CPS Energy has been running a residential thermostat demand response program for 14 years now, and with about 20% of customers signed up, the Texas utility was having trouble expanding. Getting new customers on board with the utility's direct installation offer was becoming more difficult—but the program helps cut peak transmission costs significantly, and CPS wanted to add another 1,000 customers.

Schneider Electric and Duke Energy Renewables have signed an agreement to deploy two advanced microgrids to serve the Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Safety Headquarters and Correctional Facility. Montgomery County will build the microgrids, which will help ensure more reliable and efficient power and improve resiliency for the county following major storms and other natural disasters.

ComEd announced the benefits of modernizing its grid system using smart grid technologies toward reducing outages. In a statement, the energy provider said it witnessed a 34% reduction in the number of power outages due to its investments in smart grid technologies over the past five years.

According to GTM Research’s latest solar report, 410 megawatts of community solar will be installed in the U.S. in 2017. The report describes community solar as an increasingly attractive offering for utilities as they move beyond pilot programs. This past year, the U.S. community solar market eclipsed 200 megawatts, despite some “missed growth opportunities” caused by regulatory and legislative delays.

The number of smart electric meters installed in homes, businesses and industries across the Midwest more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2015. At the beginning of the decade, Midwestern states were home to 2.2 million smart meters, which are devices that measure and record electricity usage at least hourly and feed that data to utilities and consumers at least daily. By 2015, that figure had ballooned to 10.2 million.

Pulling a cohesive narrative out of the DistribuTECH conference’s thousands of participants and menagerie of electrical doohickeys is like synopsizing James Joyce’s Ulysses. Amid the cacophony, however, a few trends emerged. The sophistication of software used to manage an increasingly decentralized grid continues to grow. Meanwhile, utility representatives expressed caution about the dislocations stemming from that decentralization.