October 28
APS to Install Half a Million Advanced Smart Meters
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is being deployed by utilities across the U.S. to give distribution grid operators better tools to manage the grid. On October 25, Landis+Gyr and Arizona Public Service (APS) said they are expanding their contract, originally signed in 2015, to include additional AMI services plus the installation of an additional 500,000 advanced meters over the next seven years.
Sonoma Clean Power (SCP), one of the most accomplished Community Choice Aggregators in the country, and Recurve, the open-source platform that enables planning, procurement and demand flexibility for virtual power plants, announced their partnership to reduce energy use at peak times and improve grid resilience through Recurve's platform, FLEXmarket.
As more consumers start generating and storing their own electricity, they are creating a new energy economy with benefits and opportunities for electric utilities. Utilities can use this change to build trusted relationships and collaborate with customers on decarbonization efforts. No longer just a one-way relationship, the new utility-customer partnership helps us work together toward a more resilient grid and makes utilities more valuable than ever.
Starting this week, income-eligible subscribers to three community solar projects run by ComEd in Illinois will begin receiving credits providing approximately $1,000 a year in savings on electricity bills for up to three years. Each of these projects was developed in conjunction with ComEd’s Give-A-Ray program, a state initiative enabled by Illinois Solar for All.
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Industry News
Thanks to a combination of government policies and decreasing costs, battery-powered cars will soon be commonplace in U.S. garages. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 80 percent of EV charging happens at home, so figuring out how all of these cars will affect their owners’ electric bills – and the grids they’re connected to – will become a far more pressing matter.
Portland General Electric Company (PGE) announced it will procure 311 MW of energy from the Clearwater Wind project in Montana to benefit its Oregon customers by 2024. With construction slated to begin this year, the wind farm is being brought online in phases, and according to PGE’s current timeline, its own portion of Clearwater should be operational by the end of 2023.
Stephanie Terrell bought a used Nissan Leaf this fall and was excited to join the wave of drivers adopting EVs to save on gas money and reduce her carbon footprint. But Terrell quickly encountered a bump in the road on her journey to clean driving: As a renter, she doesn’t have a private garage where she can power up overnight, and the public charging stations near her are often in use, with long wait times.
The people who stand to benefit the most from EVs often aren’t the ones who’ve been able to get them. A Bay Area financing startup hopes to change that. Zevvy wants to make electric cars accessible to the millions of Americans who commute many miles each day and tens of thousands of miles each year. These workers typically can’t afford the premium of a new EV, and they can’t lease one because they’d blast through the mileage cap.
