Vermont's Biggest “Power Plant” Is in People's Homes — and You Can Do the Backup Part Yourself

Nova Bliss — backup power for American homes

Vermont's largest electricity source isn't a dam or a gas plant. It's 5,500 home batteries in people's garages.

Green Mountain Power, Vermont's biggest utility, has been leasing homeowners two home batteries for $55 a month on a 10-year lease. The batteries are linked through software into a virtual power plant — about 110 megawatts, which makes it the single largest power source in the state. The fleet saved customers roughly $11 million in a single year by standing in for expensive peaker plants.

One homeowner in rural Springfield told reporters she was about to buy a $12,000 gas generator in 2024 after losing power a dozen times a year. An electrician pointed her at the battery lease instead. She hasn't lost power since. Her honest take: she did it for herself, not the grid.

Here's the part that matters for everyone who doesn't live in Vermont.

The lease math: $6,600 over 10 years, and you never own the batteries

$55 a month for 120 months is $6,600. At the end of the lease, the batteries belong to the utility program, not to you. (There's also a $5,500 one-time option — still utility-tied, still not yours to take with you.)

That's a fine deal if you're a Green Mountain Power customer. But the program is only for GMP customers. If you live anywhere else in America, there's no $55-a-month battery lease waiting for you. Your backup plan is yours to build.

And storms don't check your zip code first.

The real lesson: buy backup power for yourself

Strip away the virtual-power-plant angle and the Vermont story is simple: a homeowner who kept losing power bought backup power and stopped losing sleep. The grid-scale benefits are a bonus. The backup was the point.

That's true whether the grid ever calls on your battery or not. A storm, a downed line, a transformer failure — when the power goes out, the only battery that matters is the one in your house.

Lease vs. own, honestly

Let's be straight about what each option actually covers:

Leased whole-home batteries (the Vermont model): professionally installed, wired into your panel, can carry a house for up to about two days at minimal usage. Costs $6,600 over a decade and stays with the program.
A portable station you own: backs up your essentials — fridge, router, phones, CPAP, laptops — not your whole house. No monthly fee, no utility approval, works with any panel, any state. And it's portable: outages, camping, job sites, the car.

Different tools. But for the family that just wants the fridge cold, the Wi-Fi up, and the phones charged through an outage, owning a portable station costs less than one year of the Vermont lease.

What to look for if you're buying your own backup

Same checklist we give everyone, Vermont or not:

Battery chemistry. LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) outlasts older lithium-ion by 3–5x the charge cycles. A backup battery that dies in three years isn't backup.
Right-sized capacity. 1,000Wh-class runs a full fridge plus network gear for hours. Match the box to your critical loads, not your whole house.
UPS/EPS switchover. Under 20 milliseconds means the router and the computer never blink when the grid drops. For work-from-home, this is the feature that pays for itself.
Solar input. A station that recharges from a panel works through multi-day outages and costs nothing to keep ready.
No subscriptions. The Vermont family pays $55 every month. Your backup battery should cost you exactly once.

The bottom line

Vermont just proved that home batteries work — at grid scale, in real storms, for ordinary families. You don't need a utility program to get the part that actually protects your house: a battery of your own, sitting quietly in the corner, ready when the grid isn't.

Our LiFePO4 stations are the own-it-once version — check the lineup here: Portable Power Stations. Free shipping, 30-day returns, no monthly fees ever.

Browse the Full Catalog

Nova Bliss — backup power for American homes. US-based, free shipping, 1–2 week delivery, 30-day returns. Ocean Springs, MS · +1 228-696-3541

Order summary