October 11
ComEd’s Whole Home Electric Program Electrifies 450 Low-Income Homes
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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ComEd announced that its Whole Home Electric program has electrified 450 low-income homes and apartment units in the Chicago area. The announcement was made at the Nuestro Hogar affordable housing units in Humboldt Park, one of the first multi-family projects electrified through the program. Through this initiative, homes are retrofitted with all-electric appliances and heating and cooling systems.
The Tennessee Valley Authority recently released a report that, among other things, details its work so far to reduce carbon emissions and its efforts to expand its renewable energy portfolio. The report notes that TVA is pursuing a clean energy strategy that maintains affordability, adds capacity to the grid and supports energy security. As of April 2024, TVA has retired or announced retirement of 86 percent of our coal fleet, a total of 12,297 MW.
Nearly 90 percent of utilities view AI and machine learning (ML) as crucial for overcoming operational hurdles during the energy transition, according to a new report, with safety, cybersecurity and predictive maintenance as the top use cases. Itron’s 2024 Resourcefulness Insight Report explores the current trends and future expectations of AI and ML on utility operations and strategies.
Virtual Peaker this week announced a new partnership with MidSouth Electric Cooperative to enhance demand response management across two major wholesale markets – Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). MidSouth successfully transitioned its smart thermostat program to Virtual Peaker’s Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Management platform.
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Industry News
Batteries are all the rage – especially among homeowners who are going solar. The percentage of people who install a battery alongside their new rooftop solar system is surging in the U.S., according to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That figure – known as the residential attachment rate – jumped from just under 10 percent in 2022 to 12.3 percent last year.
The push to electrify everything has been very good for heat pump sales. Americans are now buying more heat pumps than gas furnaces – outpacing the number of units sold in Europe. Heat pumps are wildly more efficient than furnaces, and the technology continues to improve. But what does real-world experience tell us about how they impact energy consumption and household emissions?
The U.S. saw more than 3 GW/10.5 GWh of energy storage deployments in the second quarter of 2024, up 74 percent and 86 percent, respectively, from Q2 2023 and the most for any second quarter to date, Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association said last week. Utility-scale storage accounted for 2,773 MW/9,982 MWh of the total, with 85 percent of new capacity installed in California, Arizona and Texas.
More than seven years after New Hampshire regulators first approved the idea of using community solar to create savings for low-income households, electric bill discounts are finally on the horizon for the first batch of participants. Community solar is widely considered an important strategy for extending the benefits of renewable energy to people unable to take advantage of rooftop solar.
