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.
