--- title: "Startup Loans New Yorkers Free Batteries to Run Air Conditioners Off the Grid" description: "Every Electric grew to 2,000 batteries in about 1,000 households this summer, with payments from Con Edison." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-02T17:20:21Z modified: 2026-10-02T22:44:38Z url: https://rews.cc/a/startup-loans-new-yorkers-free-batteries-to-run-air-conditio-cddf65 language: en tags: ["energy", "batteries", "climate", "infrastructure", "ai", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Startup Loans New Yorkers Free Batteries to Run Air Conditioners Off the Grid *Every Electric grew to 2,000 batteries in about 1,000 households this summer, with payments from Con Edison.* By rews desk · October 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/startup-loans-new-yorkers-free-batteries-to-run-air-conditio-cddf65 ## In brief - About 1,000 NYC households ran window air conditioners off-grid through a heat dome using free loaned batteries - The loan requires a refundable $30 deposit; households can buy units for $650 and earn about $150 a year per unit - Every Electric was founded by two Columbia postdocs in 2023 and rebranded from Standard Potential Co. in 2026 - Deployment grew from 100 batteries in 65 homes in 2025 to 2,000 batteries in about 1,000 homes this summer - The wait list passed 15,000 requests; the company aims for over 10,000 batteries in 2027 and new utility markets About 1,000 New York City households ran their window air conditioners through this summer’s heat dome without drawing power from the grid, part of a free and fast-growing battery-lending program from the local startup Every Electric. The company’s pitch is simple. It drops one or more batteries at a home, the batteries plug into a standard wall outlet and the air conditioners plug into the batteries. Households keep cooling during peak-demand hours and still earn money through Con Edison’s Smart Usage Rewards demand-response program; Every Electric is paid by Con Edison as a program partner and generally promises residents $150 a year per air conditioner. The loan requires only a refundable deposit, which the company has cut from $50 to $30 per battery, and households that want to keep the units can buy them for $650 each. Jeremy Hsu, a reporter at Ars Technica who wrote about joining the program, said his family had spent four summers precooling their apartment and then sweating through the designated shut-off periods. This year, with daytime temperatures in the triple digits, their window units ran on two batteries parked discreetly in the corners of the living room and bedroom. “Being able to make air conditioners drop off the grid without actually impacting the comfort of residents was really awesome to see,” Andrew Wang, co-founder and chief executive of Every Electric, said in an interview with Ars. Mr. Wang and his co-founder, Richard May, met as postdoctoral researchers at the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center. They founded the company in 2023 as Standard Potential Co., aiming to commercialize sodium-ion battery chemistry, then pivoted to something different: a network of home batteries acting as a virtual power plant. The company rebranded as Every Electric this year. Virtual power plants, which pool small household resources to ease strain at peak times, are an established tool; in [Vermont](https://rews.cc/a/vermont-home-battery-network-becomes-the-state-s-largest-pow-455da2), a utility-run network of home batteries has become the state’s largest power source. Every Electric’s innovation is lending the equipment to renters for free. The company uses the Bluetti Elite 200 V2, a lithium iron phosphate unit that stores 2 kilowatt-hours and works with any 120-volt plug-in air conditioner. It has four standard sockets for fans or air purifiers, USB-A and USB-C ports for phones and laptops, and a 12-volt car-style outlet. Connected to home Wi-Fi, it charges overnight when demand is low and discharges when air conditioners run at peak hours, with Every Electric managing the cycles remotely. During blackouts it can keep a router or refrigerator running. There have been kinks. When Con Edison reduced voltage for hundreds of thousands of customers to protect grid equipment during the extreme heat, the batteries’ draw tripped the circuit breaker in Mr. Hsu’s apartment twice, he wrote. The company responded with repeated firmware updates. “Every household is unique, and sometimes you have pre-war buildings with old wiring,” Mr. Wang told Ars. “You have to manage both some of the losses that are on the ConEd side and then some of the losses that might be in the wiring in people’s walls to finetune how we operate the power banks.” One side benefit turned up by accident. “We found out cats are big fans of the powerbanks,” Mr. Wang told Ars. “I think it’s because they’re a little warmer.” The first test, in the summer of 2025, put 100 batteries in 65 households. This year the company deployed 2,000 batteries in about 1,000 households, four megawatt-hours of storage in all. “If you picture one of the big utility-scale, containerized batteries, one of those blocks is usually four megawatt-hours,” Mr. Wang said. “So we’ve sort of taken that up and broken it up into 1,000 pieces spread across the city.” New York is fertile ground for the model: more than 2 million rental homes, and more than 80 percent of the city’s housing stock built over 50 years ago, before central air conditioning. Still, early customers have included owners of single-family homes in Queens and Brooklyn, some pairing the batteries with plug-in solar panels. The wait list ran past 15,000 requests for batteries this summer, and the company aims for more than 10,000 deployed batteries in 2027. Mr. Wang said other utilities are watching. “We have new utility territories that are coming to us, they’re seeing that you can drop-ship literal megawatt hours to customers as a solution,” he said. “So we’re certainly looking at how to map this model onto new markets.”