>I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.

I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of

Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.

There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.

>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)

This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.

>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*

In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.

> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too.

We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it. 70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.

They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.

That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free. Thanks for sharing your experience.