Solar Battery Storage in Connecticut: Staying On Through an Outage

If you live in Killingly, Putnam, Woodstock, Thompson, Brooklyn, Plainfield, Pomfret or Sterling, you already know the drill when a storm rolls through. The power goes out, and it stays out longer than it does closer to Hartford or the shoreline. You are in the Quiet Corner, the restoration trucks have a long way to drive, and if the outage is regional, your street is not first in line.

That is not a scare tactic. It is what already happened this year.

On March 17, 2026, a storm with gusts up to 60 mph knocked out power to more than 30,000 Connecticut customers at Eversource’s peak, and Killingly and Putnam were both named among the towns with more than 100 outages apiece. Source: Patch. In February, a nor’easter brought gusts as high as 70 mph along the New London County coast and knocked out power to more than 14,500 Eversource customers statewide at its peak. Source: CT Mirror. Neither of those was unusual. Both are worth planning around.

So the real question is not “should I get a battery.” It is: what does a battery actually do when the lights go out here, and what is Connecticut willing to pay you for having one. Both answers are more specific, and more honest, than most solar pitches let on.

What a home battery actually does during an outage

A home battery is not a generator, and it does not pretend to be one. It stores power, usually from solar panels charging it during the day, and releases that power to your home when the grid goes down.

What it powers depends entirely on how it is wired and how much capacity you bought. Most residential batteries are sized to carry a defined set of circuits, refrigerator, some lighting, internet, a well pump if that is a priority, for a stretch of hours, not for the whole house running everything at once for days on end.

For a short outage, that is usually enough. For an outage that runs into a second or third day with limited sun to recharge it, a single battery can run out. That is true of every battery on the market, not just one brand, and any installer who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

None of this makes a battery a lesser choice. It makes it a different tool than a generator, sized for the outage you are more likely to face, quiet, with almost nothing to maintain, and doing something useful for you on the days nothing has gone wrong. The mistake is not choosing a battery. The mistake is expecting it to behave like a generator when it was never built to.

Eversource serves your town. Norwich runs its own utility, and that matters.

Eversource is the electric utility for all eight of Rooftop Power’s northeastern Connecticut service towns, Killingly, Putnam, Woodstock, Thompson, Brooklyn, Plainfield, Pomfret and Sterling, and for New London as well. Source: Eversource’s own service territory page.

Norwich is the one town nearby where that is not true. Norwich runs its own municipal electric utility, Norwich Public Utilities, established in 1904 and governed by its own board. Source: Norwich Public Utilities. NPU operates outside Connecticut’s statewide Residential Renewable Energy Solutions program and sets its own rules for anything battery or solar related. If you are in Norwich, do not assume an Eversource program applies to you. Ask NPU directly what it offers before you plan around a state program built for Eversource and United Illuminating customers.

Meet Energy Storage Solutions, Connecticut’s battery program

Connecticut’s answer to “what does the state pay for a home battery” is a program called Energy Storage Solutions, or ESS. It is run by the Connecticut Green Bank alongside Eversource and United Illuminating, and it is the direct Connecticut equivalent of the ConnectedSolutions program some Massachusetts homeowners have heard about, same basic idea, different state, different money, different terms.

As of April 1, 2026, ESS pays in two pieces. There is an enrollment incentive, paid upfront: $30 per kWh of battery capacity on the standard tier, or $130 per kWh on a Grid Edge circuit, meaning a part of the grid the utility considers especially constrained. Then there is a performance incentive, paid annually, of $300 per kW-year on the standard tier, $450 per kW-year on the underserved tier, or $550 per kW-year on the low-income tier. Source: CT Green Bank’s own program announcement.

That performance payment is not a one-time bonus. It is paid every year for ten years, and it is not free money. It comes with a commitment.

The ten-year trade nobody puts in the headline

Here is the part almost no one writes plainly, and it is the reason this page exists.

