Tesla Powerwalls did most of the heavy lifting as California’s home batteries set a new grid record last week. On October 6, more than 85,000 Powerwall owners sent over 600 MW to the grid, the bulk of a combined 745 MW dispatch that Sunrun announced today.

That’s 28% more than the 580 MW record the two companies set less than a month ago. And it’s bigger than most gas peaker plants in the state.

Tesla has turned on Powershare Home Backup for the Model 3 and Model Y, which means its two volume cars can now send power back into a house during an outage. Until today, the Cybertruck was the only Tesla that could do it.

There are limits. You need a Powerwall 3, and Tesla only guarantees the feature on cars ordered since October 1. For years, Ford and GM have been selling EVs that can back up a home.

Between increasingly extreme weather, rising electricity demands, and the rapid expansion of data centers, energy independence is starting to look less like a talking point for doomsday preppers and more like sound planning. That shift in thinking is driving more homeowners than ever towards solar-plus-battery energy solutions like the industry-leading Tesla Powerwall – but Powerwall isn’t the only game in town, anymore.

UPDATE 05OCT26: added the EcoFlow DELTA Pro.

Sunrun and Tesla pulled a record 580 megawatts of power from home batteries onto California’s grid during a heat wave on September 9, the largest residential distributed power plant event ever recorded.

The dispatch pooled more than 140,000 home batteries across the state and ran for a three-hour window in the evening, when the grid was straining under air-conditioning load.

Tesla’s Cybertruck Powershare feature can now back up your home at the same time as a Powerwall 3, the company announced Thursday. Run together, the truck and the battery add more than three days of backup power, which Tesla says is the equivalent of nine extra Powerwalls.

It’s a feature Tesla first promised for 2025, and it’s showing up nearly two years after Cybertruck deliveries began. But it finally closes one of Powershare’s most annoying gaps.

Tesla has launched Tesla Home, a home energy management platform powered by an AI engine called Opticaster that it says makes “hundreds of decisions” a day about when to store and use electricity to lower your bill.

However, it’s not an entirely new product as Electrek has been reporting on Tesla’s Opticaster for 5 years.