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№ 46 · appended

California sends Newsom a bill counting aggregated home batteries as resource adequacy, a year after he vetoed three distributed energy bills

Resource adequacy is the accounting by which a state decides which resources it may count on in the worst hour of the year, and it has always counted power plants. Writing aggregated customer-owned devices into that ledger is categorically different from paying households to export: export compensation and demand-response programmes pay for energy or for showing up when called, while resource adequacy pays for being relied upon in advance, which is what drives procurement and therefore what gets built. The telemetry clause decides whether that promise is real. Measurement is the cost of proof and the cost of proof decides who can afford to participate: if device-level telemetry counts, a household battery can prove itself through the inverter it already owns, and if it does not, proof needs utility-grade metering at every site and the viable customer becomes larger and wealthier. The legislature did not settle this; it sent the question to a CPUC proceeding where the best-staffed parties usually do best. The signature is also a live question rather than a formality, because this governor vetoed three distributed energy bills on 3 October 2025, and one of those vetoes said the change belonged in the resource adequacy proceeding.

Resource adequacy is the ledger of what a state is allowed to count on. SB 913 would put aggregated household devices in it. The governor who has to sign it vetoed three distributed energy bills last October, and one of those vetoes said the change belonged in the resource adequacy proceeding instead.

California Senate Bill 913 was enrolled on 30 August 2026 and presented to Governor Gavin Newsom at 3 p.m. on 2 September. As of 14 September the Legislature's own status page records no further action: the bill is neither signed nor vetoed. Bills passed before 1 September and in the governor's possession on or after that date must be signed or vetoed by 30 September, or they become statute without a signature. [UNVERIFIED: the 30 September deadline and the default-to-statute rule are taken from secondary summaries of Article IV, Section 10 of the California Constitution; the constitutional text was not read.]

The bill adds a single section, 380.1, to the Public Utilities Code. On or before 30 June 2028, the California Public Utilities Commission, coordinating with the Energy Commission and the California Independent System Operator, must "enhance existing market-integrated pathways" by which aggregated distributed energy resources can qualify as resource adequacy capacity. The bill defines such an aggregation as more than one distributed resource that can either supply electricity to the distribution system or reduce demand on it. Qualifying aggregations must be able to count toward local, system or flexible resource adequacy, and must be eligible for credit at their qualifying capacity value.

Two clauses carry most of the operational weight. The commission is directed to determine the extent to which device-level telemetry can accurately measure net load impact. And qualifying capacity methodologies must credit both load reductions and net exports during the specific hour of the day that resource adequacy showings require. The statute names no valuation method; it directs the commission to fit these resources into the existing resource adequacy construct and counting conventions rather than building a parallel one. The legislative findings state that demand response participation in resource adequacy has declined even as the resources capable of providing it have multiplied, and call for a "durable, transparent, and timely pathway". [UNVERIFIED: reporting elsewhere describes a provision requiring conditions that prevent net energy metering and net billing tariff customers receiving duplicate compensation. It appears in a summary of an earlier Legislative Counsel's Digest and was not located in the enrolled text read here.]

SB 913 is authored by Senator Josh Becker, with seven coauthors across both houses. The Assembly passed it 59 to 3 on 25 August and the Senate concurred in amendments 40 to 0 on 27 August. It is co-sponsored by The Climate Center and Environment California.

The vetoes this bill is shaped around

On 3 October 2025, Newsom vetoed three distributed energy bills that had passed by large margins: AB 44, AB 740 and SB 541. Utility Dive counts a fourth, AB 1408, on interconnection. The stated reasons are the useful part.

AB 740 would have required a statewide virtual power plant deployment plan. Newsom's objection was fiscal: the bill would impose costs on the Energy Commission's primary operating fund, which he described as facing "an ongoing structural deficit". AB 44, on load flexibility, drew a different objection: that it "does not align" with the CPUC's ongoing reform of the resource adequacy programme. SB 541, on load-shifting analysis, was called disruptive of work already under way at the CPUC, the CEC and CAISO.

Read together, those three messages describe a governor who did not dispute the value of distributed resources and did dispute the venue and the funding. SB 913 answers both objections on their own terms. It does its work inside the resource adequacy proceeding rather than beside it, and it assigns the duty to the CPUC rather than to the Energy Commission whose budget was the stated problem. A June 2028 deadline gives the commission most of two years, which is the pace of a rulemaking rather than a mandate.

