California lawmakers want home batteries bidding against gas plants. Newsom has until September to decide.

California has some of the most expensive residential electricity in the continental U.S., and Gov. Gavin Newsom has until the end of September to decide whether to let a network of home batteries, EV chargers, and smart thermostats start bidding for the same grid-capacity payments that today go almost entirely to large gas and hydro plants.

SB 913 and SB 905 are the bills at issue. They cleared a key California Senate committee earlier this month and now face a floor vote by Aug. 31, 2026. Sen. Josh Becker, a Democrat who wrote both, cast them at a Sacramento press conference as a "win-win" for grid reliability and household bills.

A virtual power plant is a software layer that turns thousands of small devices into one dispatchable generator. A home battery that would normally charge an EV overnight can be told to pause during the dinner peak, then resume once wholesale prices fall. The Brattle Group estimated in a 2024 analysis prepared for GridLab that California virtual power plants could cover more than 15% of state peak demand and deliver roughly $550 million in annual customer savings by 2035. That is a projection from a study commissioned by a clean-energy advocacy group, not a measured result, and it is the load-bearing number in the bills' case.

SB 913 is the more procedural of the two. It directs the California Public Utilities Commission to write rules by mid-2028 letting virtual power plants compete in resource adequacy, the annual auction that decides which generators get paid to keep the lights on through the hottest hours of the year. Today those payments go almost entirely to big gas, hydro, and nuclear plants. Letting in distributed fleets changes who gets the money, and how much, without building a new power line. The bill text is on California leginfo.

SB 905 is the more political. It nudges Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric to use virtual power plants in place of some of the grid investment they would otherwise build and bill customers for. As Becker put it, the rules have not kept up with the technology. For a state that already runs some of the most expensive residential electricity in the continental U.S., the bet is that a coordinated set of rooftop and garage devices can defer a substation.

Earlier this month, a 100,000-home battery fleet delivered a record power assist to the California grid, the kind of dispatch that a decade ago would have required a peaker plant. The California Energy Commission set a 7 GW load-shift goal for 2030 in 2022; a June 2025 workshop found the state at roughly half that and not on track. That gap is what the bills' authors say SB 913 and SB 905 are meant to close.

The political hard part is Newsom. Last year he vetoed a slate of similar bills aimed at home batteries, smart thermostats, and EV chargers, and the trade-press summary of the cycle flags that as the open question for 2026. The bills' proponents argue the resource-adequacy carve-out is narrower than last year's package; opponents, including some ratepayer advocates, still want to see the procurement rules in writing before they trust the savings.

The floor vote is due by Aug. 31, 2026. If both bills pass, the next hard date is the end of September, when Newsom has to sign or veto them. That clock is what turns a committee move into a bill story.