Carrier wants to turn air conditioners into grid batteries. (Canary Media)
The HVAC giant is piloting batteries paired with AC units that charge when power is cheap and run the cooling system during peak hours to ease grid stress.
Utilities could fund the batteries and control them during peak demand, creating a scalable, customer-friendly way to free up capacity.
With 7M HVAC replacements a year in the US (2.5M of them sold by Carrier) even modest adoption could rival the entire home battery market in scale.