AI is transforming residential storage fleets. What does that look like in practice?
Source：pv magazine
Residential batteries have long been marketed primarily as passive backup and insurance against outages. That narrative is rapidly becoming outdated, as storage systems become smarter and more autonomous assets right under our noses.
For Raghu Belur, co-founder and Chief Products Officer at Enphase Energy, the key shift isn’t in the hardware. It’s in the software that binds distributed systems into intelligent fleets and enables them to participate as active grid resources.
“In a distributed power network, the end points like batteries have become very intelligent,” Belur told ESS News, explaining that the systems must not only be capable of making local decisions, but also of operating as part of a larger system. “The home should be the unit of intelligence when we look at infrastructure. That should be where you produce, store and manage your energy.”
What Belur has seen emerge among Enphase’s global fleet of nearly five million distributed energy systems is a seemingly small but significant change in how these devices learn and improve their operations over time.
He explained that the company’s battery systems now run their own health checks using AI and embedded analytics to detect subtle performance issues before they escalate; it’s gotten to the point where the systems can even self-correct without a technician ever setting foot on site.
“It takes the human out of the picture,” Belur said, adding that this can free up time to focus on other things by reducing truck rolls, or when a technician travels to a project site to fix an issue.
He also noted that this kind of predictive maintenance based on embedded intelligence is already shifting the economics around how residential storage pencils out, as it helps catch faults early and improves system uptime.
While it’s invisible for homeowners, it could be a gamechanger for manufacturers and installers.
“These systems will tell us, ‘I don’t feel healthy,’” he said. “They report it, they adjust and they either fix the issue themselves or alert our network operations team that they should take a look at the system.”
It’s less about improving oversight, Belur said, and more about building a new method for automating fleet-wide monitoring. That ability to act and solve a problem (not just recognize it) is actually where he sees residential storage going in the near future.
In some European markets, like Belgium and the Netherlands, Enphase systems already participate in day-ahead electricity markets, where they utilize AI-driven forecasting and price simulations to determine the optimal times to charge or discharge without any human input.
The regulatory environment and market structures around the United States remain hurdles to overcome, but Belur believes it’s only a matter of time before the nation catches up.
“The grid was never designed for bidirectional power flow,” he said. Given rising electricity demand and aging infrastructure, the need for modernization is more critical than ever.
In his view, fleet intelligence means more than just making operations and maintenance cheaper: it’s about preparing residential systems to play a larger role in providing grid services and to participate in virtual power plants and capacity markets.
Belur also noted that AI has a role to play in streamlining grid integration and compliance. He foresees a future where interconnection paperwork and permitting are handled solely by machines, which, he says, could reduce friction for both utilities and customers.