HOMER Grid

Key Takeaways

• HOMER Grid = commercial behind-the-meter (BTM) solar + storage modeling tool.
• Optimizes battery dispatch against TOU rates and demand charges, not off-grid loads.
• Companion to Energy Toolbase for C&I solar + storage economics.
• Commercial license required (no free tier).

HOMER Grid vs. HOMER Pro

HOMER Grid and HOMER Pro share the same modeling lineage from HOMER, but they are aimed at different problems. HOMER Pro’s traditional strength is off-grid and microgrid design — sizing solar, wind, batteries, and diesel generation to serve a standalone load reliably. HOMER Grid keeps that optimization engine but repoints it at a grid-connected, behind-the-meter site: instead of asking “how much generation and storage does this load need to stay powered,” it asks “how should this battery charge and discharge to minimize the customer’s utility bill” — accounting for the specific TOU rate schedule and demand charge structure the site is billed under.

That distinction matters when scoping a commercial project. A microgrid or resiliency-driven battery is sized against outage risk and critical-load runtime; a HOMER Grid-modeled BTM battery is sized against the shape of the customer’s TOU rate and peak demand profile, since that’s where the savings actually come from.

Related Reading

HOMER Grid sits in the same commercial solar + storage economics space as Energy Toolbase, which does the equivalent TOU rate and NEM 3.0 / demand charge modeling but is built specifically around US utility tariff structures rather than HOMER’s broader hybrid-system optimization engine — teams weighing the two are usually deciding how much of the analysis needs HOMER’s generation-mix flexibility versus Energy Toolbase’s California-tariff depth. For readers assembling the full commercial design stack around a BTM storage project, the ranked overview of solar design software and the Aurora vs HelioScope comparison cover where a layout and yield-modeling tool fits alongside a dispatch tool like HOMER Grid. For the storage hardware side of a behind-the-meter project, Heaven Green Energy’s BESS glossary entry and its comparison of lithium vs. lead-acid solar batteries are useful next steps once the dispatch economics from HOMER Grid justify moving forward.