Get checks from your utility with a Lunar battery
I took a field trip to Mountain View to check out Lunar's battery and home energy control system.
This week on Everybody in the Pool
On the latest episode, I visited the Mountain View headquarters of Lunar Energy, makers of a modular solar-plus-battery system designed to turn your home into a power plant that is resilient to outages, can meaningfully cut power bills, and can contribute energy back to the grid during peak demand. Yes, yes, my favorite thing.
Lunar doesn’t make the solar panels themselves; instead, the system centers on stacked battery blocks (in 5 kWh increments) topped by an integrated inverter, plus rooftop “maximizers” installed behind each panel to squeeze more energy out of the array. And finally, there’s the Lunar Bridge, a box that sits between your home and the utility. This isolates the house when the grid goes down so you can operate as a microgrid, and enabling the Lunar app to manage and optimize your power whether you’re on-grid or off.
Founder and CEO Kunal Girotra was the head of Tesla Energy for five years, and he told me he founded Lunar because, in his view, the market was too fragmented and “widgetized” — homes were being pieced together from a battery company, a smart solar panel company, an inverter company, an EV charger company, an electrical panel company, etc. etc. etc.
The idea behing Lunar was to integrate as much hardware as possible with an app, and make the hardware and the app attractive and consumer-friendly and easy to use, so the vibe for the homeowner is like using Apple products. Here’s a little visit to their showroom, where we simulated a power outage and how you can control individual appliances (even if the power is on!) to maximize energy storage.
So that’s pretty cool and I obviously want that — yes, for power outages, and also because, like everyone in America, I would like to pay less for my electricity. Girotra said that in high-cost markets like California (me!), any solar-plus-battery setup can, all by itself, save you something like $2,000 a year. Add to that the second-by-second optimization that the Lunar app does, and you can save an additional $400 to $600 a year.
And then, if your battery is enrolled in a virtual (or, as Lunar prefers, “distributed”) power plant program, you can get paid on top of those savings. Girotra described sending customers checks in the $300–$500 range, because at peak moments the grid can call on aggregated home batteries to supply power the way a peaker plant would.
On that side of things, Lunar is taking a decidedly less Apple approach. The company acts a lot more like Android there, with an enterprise software platform called Gridshare. It’s an open ecosystem that can work with third-party batteries and smart panels and home energy systems, including their own, and connect to utilities to distribute stored energy when it’s needed.
I know we’ve been talking about this a lot, and for good reason, and Girotra told me that we’ve now firmly demonstrated that distributed power plants can, in fact, provide reliable, consistent backup power to the grid and consumers will happily participate in power-sharing because uh, duh, they get paid for it.
In a test in July of 2025, Tesla and Sunrun — running, in part, Lunar’s Gridshare software — emptied 100,000 residential batteries onto the grid simultaneously, over the course of two hours. That discharge added up to 539 megawatts, or the equivalent of a mid-size natural gas plant. So that’s awesome! We proved it! It can work!
Unfortunately, it happened just as the state of California is considering cutting and even withdrawing allocated funds from the program that would incentivize more of this buildout. The four-year-old Demand Side Grid Support program is what pays utility customers who reduce energy usage during peak times or share power with the grid. It’s enrolled something like 800 megawatts of capacity, and, experts told Canary Media, it’s “leading the nation for distributed energy.”
Meanwhile, Girotra told me the Northeast is moving aggressively in the direction California could be headed, due to both extremely high electricity rates and data center demand.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!