Eversource Ties Massachusetts Storage Payments to Where a Battery Sits on the Grid

In late June, Eversource opened two demand-response pilots in Massachusetts that price a battery’s payment by where it sits on the distribution network rather than by what it can do in the aggregate. The utility detailed the programs on July 1.

Both pilots layer new incentives, branded ConnectedSolutions+ and Managed Charging+, on top of the base ConnectedSolutions program that Eversource has run across its territory for years. What separates them from the base program is geography. Each pilot draws a boundary around a cluster of constrained substations and offers richer payments to distributed energy sited behind them.

In Greater Boston, ConnectedSolutions+ covers customers in Cambridge, Milton, and south Boston. An enrolled battery there earns a $400 per kilowatt performance incentive, and Eversource has made commercial customers explicitly eligible. In southeastern Massachusetts, the pilot covers New Bedford, Dartmouth, and Freetown, where enrolled batteries earn $275 per kilowatt across the June-through-September summer season. Events are called between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. The pilots are scheduled to run through 2029.

The selection rule. Eversource located the pilots at constrained substations, the nodes where distribution capacity is tightest, rather than across its full footprint. The event window, from mid-afternoon into the evening, coincides with the hours when demand on a dense urban feeder tends to peak. The design points the incentive at the times and places where the local network is most likely to bind, not at the system-wide peak a conventional program chases.

What changed. The base ConnectedSolutions program pays an enrolled battery the same summer performance rate regardless of where on the network it sits. A battery in a rural town with spare capacity earns what a battery on a maxed-out urban feeder earns. The two ”+” pilots break that symmetry. They pay for location.

That is a different theory of what a distributed battery is worth. Under a flat program, the battery is a fleet asset: aggregate enough kilowatts anywhere and dispatch them against the system peak. Under a locational program, the battery is a substation asset, and its value depends on whether it discharges into a wire that is close to its limit. Two identical commercial batteries, running identical software, earn different money depending on which feeder they are wired to.

The distribution-deferral logic. This is the non-wires-alternative idea, imported from utility capital planning into a demand-response tariff. When a substation approaches its rating, the conventional fix is a transformer upgrade or a new feeder, capital that lands in the rate base and takes years. Paying customers behind that substation to shave the local peak is a cheaper and faster substitute. The pilots test whether a targeted incentive can defer that spending.

The scope reinforces the experimental framing. These are bounded tests confined to a handful of towns, not territory-wide rollouts, designed to measure whether locational payments actually relieve the specific nodes Eversource named. The results will function as a signal rather than a proof.

Where the constrained nodes are. The covered towns are not a random cross-section of Massachusetts. Cambridge, Milton, and south Boston are dense, built-out urban districts. New Bedford is a compact industrial city. These are the places where a commercial building has the least room to site energy hardware, where ground for an outdoor cabinet is scarce and where the buildings that would host storage are occupied offices, institutions, and multifamily structures rather than warehouses with open land.

So the pilots concentrate their richest payments in the corner of the market where physical siting is hardest. A locational incentive rewards a battery for being close to a constrained substation, and the buildings closest to constrained urban substations are often the ones least able to place a battery outside. The program design and the siting problem point at the same square footage.

A parallel abroad. The same logic surfaced this week on the transmission side. Vopak took a final investment decision on a 200 MW / 800 MWh battery in the Netherlands under an agreement with grid operator TenneT that dispatches the asset explicitly to relieve congestion rather than to arbitrage energy prices. Different voltage, different continent, same structural move: a grid operator paying storage for where it sits and what it relieves, not merely for the megawatt-hours it shifts. Locational grid value, long buried inside averaged tariffs, is being unbundled and priced on both sides of the meter.

What it does not settle. A pilot is a pilot. Eversource has not committed to extending locational adders across its footprint, and the programs are structured as tests rather than permanent tariffs. The base ConnectedSolutions rate still governs the majority of enrolled batteries, and a commercial owner outside the covered towns sees none of this. A companion program, Managed Charging+, applies in the same zones, though Eversource has not published its full terms.

What the pilots establish is a precedent for how the payment gets calculated. Once a utility has priced a battery by its substation, the flat statewide rate starts to look like the exception. The location was always worth something. Eversource has now put a number on it, in two zones, for the summers through 2029.

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