The California Energy Commission (CEC) has released over US$46 million for the state’s Distributed Electricity Backup Assets (DEBA) Programme.
Announced 23 October, the US$46.14 million is being released through a Grant Funding Opportunity (GFO).
The DEBA Programme provides funding for distributed energy resources (DERS), including battery energy storage systems (BESS), microgrids, and load flexibility technologies that can increase supply or shift load to improve grid reliability and help avoid blackouts during extreme events.
DEBA was established as part of California’s Strategic Reliability Reserve, which was created in 2022 and formed part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s Assembly Bill (AB) 205, which also introduced the CEC’s opt-in certification scheme for BESS projects exceeding 200MWh.
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Speaking with Energy-Storage.news at the US Solar & Storage Finance event in Garden Grove, California, CEC Commissioner Noemí Gallardo highlighted the opt-in scheme as a sign of the Commission’s growing role in fast-tracking large-scale storage.
Gallardo noted that the CEC has “approved three projects already,” or, “about two gigawatts”, since the programme’s launch. DEBA represents a parallel avenue stemming from the same 2022 legislation, aimed at channelling funding directly toward grid-reliability-focused BESS deployment.
In 2025, utility-scale developer SB Energy received a US$25 million grant from the CEC, through DEBA, to purchase BESS for a solar and storage project in Riverside County, California.
Submissions for the GFO are due by 26 January 2027. The CEC will hold a pre-application workshop discussing the solicitation on 5 November 2026.
The submission and questions deadlines can be found on the CEC’s website.