That reading is inference from the veto messages and the bill text, not reporting: no source consulted here states that SB 913 was drafted in response to those vetoes, and none of the veto messages mentions it. But it is the obvious construction, and it makes the signature a real question rather than a formality. If the objection was always venue and cost, this bill removes both. If it was something else, the same bill arrives with the same governor and a cleaner excuse to say no.

Why it matters

Resource adequacy is not a subsidy, a tariff or a programme. It is the accounting by which a state decides which resources it is entitled to count on to keep the lights on in the worst hour of the year, and it has always counted power plants. Load-serving entities must demonstrate they have procured enough qualifying capacity; that demonstration is what drives procurement, and procurement is what gets built.

Writing aggregated customer-owned devices into that ledger is a categorically different act from paying households to export. Export compensation, net metering and utility demand-response programmes all pay for energy or for showing up when asked. Resource adequacy pays for being relied upon in advance. A resource that counts toward a showing is one the state has planned around and therefore does not need to procure elsewhere. That is the point at which a home battery stops being a load reduction on somebody's spreadsheet and becomes a counted resource with a capacity value.

The telemetry clause is where this succeeds or fails, and it is easy to skip past. Measurement is the cost of proof, and the cost of proof determines who can afford to participate. If device-level telemetry is accepted as accurate measurement of net load impact, a household battery can establish its performance through the inverter it already owns, and an aggregator's marginal cost of adding a customer stays small. If it is not, proof requires utility-grade metering at every site, and the economics of aggregation change: the fixed cost per device rises, the viable customer becomes larger and wealthier, and the resulting market looks much more like the one it was supposed to open. The legislature did not resolve this. It told the commission to decide, which means the substantive fight moves to a CPUC proceeding where the parties with the most staff generally do best.

The qualifying-hour provision matters for a related reason. Demand response has historically been credited awkwardly against resource adequacy, and the findings note participation has fallen while capability has grown. Requiring that methodologies credit both load reduction and net export in the specific hour the showing requires is an attempt to fix the measurement mismatch rather than the incentive: it says the question is not whether the resource is valuable but whether the counting convention can see it.

On scale, the claims worth reporting all come from interested parties and should be read that way. Becker's office says more than 8,000 customer batteries totalling over 100 MW are being installed in California every month, and that the Demand Side Grid Support programme has already drawn more than 1,000 MW from customer-owned resources. A 2024 Brattle Group analysis, cited by Canary Media, projected virtual power plants could supply more than 15 percent of California's peak demand by 2030 with roughly 550 million dollars a year in customer savings. A coalition letter organised by Advanced Energy United in support of last year's vetoed bill put the figures at more than 7,500 MW and 750 million dollars a year. [NEEDS DATA: how much aggregated distributed capacity in California currently receives no resource adequacy credit, from a source that is not a party to the proceeding.]

What is still unknown

  • Whether Newsom has signed, vetoed or allowed SB 913 to become law, and on what date. As of 14 September 2026 the Legislature's record shows nothing after presentation.
  • Whether the enrolled text contains the duplicate-compensation condition described in earlier summaries, and how it treats existing net energy metering customers.
  • What the CPUC is required to produce by 30 June 2028: a decision, a tariff, a qualifying capacity methodology, or a proceeding schedule.
  • Whether the commission's telemetry determination has a deadline of its own, or arrives whenever the broader proceeding does.
  • What the other five energy bills sent to the governor at the end of August did, and what has happened to them. Only SB 913's passage was confirmed here against the primary record.

Sources

slug: california-sb-913-aggregated-der-resource-adequacy-awaits-signature beat: 2 format: news_brief meta_description: SB 913 would make aggregated home batteries and thermostats count toward California resource adequacy. It has been on Newsom's desk since 2 September. tags: [California, resource adequacy, virtual power plants, CPUC, telemetry, aggregation] internal_links: [] review_flags: needs_data: [aggregated distributed capacity in California receiving no resource adequacy credit, from a non-party source] unverified: [the 30 September gubernatorial deadline and default-to-statute rule, the duplicate-compensation provision in the enrolled text] legal_sensitive: false confidence: high

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