New batteries have been spreading across New York City, popping up at small businesses over the last year: bidirectional, plug-in, and, at just 120 volts, tiny. But according to their purveyor, David Energy, they’re the biggest things happening in distributed energy right now.
The idea is that these batteries, small as they are, can make use of pre-existing grid connections. Also known as permissionless DERs, there’s no electrician, nor stint in a lengthy interconnection queue, required.
CEO James McGinniss is a distributed energy champion: an organizer of the DER Task Force and enthusiastic fixture of the DERVOS conference (which in 2025 grew large enough to take over New York’s Governor’s Island), and generally a vocal endorser of the grid benefits of especially small storage.
However, he explained in an interview with Latitude Media that his company’s primary pitch is for cost savings: “As long as you let us install these batteries and take over your energy supply, we guarantee you that we will lower your costs relative to the utility,” he said.
David Energy, which is based in New York but has plans to expand across the Northeast in the next year, then acts as the middle-man between the customer and Con Edison. The customer can leverage the batteries to save money on their electricity bills, which are up by roughly 4% for the average New York City customer this year. The increase has triggered political backlash both in the Big Apple and nationwide.
Since its launch in 2019, David Energy has primarily sold energy management software, offered free to customers who agree to buy energy through David rather than through ConEd. It operates in Massachusetts and New Jersey, as well as New York.
The plug-in battery launch came in December, after a few months of piloting. And McGinniss said the batteries “immediately took off” among the small commercial customers that are its target, including laundromats, gyms, and restaurants. Since the start of 2026, they have signed roughly 100 customers and contracted more than 250 locations. Across those customers, the company has earmarked over 2,000, and installed over 500, with multiple installs each day.
Many of the businesses are renters who have never had access to solar or storage before; renewables are not historically the province of tenants. Traditional residential solar and storage requires commitment: expensive installs, long-term financing, and often permits. But a plug-in system, much like a window AC unit, is attached to the tenant and not the landlord. Accordingly, if a store closes, David’s model is to retrieve the battery and redeploy it elsewhere.
And it’s fast to deploy: “We could sign a customer on Monday and deploy the battery by Friday,” McGinniss said. With a few exceptions including the trendy Black Seed Bagels, the company isn’t necessarily targeting its existing energy software customers (though it does reach out to them about the new product when the time comes for renewal). That said, the company is now getting inbound interest, because as McGinniss said, customers are telling their friends “at dinner parties.”
Even David, which staked its strategy on the premise that small commercial grid connection points have capacity to spare, has been surprised by just how much room there really is. McGinniss said that they expected to attach batteries at 90% of signed locations, but “it’s been actually closer to 98%,” he said. “There’s always space on the panel.”
At least for now, David customers will still receive a ConEd bill — in every unregulated market other than Texas, the utility bills for the costs of poles and wires, while retail electricity providers bill for supply — while David separately communicates how much was saved. That said, the long-term goal is to abstract ConEd from the transaction entirely.
A strategic market intersection
David doesn’t have much competition, at least not yet. That’s because the company sits at the intersection of several specific opportunities.
First, the technology: David sources its batteries from EcoFlow, a portable power company that straddles both the U.S. and China; two of its founders are American and two are Chinese. While OEMs like Tesla and Enphase dominate much of the U.S. distributed storage market, EcoFlow offers essentially the only plug-in battery available at scale.
Then there’s the matter of market structure. David’s ideal market is deregulated, with smart meters that measure and settle usage against wholesale prices, rather than billed at a single flat rate. While the company started out in New York, McGinniss said the company is actively developing plans for many more cities. David is licensed in PJM and ISO New England, and later this year, McGinniss said the company will be fanning out across the Northeast and New England.
In a moment when PJM capacity prices are “growing through the roof,” David will be making the case for monetizing batteries without having to enroll them in capacity market auctions.
For more on David Energy’s permissionless DERs, listen to James McGinniss’ interview on Catalyst:
Finally, there’s the business model. While copycats are always possible, even inevitable, David has the advantage of having spent years building its platform. It operates as a full-stack, retail-integrated VPP, acting as both a retail electricity and demand response provider, using its own software platform. Tesla’s Texas VPP uses a similar model, while NRG actively assembled a full stack by acquiring Vivint Smart Home in 2023, then VPP company CPower in 2025. NRG is vertically integrating its assets and managing them using CPower’s platform. Meanwhile, in the U.K., Octopus Energy (plus its Kraken software platform, which spun off last summer) is a prominent example of the full-stack approach.
But when vertical integration is combined with plug-in batteries, small commercial customers, and the deregulated markets of the Northeast, David is the only one.
One surprise in the rollout so far is the fact that David is learning they can go for much bigger customers than they expected. Initially, McGinniss expected these plug-in systems would suit small restaurants (or else residential customers). But the company is learning that even larger sites like warehouses or grocery stores have extra headroom on their interconnection as well — and can ostensibly plug in as many small batteries as needed to take advantage of that spare capacity.
The real strain so far, McGinniss said, is the supply chain. The company is now buying thousands of batteries, which involves moving far more hardware than during the company’s years of primarily installing thermostat systems. For now, McGinniss said, the company is “chasing demand.”
This comes as interconnection friction mounts especially in the New York area. Last August, facing a flood of applications, ConEd changed its interconnection study methodology for distribution-level battery storage systems. Clean energy groups asked regulators to roll back the change, saying the new two-part test for interconnection presented too high a cost barrier, and effectively halted battery deployment in much of the utility’s territory.
Just a few months later, the state’s Public Service Commission directed the utility to develop a plan to solve a reliability shortfall, telling it to prioritize clean capacity. While the reliability need is happening at the bulk transmission level, clean energy advocates have argued that it’s a bad moment to throttle even distribution-level storage capacity.
For now, the ability to get new batteries onto the New York City distrbution grid is essentially on pause. And at least in McGinniss’ view, its a state of affairs that makes the case for plug-ins even for utilities.
“The reality is that frictionless solutions like plug-in batteries are attractive not only to our customers, but should also be to utilities, because they can be deployed almost instantly, provide grid services, and don’t require expensive grid upgrades,” he said. “By comparison, how fast we can build front-of-the-meter is inherently constrained by the interconnection process.”
