April 11
Virtual Peaker Announces Partnership for Smarter Energy Storage
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Virtual Peaker and NeoVolta have announced a strategic partnership to integrate NeoVolta’s advanced battery energy storage system (BESS) with Virtual Peaker’s VPP software. Virtual Peaker’s AI-powered platform optimizes batteries as distributed energy resources (DERs) to maximize energy savings and improve grid reliability.
Including, retaining and satisfying customers is crucial to building a resilient grid and accelerating the clean energy transition. One tool that many utilities employ are energy Marketplaces that sell energy efficiency and energy saving products, incorporating rebates and other incentives at checkout.
Georgia Power, the state's electric utility serving 2.8 million customers, focuses on improving and enhancing the customer experience throughout its business. The company works with many businesses of all sizes and different industries across the state to help them manage their energy use, save money and implement solutions to challenges for their business.
Residential batteries are a fast-emerging tool for peak load shifting. A residential battery acts like a buffer between a home and the electric grid. It can be used to mitigate local capacity constraints, optimize daily energy usage and act as a back-up power source during an outage. This interview covers lessons learned from incorporating residential batteries into demand response (DR) programs in the Northeast.
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Industry News
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills and increase a home’s resilience during power outages.
Santee Cooper is launching a new program to help reduce barriers to energy efficiency for customers with high-energy burdens. Called Power Partners, the program will feature workshops, energy assessments, and free home energy-efficiency improvements for eligible residential customers. The initial phase will focus on specific neighborhoods in Conway, with plans to expand the program in the future.
Wind and solar together generated more electricity than coal in the U.S. for the first time last year, and coal’s share of the generation mix fell to an all-time low of under 15 percent, according to a Tuesday report from the think tank Ember. “2024 saw the largest-ever increase in solar generation in the US (+64 TWh),” said Ember. Wind production grew by 32 TWh, while coal generation dropped by 22 TWh.
Base Power, the Texas startup designing and installing very large home batteries for close to free, just pulled in an additional $200 million to fund its growth. Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz co-led the Series B with Addition, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners. They were joined by previous investors including Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain and Trust Ventures.
