Five hours a day, seven days a week: who holds the switch on your customer's battery

The marquee program is closed. Tesla stopped taking new Demand Side Grid Support enrollments in March 2026. What's left is one open door, and the money behind it belongs to whoever holds the discharge switch. That isn't the homeowner.

Tesla's own DSGS page carries the notice at the top. It says new DSGS VPP enrollments are not being accepted as of March 2026, and points eligible customers to the Emergency Load Reduction Program instead. That's the whole redirect. Anybody who sold storage on the DSGS story last summer is selling a different product this summer, on a shorter clock, under a different agency, with a different set of terms sitting behind the enrollment screen.

The door closed on April 27

The California Energy Commission adopted the Fifth Edition DSGS Guidelines at its April 27, 2026 business meeting. Docket 22-RENEW-01, TN 269650, CEC-300-2026-001-CMF.

Chapter 5, Section C is the line that matters. Participation in the 2026 season, it says, "is limited to storage VPP aggregators that participated in October 2025," with an exception only for aggregators of bi-directional EVSEs. Option 1 is separately suspended for the year on budget grounds. The season isn't tight. The season opens May 1, 2026, and eligibility turned on who was already dispatching back in October 2025.

The money explains the door. Option 3 has 19.5 million USD for 2026 capacity payments, and up to 42.7 million becomes available only if the 2026-2027 budget process frees it. The Preface states the arc plainly: a program "originally envisioned as a $314 million program to build 1 GW of demand-side resources," with "only $109.5 million" allocated and nothing new authorized in the 2025-26 Budget.

The published prices are still real money. September alone pays 19.20 per kW-month, a 30 percent bonus applies on top for program years 2025 and 2026, and a four-hour storage resource clears 82.80 USD per kW across the whole season. That's arithmetic no contractor can sell this year, because the April rule made last October the test, and nobody knew it at the time.

Closed March 2026 TESLA NEW DSGS VPP ENROLLMENTS, PER TESLA'S OWN PROGRAM PAGE Sunset after 2025 ELRP A.6 RESIDENTIAL POWER SAVER REWARDS, PER CPUC Dec 31 2027 THE DATE ELRP A.4 ENROLLMENT ENDS, PER THE SCE AND TESLA AGREEMENT

Exclusive access to the device

ELRP is a seven-year CPUC pilot, 2021 through 2027. D.21-12-015 brought residential customers in and set the rate, D.23-12-005 carried the pilot to the end of 2027, and the A.4 sub-group is the residential path in SCE and SDG&E territory, running through an aggregator rather than direct enrollment.

Eligibility is a short list with a long tail. It takes a valid Rule 21 interconnection agreement, an interval meter, a residential service account, and no other demand response or VPP enrollment anywhere. SCE decides all of that "in its sole discretion." Enrollment then "shall continue until December 31, 2027, unless expressly extended by SCE or terminated sooner."

Read the control section out loud before anybody signs. Tesla "will have exclusive access to the Device," other than the participant's own operation of it. Except for honoring the Backup Reserve, Tesla "may charge or discharge the Participant's Device to any level seven days per week during the hours of 4:00 PM and 9:00 PM." SCE holds sole discretion to terminate participation "at any time and without cause."

Tesla can change the terms on five days' notice. If the customer dislikes any of it, the agreement says the "sole and exclusive remedy" is to disenroll.

Then there's the payment section. SCE pays Tesla, and Tesla pays the customer. The participant "shall have no recourse to SCE for any payments," and SCE "disclaims responsibility for ensuring" that the funds it hands Tesla reach the person whose battery did the work.

The rate is what sits on the enrollment screen in the app: the 2.00 USD per kWh the CPUC authorized, the 450 ceiling, a signature line. The control section lives in the agreement instead, and that's where the 4:00 to 9:00 PM authority is written down. No salesperson is obligated to read that part aloud to a homeowner. Read it anyway, because the alternative is that the customer learns it the first hot evening the block goes dark.

