I spent decades working on DVRs and streaming television, first at ReplayTV and later for 10 years at Roku, helping time-shifting technologies go mainstream.
Time-shifted TV was such a compelling consumer proposition that it eventually forced cable companies to embrace DVRs and streaming, further accelerating their adoption and dusting the traditional broadcast TV model. A whole generation has grown up expecting to watch TV whenever and wherever they want it.
Electric retailers today face a similar choice: develop products that leverage the home battery transition, or be disrupted by them.
Those that evolve their offerings to bundle a battery and guaranteed energy savings will unlock enormous demand, transform their customer relationships, and capture massive market share from other retailers and the default provider.
Time-shifting: Convenient for content, crucial for energy
Like DVRs and streaming devices, batteries untether households from someone else’s schedule. Homeowners can cool their homes, run appliances, and charge EVs whenever they choose, using electricity stored when rates were lower.
But the stakes go well beyond entertainment. Batteries lower bills, provide essential backup during outages, and earn homeowners payments for exporting energy. Aggregated into virtual power plants (VPPs), they also ease grid strain and reduce system-wide costs.
With rates rising and extreme weather threatening reliability, the consumer appeal of a battery is obvious. The historical obstacle was spending $30,000 upfront.
Because of this price point, we ship just 150-200K batteries annually, almost exclusively to wealthy, price-insensitive households. Your average homeowner doesn’t lose power enough to value this product.
The opportunity: Making batteries mainstream
In 1999, a standalone DVR cost about $1,500 in today’s dollars. When cable companies began bundling DVR rentals with TV packages, they found a win-win: recurring revenue and stronger customer retention.
DVR adoption skyrocketed – from 2% of U.S. homes in 2003 to nearly 40% in 2010. Then came streaming, which capitalized on DVR momentum to deliver the knockout punch to broadcast TV.
Today, in the residential energy world, enterprising electric retailers and innovative utilities are moving quickly to capitalize on the power of batteries.
Base Power, Tesla, Octopus Energy, Energywell, and SOLRITE are introducing battery-enabled plans in markets like Texas, Connecticut, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, while PG&E, Evergy, and Green Mountain Power are offering subsidized battery plans. Eligible customers can now lease batteries for $50/month or less, and receive a 20%+ discount on their energy plan.
The economics work because deployed batteries become revenue-generating assets. By storing cheap electricity, discharging when prices rise, and providing grid services through VPPs, providers earn returns that significantly help cover equipment and installation costs.
State and utility incentives are also playing a key role in accelerating adoption; programs in Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Illinois, Maine, and New Hampshire already offset battery installation costs or reward grid participation, and many more are on the way.
But even more notably, deep-pocketed and highly motivated hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft are stepping in to bankroll grid-edge flexibility, and may prove to be the real underwriters of the home battery transition.
Who isn’t going to buy this product?!
Together, financing, incentives, grid services revenues, and an improved customer experience will take batteries from 200K residential installations in the U.S. a year to at least 2-3 million annually.
As with DVRs and streaming devices, what started as a luxury will soon be a standard household fixture. What home wouldn’t invest in a battery that costs $50/month, provides resilience, and guarantees energy savings?
Accelerating adoption with AI-powered acquisition
In a battery-enabled world, electric retailers will no longer compete on price alone. When customers expect backup protection, predictable bills, bill credits, and beyond, novel rate plans that save the consumer money while maximizing profits will be your differentiator.
Which means it’s becoming more critical than ever to find and acquire the right customers: households that don’t just reap benefits but actually produce value for the grid. Doing this successfully requires deep insight into individual homes, occupants, and energy consumption patterns, as well as expected future behaviors.
At 257, we’ve built digital energy twins for all 130M U.S. homes using AI and billions of energy data points. These profiles capture each home’s current energy characteristics including outage history, predicted load profile, and presence of DERs like batteries, rooftop solar, smart thermostats, heat pumps, and EVs.
Moreover, proprietary predictive models forecast a likelihood to adopt these assets and participate in a VPP.
Across the country, leading-edge suppliers are proving just how powerful these insights can be. Today, 257 is helping power battery and VPP customer acquisition across 8 states and growing, on behalf of dozens of solar, storage, and VPP providers.
Knowledge is power, literally
A decade from now, an American home without a battery may seem as outdated as one without streaming. The question isn’t whether batteries will reshape residential energy, but who will capture the value they create.
From Netflix to Amazon to Roku, the biggest winners of the streaming transition made on-demand video affordable and accessible – and turned new consumer behavior into recurring revenue engines.
The retailers that emerge as winners of the home battery revolution will take a page out of this playbook, marrying innovative, profitable plan design with customer acquisition that scales. Data and AI can help you achieve both.
About the author:
Scott Rosenberg
Co-founder and CEO, 257
Scott Rosenberg is co-founder and CEO of 257, a venture-backed NYC company using large datasets and AI to accelerate the home energy transition. 257 builds digital energy twins for 130M U.S. homes, helping partners in energy, HVAC, and solar identify and engage households most likely to benefit from their products and services. Previously, Scott launched and led Roku’s advertising and media business, scaling it to billions in revenue and a public company.
