January 31
SECC Presents Five Themes at 10th Anniversary Symposium
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
For the past 10 years, SECC has been studying, surveying, collecting data and releasing reports on consumer behavior, interests and viewpoints about energy and their utilities. Then, each year at DISTRIBUTECH, the group holds a symposium during which it reports on its findings. Celebrating 10 years means that the group had a lot to report about at the 2020 event, which took place on Monday in San Antonio, Texas.
Energy disaggregation is a term of art for technologies that can parse out energy usage of individual loads like air conditioning, heating, lighting and appliances, simply by analyzing single sources of data such as smart meter feeds or circuit-level sensors. But this general term masks a variety of different approaches to this underlying data-analytics challenge, largely based on the granularity of the data they can access, how quickly they can analyze it and how deep a historical record they have to draw from.
Duke Energy Florida recently announced the launch of two new solar power plants. One is the Twin Rivers Solar Power Plant in Hamilton County, Fla. This 74.9 MW facility will consist of approximately 235,000 tracking solar panels, which will produce enough electricity to power about 23,000 homes at peak production. The other is the Santa Fe Solar Power Plant in Columbia County, Fla., and will also generate 74.9 MW of power with 235,000 tracking solar panels.
DISTRIBUTECH, the country’s biggest annual grid technology trade show, is a good place to get caught up on the latest developments in grid edge evolution, from integrating distributed energy resources to planning for a low-carbon future. Sometimes, all of those things are happening at once in the same place. That’s the case for CPS Energy, the municipal utility of San Antonio, Texas, host city of this year’s DISTRIBUTECH.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy released recently a wide-ranging plan with details on how the state could achieve 100-percent clean energy by 2050, a goal adopted by governors of both Massachusetts and Washington in the past month. The governor’s “Energy Master Plan” admits that New Jersey’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions thus far are insufficient to achieve the target of 80-percent reduction from 2006 levels set by the state’s Global Warming Response Act, passed last summer.
That’s the headline news — all those years of talk about customers and pushback and apathy, about leaders and laggards and all those consumers in between — we’ve hit the tipping point, the spot where, yes, the average energy consumer actually wants to have a chat about what you’re doing (as their utility) and what they can do (as your customer) to save themselves money (and, together, help save the world, too).
Pepco has partnered with SimpliPhi Power and New Partners Community Solar to launch one of the first resiliency centers in Washington, D.C., that is powered by solar and SimpliPhi Power's batteries, at a new justice housing development, The Maycroft. The Maycroft's resiliency center includes a 70.2 kW rooftop solar array combined with a 46 kW/56 kWh battery system that seamlessly disconnects from the grid and provides power for up to three days during an unplanned power outage.
In recent years, many programs and funding options have opened up to extend the benefits of solar power to low- and moderate-income consumers. One of the most popular options is community solar. Community solar — sometimes described as shared solar or locally controlled solar — includes any solar project or purchasing program in which the benefits flow to multiple community participants such as individuals, businesses and nonprofits.