One number, and Tesla says which way to move it

The homeowner sets the Backup Reserve. That's the negotiation, all of it. There's a single-event opt-out and a suspension toggle too, and Tesla notes that lowered participation may reduce compensation, because the program pays on performance.

Tesla's own worked example prices the setting. One Powerwall at a 20 percent reserve, full when the event starts, has "13.5 kWh * (100%-20%) = 10.8 kWh to contribute." Subtract a typical 3 kWh of house load and 7.8 kWh moves, worth 15.60 USD. The window Tesla can come get it in runs 4:00 to 9:00 PM, seven days a week. The guidance under the example reads "Lower your Backup Reserve to earn more."

Now set that against the outage the battery was bought for. Tesla puts a rotating outage at roughly one to one and a half hours, and notes PSPS events may run longer. The agreement disclaims the rest. Neither Tesla nor SCE is liable for damages including "Participant's Device reduced state of charge during a power outage causing a loss of power." Disputes go to a single arbitrator.

The reflex is to make the terms the villain. I read the agreement first too, and on a one-Powerwall house that's the wrong document to start with. A house that needs more than 10.8 kWh to ride out an evening was undersized the day it was drawn, and no reserve setting repairs a thin design. That's a load calculation nobody ran. Both failures make the same phone call at 7:00 PM in September.

Three applications get unlimited cycles

The Powerwall Limited Warranty (USA), Rev. 2.3, effective January 27, 2025, holds 70 percent energy retention at ten years across the board. What changes is the cycling. "Solar self-consumption or time-based control, and backup" gets unlimited cycles. Any application not on that list, or any combination that includes one that isn't, gets 37.8 MWh of aggregate throughput, and coverage ends there.

Export to the grid for a utility program is not among the three named applications. The warranty also carries no exclusion naming virtual power plants, grid services or third-party dispatch, and no Tesla document resolves which side of that table a dispatched battery lands on.

So give the customer the honest version. The party that would classify a warranty claim is the same party running the program and holding the discharge switch. Tesla decides.

Seven events, or twenty hours

Tesla publishes 100 to 450 USD per Powerwall for a season. The floor under that is "a minimum of seven events each year." The ceiling is built on "as many as 60 hours of events." The same page also describes "the program minimum of 20 hours of events."

The CPUC sets an event at one hour minimum and five hours maximum, so seven events lands anywhere between 7 hours and 35, and the 20-hour program minimum sits somewhere inside that spread. The two floors don't converge, and neither Tesla nor SCE publishes which one governs.

Money moves on the season calendar, not the meter. The season closes October 31, Tesla then calculates, the utility validates, and payment lands five to seven days after the customer requests a payout in the app.

The width of that range is the argument. The top number assumes the grid has a bad summer. The CEC announced on November 13, 2025 that California had gone three consecutive years without a Flex Alert, crediting storage growth. The fleet behind that announcement held 16,942 MW statewide, including 2,213 MW of residential systems across more than 200,000 homes. Nobody publishes an expected value between 100 and 450.

It's the same electricity the export credit reset repriced at midday, priced at 2.00 USD when the grid picks the hour. The kilowatt-hour didn't change. The party choosing when it moves did, and the price follows that party.

Sunrun says its California plant will offer up to 425 MW of peak dispatchable capacity this summer, across more than 80,000 households and more than 110,000 batteries, dispatching through both DSGS and ELRP under bilateral contracts with PG&E and SCE. Whoever is inside DSGS this year was inside it last October. Storage retrofits surface in the record the way service upgrades do, as panel and interconnection work filed months before anybody buys equipment, which is where a contractor reaches the homeowner while the reserve setting is still a question instead of a complaint.

Everyone else gets the short version. One open program. An enrollment that dies December 31, 2027 unless SCE expressly extends it. Dispatch from 4:00 to 9:00 PM, seven days a week, May 1 through October 31. A payout the customer has to go ask for in November.

Put the dispatch window in the proposal, next to the price. Five hours a day, seven days a week, six months a year, held by somebody else.