Whole-Home Energy Independence in Downtown Austin
One downtown Austin home, four sources of power — 20 kW of solar, Enphase battery storage, a 26 kW Generac generator, and SPAN smart panels working as one system.
The situation
This homeowner wasn't chasing a lower bill. They wanted energy independence — and protection from a grid that keeps showing its age. After watching outage after outage roll through Central Texas, they asked us a simple question: what would it take for this house to keep running no matter what the grid is doing?
What we designed
The answer was a layered system where each part covers the others' gaps:
- 20 kW rooftop solar on Enphase microinverters — production continues panel-by-panel, with no single point of failure in the array
- Enphase IQ Battery 10T storage — solar energy banked for evenings and short interruptions
- 26 kW Generac standby generator — deep reserve for extended outages, when battery and cloud cover meet a multi-day event
- Two SPAN smart panels — circuit-level control over the whole home, deciding what runs on which source and when
The interesting part
Most homes run on one source of power. This one runs on four — grid, solar, battery, and generator — and the engineering challenge was making them cooperate: clean transfer between sources, storage that charges from solar rather than the grid when it should, and a generator that starts only when it's genuinely needed. The SPAN panels are what make that orchestration visible and controllable from the homeowner's phone.
The result
The house has ridden through multiple outages since commissioning. When the grid drops, the home doesn't — solar and battery carry the load first, the generator picks up if an event runs long, and the homeowner watches it happen from an app instead of a dark living room. That's what energy independence looks like in practice: not a single product, but a system.
Related: Whole-Home Backup · Battery Storage · Generators · Residential Solar