To collect that annual performance payment, you commit your battery to what ESS calls Active Dispatch for ten years. Ten years is the actual term of the enrollment agreement, not a marketing number. Source: CT Green Bank. For ten years, the utility can call on your battery, up to 10 times per year in winter and between 30 and 60 times per season in summer. Source: CT Green Bank.

We are not going to tell you the exact hours or time of day those dispatch events happen, because the public program materials we checked do not spell that out clearly enough to print here, and guessing at it would be worse than saying nothing. Ask your installer or the CT Green Bank directly for the current dispatch window before you enroll, and get it in writing.

What we can tell you plainly: during those events, your battery is doing what the utility asked it to do, not necessarily what you would have chosen for it in that moment. That is not a hidden catch. It is the actual deal. You are trading ten years of some control over one piece of equipment you are paying for, in exchange for a real annual payment. For some homeowners, especially anyone who mainly wants the battery for outage backup and does not mind the utility using it the rest of the time, that trade is a good one. For a homeowner who wants total control over the battery at all times, it is worth knowing that before you sign, not after the first summer dispatch notice.

Battery alone, or battery paired with solar

A battery with no solar attached to it drains and stays drained until grid power comes back to recharge it. A battery paired with solar panels can recharge itself during daylight, even mid-outage, which is exactly the difference between “we made it through one afternoon” and “we made it through three days with intermittent sun.”

Pairing also changes what the equipment does on an ordinary Tuesday. A battery with no solar just sits there until an outage or a dispatch event. A battery charged by solar is storing power you generated instead of power you bought, every sunny day, whether the grid is up or down. That is the case for pairing them, separate from the outage question entirely.

What is gone, and what is still real

The federal residential clean energy credit, the 30 percent credit under IRC Section 25D, is not available for solar equipment placed in service after December 31, 2025. The IRS states this directly. Source: IRS. A Connecticut system installed and placed in service in 2026 does not qualify for that credit, full stop, regardless of when a contract was signed.

Two things Connecticut still offers are permanent, not promotional. Solar equipment is exempt from the state’s 6.35 percent sales and use tax. Source: Connecticut Department of Revenue Services. And Connecticut municipalities are required by state statute to exempt qualifying residential solar installations from property tax, so adding solar does not raise your property tax bill. Source: Connecticut General Assembly research summary. Neither of those depends on a program budget or an enrollment window. They are written into state law.

Before you commit to a battery, ask an installer these questions

Ask what the exact dispatch window is, in hours and times, not just the event count. Ask what happens to your battery’s backup capacity during a dispatch event, meaning how much charge is actually reserved for your own outage protection versus what the utility can pull. Ask whether solar is required to enroll, since Connecticut’s structure is built around pairing the two. And ask what a realistic outage duration looks like for your specific circuit and neighborhood, not a statewide average, since restoration timing in the Quiet Corner has not tracked the same as restoration timing closer to the coast.

$0 upfront and $0 upfront financing is available on approved credit, and it is worth understanding the full ten-year picture before you decide that is the right structure for your situation.

A decision that starts with your outages, not with the incentive

The honest starting point is not “what does Connecticut pay me.” It is “how long do my outages actually run, and what am I willing to trade for ten years to get paid for a battery I already wanted.”

If a battery is mainly there for peace of mind during the next multi-day storm, know its real limits going in. If the ESS performance payment is the deciding factor, know what you are committing the equipment to for a decade before you count on it. Neither answer is wrong. What is wrong is signing up for one without understanding the other.

Rooftop Power services Killingly, Putnam, Woodstock, Thompson, Brooklyn, Plainfield, Pomfret, Sterling and New London directly, and we install both solar and battery storage. Check current outage status at Eversource’s outage map before your next storm, review battery storage and what it covers, see our Connecticut service area, or read more on Connecticut solar incentives. Ask what Energy Storage Solutions would pay on your system. We will give you a straight answer either way.